Author: Mara L.

I haven’t been in Munich for a long time, and up to now, I only recommended one restaurant on Jens’ blog, a lovely lunch place called “Schumann’s Tagesbar.”

But now I have more. Today I met up with some friends at Sancho Panza, a tiny Spanish bar in Munich, the kind of place that is not on the web (sic! now it is…), and that lives from locals who are devoted customers. The name of the place, Sancho Panza, is a bit too predictable, as if the only thing one knew about Spain was Don Quixote. But otherwise, it is an absolute gem. The chef and owner, Mrs. Barrón, serves home-cooked Spanish tapas, little cakes and coffee, and she sells Spanish wine. There is also a small selection of especially good sweets, such as mazapanes de soto from Segura and chocolates from Alemany. But Sancho Panza’s most charming feature is the home-made food. Everything looks as if it just came out of an upscale family kitchen, and tastes entirely genuine. Today, we ate some kind of eggplant cakes, which were simply masterpieces.

What is more, Mrs. Barrón continues a tradition dear to the heart of my friends. They tell stories of their parents, having the same kind of bar food when the place was still owned by Mrs. Barrón’s predecessor, whom they all know by name, but whom I hesitate to name on the web. The small tapas bar has been a Bavarian incarnation of Spanish cuisine for decades. All the time, it was the kind of place where kids go with their parents, and where they would eventually take the person they hoped to marry. Not really cool enough for hanging out in the years in between, but part of the family, and a truly personal place. Sancho Panza gets my highest ranking, five stars *****.

Today I went to Citarella, to store up on things that I might want to cook in the next couple of days or weeks, which promise to be super-busy. I love buying eggplant ravioli and gnocchi and throw them in my freezer. This is what I eat when I have zero time: a little bit of Pomi Strained Tomatoes, a hint of cream, a sip of white wine, and a leave of sage, mixed into a tolerably nice tomato sauce. You can take part of a Citarella portion of ravioli or gnocchi out of the container and leave the rest in the freezer. This is a meal made in 5 minutes, and it’s perfectly fine.

But I was prompted to send Jens this entry for a different reason. Some of the people at the meat counter at Citarella — the Upper West Side store — are just marvelous. They are the incarnation of people taking care and tending to meat. Sometimes, I make an Italian dish that I associate with a place where I ate it in its ideal form, Villa Tuscolana near Frascati, a few kilometers from Rome.

Villa Tuscolana is a beautiful hotel, which I found by accident. I had booked a couple of nights in another Frascati hotel, which turned out to be a nightmare (disco music until the early morning hours). My friends and I took off in our car the next morning, looking for something better, and we found the Villa Tuscolana. There we had very thin-cut beef over rucola, with olive oil and lemon. The absolutely perfect summer meat dish, fresh, hearty, and lovely; however, not easy to reproduce: the meat needs to be perfect. Today, when I asked the guy at the meat counter at Citarella’s whether he could cut one beef steak into several thin slices, he suggested that he could cut it into five slices! This is the spirit, I thought, and was thoroughly impressed. I said “four is enough,” and he cut see-through-thin layers of beef. I love this kind of craftsmanship. Five stars for Citarella *****.

Another note on “Food Inc.”: Robert Kenner, the filmmaker, says that hamburgers are his favorite food. This reminded me of a strange aspect of my life here in New York. When you come from Europe, you expect the US to be the country of burgers. But there are, as far as I can see, almost no burgers in this city. Of course, there are bound to be many, but they are not part of the way of life that I’ve been initiated to, by my architecture and art friends. I quite agree with Kenner, burgers can be great. They are certainly not part of my home-country’s diet. But I had a formative hamburger experience as a young student visiting Cambridge (that is, UK’s Cambridge, not MA’s Cambridge), an absolutely perfect burger at a bar in a pub, shared with my brother. There I learnt: burgers need not be fast food!

After several years in Manhattan, I declared that I finally wanted a hamburger. My friends took me to the Corner Bistro at 331 West 4th Street. I saw the appeal (the attempt to be ‘real’ even though this is Manhattan), but I didn’t return. Too crowded for me, and too much as if we were all pretending that we are in a run down pub somewhere in no man’s land. Click here and here for reviews…

But the more I travel in the US, the more I realize that hamburgers are a reason to travel. As soon as you leave Manhattan, it’s actually quite easy to find really good ones. I’ve made a habit out of eating burgers in hotels, for example, at the Eastern Standard Kitchen in Boston’s Commonwealth Hotel, or at the Grille 700 in Baltimore’s Marriott Waterfront.

If I had to choose, my all time favorite hamburger location is perhaps the Park Grill Lounge at the LA Intercontinental. If you go for a late lunch, the atmosphere is almost serene, and the burger is delicious.

So, for me, the desirable hamburger places seem to be outside of Manhattan. Perhaps hamburgers fit better with the kind of ‘normalcy’ of the traveling worker that, at times, I am.