Don’t Eat There
Naturally, with the hype of the Royal Wedding, my parents wanted to send me the McVities commemorative biscuit tin. Yes, I’m trying to cut down on posh people since leaving Durham Uni and I’m on a permanent sugar diet, but I’ve also been known to leave an encouraging comment under the Queen’s speech on Youtube and need Jammy Dodgers to feed my classier teatime guests. I can live with biscuits and the monarchy. It was to be a tin I would be happy with, if not head over heels for.
So when, two weeks post-wedding, it actually arrives and I get a yellow slip from Deutsche Post, I’m still semi looking forward to these biscuits. I’ll even overlook that on the slip the postman’s written ‘You were not in so we’ve left your package at the doner place on the corner.’ So what? He couldn’t wait until after his shift for a kebab. Give him a break. He’s been delivering packages all day. In England he’d get a day off to watch a rah dress up as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.
What got to me, though, was the reception I got in three of the Rosenthaler Platz kebab shops. Just popping in to say “Could I pick up my biscuit tin, please?” got me replies of “F**** off you twat in a tie”, “Who do you think I am, the post office fairy?” and “Why are you crying you idiot, do you want me to give you a hug?” It was no use saying “I come here twice a week, the least you could do is check behind the counter for my sodding parcel!” It was like, if I wasn’t there for Döner, I was scum.
And so it was that I resigned never to spend my good money at their dirty establishments ever again. I told my friends about them. I shot them dirty looks on my way past. I threw rubbish not bought from them into their rubbish bins. I ate other kebabs from other parts of town. I tested their kebabs – just to make sure they were as crap as I was telling everyone.
It was when I was warning yet another stranger about that virus in the garlic sauce of the Rosenthaler Platz area that I realised writing off restaurants and bars, and shouting about it, has become part of my life here. The list of places that I’ve sworn off is so long now, that soon I may starve (or never get drunk again).
“Despite its cool toilets, that hipstomatic Torstraße haunt is just an expensive pile of crap. They can’t speak German. They bring your drinks hours apart and you have to argue to split your bill, I am never going there again,” is a classic. Then there was “you pay eleven euros for a burger on Graefestraße and they use plastic cheese. Not even McDonalds does that anymore. That place is dead to me.” “Ok, I’m digging the pink fluffy walls in here, but if you’re not sleeping with the bar staff, you have to wait an hour for a drink. I’m telling all my friends to boycott this half of Oranienstraße.”
I won’t go to the Vietnamese place in my building, just because I used to happily spend 30€ a week there, yet they have never once given me free prawn crackers. That seems as good a reason as any to fall out of love.
Once I sat at a Reuterstraße counter, waiting for my Guacamole Burger, and watched them short-change five people in a row. Maybe that’s how they can afford such good avocado? Maybe I should just leave right now and never return?
My hippy LA friend would tell me to let go of this hostility, stop spreading it around, it’s a waste of energy, it makes for awkward first dates, have I ever tried meditation? But I see something satisfactory in finding places that you will never revisit, that will not become your local, that you will not recommend to friends. It feels like a more active relationship with a city than simply knowing who you love, and slurping their noodles again and again and again.
