A Travel Blog

I decided to merge my two blogs into one. The travel blog posts have been imported into http://www.steinbeck-molecular.de/steinblog. This blog stays here for reference.

Following a recommendation by a colleague, I went to the Asia on Regent Street in Cambridge. They describe themselves as pan-Asian but I felt that there was a bit much emphasis on the indian subcontinent to be truely pan-asian.

The interior is “basic”, simplicity rules, and I had a nice table with a view on the convenience store on the opposite side of the street. I started with a glass of their favorite australian Sauvignon Blanc, the coriander crusted scallops and some prawns in oyster sauce batter. The main course was a Penang Beef with a bowl of plain rice. The sauce there was really excellent but the beef was of shoe-sole quality, really disappointing and incredibly hard to chew. The pistaccio Kulfi for desert was again very good.

While so far the service was quite good, I then did not manage to catch anyone’s attention to order a coffee for more then 15 min and then decided to leave. That kind of spoiled the otherwise quite nice experience. I’ll probably go again and give them a second chance. Overall a 4 on my scale from 0 to 10 for the food and also for the service.

Looking for a truly outstanding Japanese dining experience in a really unusual interior? The Shiro i Shiro – in waling distance to the Alexanderplatz – is it.

We asked them for selection of their choice and got:

• Miso soup and silk tofu
• Poached egg in a smoked broth
• A selection of sushi and sashimi and kobe beef
• Lamb and black cod
• Udon noodles with salted butter

Accompanying the menu, we have various type of room-tempterature sakes. Everything was just perfect, including the very nice service.

Quite a contrast to the Renaissance Hotel in Cologne, where I stayed yesterday, is todays stay at the Hilton in Bonn, Germany’s former capitol village. The run-down place confirmed experiences with previous hotel of the same chain. While my room was nicely renovated, the communal areas of the hotel made me feel like in a eastern European hotel during cold-war times. The location next to one of the ugliest bridges in the world – the Kennedy bridge – ruins the only potential plus of this hotel of being directly located at the river. My mood dropped even further when I discovered that the hotel does not offer (I would have payed for it) decent newspapers for breakfast – only one crappy stock-market publication they get for free. As a plus I should mention that I was allowed a late check-out without any problems and most of the staff was friendly.

I’m staying for two nights at the Renaissance Hotel in Cologne, Germany. The place is perfectly located just a few steps away from Friesenplatz, since I had some business to do at the University. The Renaissance Hotels belong to the Marriott empire. One thing that struck me with this particular stay was the extremely well trained or well selected staff. Whatever request you had was answered in a “no-problem” kind of way. Small issues where solved immediately and where a solution could not be found, good alternatives where proposed. The whole hotel was in very good shape (no run-down looking corners, etc) and the room well designed, quiet as requested and cosy. Breakfast buffet offered rich choice. The only minus was that my laundry, dropped off before 8:30 am at the reception, got lost and was not ready the same days, as promised in their guide, and neither the next morning. In compensation for this mistake, they offered me to waive my wireless bill of 24 Euro and a late check-out (with out the need for any fuzz on my side) which I of course happily accepted.

I can whole-heartedly recommend this hotel and will go there again when in Cologne next time.

If you fly out of Stansted Airport with RyanAir about once a week, like I do, you need to come up with certain rituals to stay mentally sane. One of my rituals at Stansted is having a Tropicana Juice with an additional piece of Ginger at the Giraffe Juice and Coffee Bar in the RyanAir terminal. The Tuna melt is another one.

This Giraffe Juice and Coffee bar is run by some really nice girls, who are always friendly and helpful, even when its the end of a long buisiness day, which is when I typically go there.

The Bar features a great variety of freshly prepared food – the fresh juices like my favorite Tropicana are made on the fly with one of those large juicers. The coffee is excellent.Since they always give me a feeling of home when I’m there, I should probably not give them a positive review because they do not seem to lack business, but good stuff should be honored.

For the second time I took guest to the La Mimosa in Cambridge and it was as flawless as the first evening.

La Mimosa has both a beautiful location and a very nice menu – solid, no-nonsense Italian food.

In the summer you can site outside directly at Jesus green at Thompsons Lane, Fen Ditton, Cambridge, CB5 8AQ, UK, +44 1223 362525. The interior is very cosy, the staff enjoyable and friendly and I’m more than happy to recommend the place. Today we shared some mixed antipasti consisting of a bit too much salad, prosciutto, salami, buffalo mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes and olives. Nothing fancy but solid quality.

I had a Risotto ai funghi porcini as the main course. Well done!

And concluded with the a traditional Italian desert – so boring that I’m ashamed to say which one.

Then Double Espresso and a Grappa, as usual.

So, good food, nice people running the place. A great evening for the second time, which I really credit to the people taking care of us.

Not much to say here. For a hotel of this chain, a disaster! Avoid it, if you can. Take the Marriott or the Hilton in the center, or even better, one of the small, more private hotels in the area.

The Crown Plaza’s staff was, with the usual exceptions, crabby and unfriendly, and – even worse – horrendously disorganized. The regular category of rooms (the stuff that you get when you do not ask for anything smart) was loud, small and ugly. Trying to get something decent away from the street was possible but hard. The breakfasts on the following days were characterized by being treated like a fraudster because they did not manage to put our names paired with the correct room number on their list of people to be admitted to the restaurant for breakfast.

It was impossible to get a correct recommendation from the concierge on how to get to the centre. Staff tried to sell overpriced tickets as it turned out later. An attempt to get our hands on our voucher (delivered to staff at check-in) to check for the pick-up time to the airport, resulted in 30 min of hectic searching by the people behind the counter. Yet without success.

So, again, avoid this place, even if you have business in the area.

Today was the absolute highlight in my culinary life. I had lunch at the fabulous restaurant “Schwarzwald Stube”, headed by Harald Wohlfahrt, one of Germany’s 3-Michelin-Star chefs. We went for the great 7 course menu which kept us entertained for about 4.5 hours. Following an amuse bouche, we started with tartar and mousse of mildly smoked sturgeon with imperial caviar and oyster vinaigrette. A glass of a white burgundy accompanying it was surprising in that it had the honey bouquet of a sweet desert sautern but was ultra-dry on the tongue with fruity, mineral notes.

A fried goose liver with artichokes and a caper pesto on balsamico glace formed the second course. I’m not commenting on quality – everything with no exception at all was just fabulous – fantastic material, creatively combined, cooked to the point. The service was also flawless, with a special price to be awarded to the sommelier whose recommendations where always right. The goose liver was accompanied by another white burgundy, this time with pronounced notes of oak.

The third course – scallops with a truffles from the Perigord – was especially nice because it was combined with a local specialty, Topinambur roots, their earthy, moldy taste perfectly complementing the truffle. The main course, a potpourri of lamb with fennel compote and a mild garlic jus underpinned again Wohlfahrt’s dedication to flawless ingredients combined with uncompromising craftsmanship.

Although already slightly overwhelmed by what we had so far and time approaching 3 o’clock (we had started at noon), the cheese cart selection easily managed to revive our excitement. My memory being as bad as it is, I can only recall an ash-covered creamy goat cheese and a perfectly semi-liquid brie, but all six specimens on my cheese table where equally sensational. For both the lamb as well as the cheese we went for a Rioja, which was smooth with a well-balanced rich full body.

The first of the two concluding deserts consisted of a warm lemon biscuit on rhubarb compote, with a ginger lime sorbet served in a separate glass. The latter combination of tastes is one of my eternal favorites which I try to get where ever I can. The sommelier recommended a 1992 Riesling Beerenauslese for desert, which have lost a lot of its initial intense sweetness over the years and was now just incredible, with a wonderful acidity over fruit and honey notes.

The last course served its purpose of completely equilibrating our taste buds. A simply surprising apple-cilantro sorbet was set on a bed of mango and hibiscus juice, with a crunchy eucalyptus oblate on top.

So, it was simply astounding. We would have preferred to go there for dinner, but you need to book a dinner table up to a year in advance, depending on when you want to go (I guess, Saturday evening is the hardest). However, if you consider visiting Harald Wohlfahrt’s Schwarzwald Stube, just book a table – it will be an unforgettable event, no matter how long you wait for the evening to arrive.

I have the pleasure to dine at the “Trüffel” (Bäckerstraße 106, D-38640 Goslar) in Goslar once every year as part of my duty to organize the German Conference on Chemoinformatics in this medival town.In 2007, I was accompanied by two of my collegues. The restaurant is usually well visited and a reservation is recommended. We all started with my favorite aperitive – a glass of Prosecco with a dash of Aperol. The started consisted of Coquille Saint-Jacques, green asparagus on a bed of basil oil. Very nice and well balanced.
The main course was a Lotte, gratinated with Mozarella, olives and other vegetables.While it was quite a tasty dish, I must say that this combination is actually a crime to the delicous texture and taste of a Lotte.I finished with a lemon sorbet with prosecco, but should have either left the prosecco away or replaced it with a bit of vodca.
We had a bottle of a delightful 2005 Gavi de Gavi, light and fruity, with all of the courses.

I can recommend the “Trueffel”.