Das Kochhaus: Tante Emma with a Twist

A new kind of grocery store opened last month in Berlin-Schöneberg -- a store that makes you feel you are walking into a Nigella Lawson cookbook.

That's exactly the experience that Ramin Goo, the under-30 founder of Das Kochhaus, wants you to have (except, perhaps, for the Nigella Lawson bit).

Guess Who's Making Dinner
Goo knows from personal experience the frustration of returning home from work (he was a management consultant at McKinsey) and trying to make an inspired menu from weary-looking veggies at the back of the fridge. Neither did he feel like trawling through supermarket aisles, filling a grocery cart with random items. People needed an alternative, he decided. And it wasn't take-out.

The joy of cooking at home, says Goo, begins with the pleasure of shopping for food. That's why his store is not organized according to categories of produce but instead visualizes the process of reading (and being inspired by) an illustrated cookbook.

photo: courtesy, Das Kochhaus

Shopping by Storyboards
Each week, Goo and his team create recipes that combine seasonal freshness, creativity and simple elegance. Then they stock the store for that week according to the recipes.

photo: courtesy, Das Kochhaus

The aesthetic of the store is Zen-like. There are 20 tables and above each, a display poster in blackboard style, illustrating a recipe.  The ingredients are on the table, carefully measured for two, four or six, arranged as beautifully and symmetrically as in a Japanese bento box.

photo: courtesy, Das Kochhaus

The store itself is laid out as a kind of dinner storyboard. You move from the appetizer tables to the salad variations, on to the entrees, and finally, the dessert. Recommended wines are on each table, as are kitchen tools called for by a specific recipe: a nutmeg grater here, a garlic press there. No detail has been overlooked.

A New Kind of Tante Emma
When Goo first broached the idea to investors, it was met with skepticism. A start-up project with fruits and vegetables instead of the internet? Not exactly cutting-edge.

But Goo's idea has caught on. While the average supermarket has about 15,000 items, Das Kochhaus has around 500. On the one hand, it is a throwback to the Tante Emma Laden of the 1970s (pre-supermarket), the little family-run shop where you could stock up on kitchen, pantry and domestic needs in one stop. On the other, Das Kochhaus fast-forwards Tante Emma into the twenty-first century.

Personally, I prefer the chaotic shopping you tend to do in the weekly farmers' markets (where you pick up two kilos of porcini mushrooms, then concoct recipes around the reckless purchase), and I warm to the kitchen that never runs out of cinnamon or turmeric rather than one that sports tidy packages of three red chillies, two stalks of parsley and one clove of garlic. But then, that's just me.

Das Kochhaus was bustling with customers yesterday. Couples stood in front of the tables, discussing dinner possibilities. Should it be the pasta with shiitake mushrooms and diced ham in a rosemary sauce this evening, or would they dare to try the lentil and lychee curry?

Goo's team, creators of the world's first walk-in cookbook,  is already thinking of introducing cooking classes and expanding into other parts of Berlin and other cities in Germany.


For more information, photos, videos, press clippings (Das Kochhaus has extensive local, national and international press coverage) and the week's recipes, go to www.kochhaus.de. Recipe ingredients cost anywhere from 2,70 EUR per person to 9,50 EUR per person, and the package includes a recipe leaflet to take home. 


Das Kochhaus is open Mondays to Fridays, from 10:00 am to 09:00 pm, and on Saturdays from 09:00 am to 08:00 pm. It is located at Akazienstrasse 1 in Berlin-Schöneberg, at the corner of Akazienstrasse and Hauptstrasse. The nearest U-Bahn station in U Eisenachstr. (U7). Buses M48 and M85 have stops right outside the entrance.

Bach in Schöneberg, Free Jazz in Friedrichshain

Piano City Berlin is on this weekend, a music festival that takes place in living rooms rather than in concert halls. The festival is an initiative of Radialsystem V, the cultural centre that calls itself "a new space for the arts in Berlin," and it invites listeners to piano concerts in private homes. The performers are not concert pianists. They just might be your neighbors.


It all began with a concert at the German-Finnish Society in Turku in southwestern Finland, in April 2009. After the concert, pianist Andreas Kern  met up with three other guest performers in a cafe. They talked about the loneliness of the professional pianist. Unlike musicians in an ensemble or an orchestra, the pianist spends hours alone with his instrument. But what if you made the experience less solitary, if only for a day -- or a weekend?

There must be several hundreds of pianists in Berlin who had something to offer an audience, Kern thought  -- students at the music conservatories such as the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler or the Universität der Künste, those who taught music or played for pleasure.  He was right. When he created a website inviting Berliners to send in videos of their performance and their reasons for wanting to be part of Piano City, he got hundreds of responses from professionals, amateurs, and shades of in-between -- Berliners from all walks of life, all ages, playing everything from classical to standard and free jazz to original compositions. They had one thing in common: they were passionate about the piano.

photo: Kitty Kleist-Heinrich

Sophia Grevesmühl, music professional who studied at the Universität der Künste, was one of the first to send in her video to Kern's web site, and this weekend she will be performing Brahms in her Kreuzberg apartment, crammed with her favorite books and ficus house plants. Her sofa and kitchen chairs will be the "concert hall," and she plans to add a homey touch with tea and cookies. Sophia likes the idea of playing for people she has never seen before and being able to chat with them later. What brings them to my concert of all those featured in the program, she wants to know.

If you cringe at the thought of hearing one more amateur rendition of Bach's Prelude in C, this might not be for you. But if you like the idea of getting to know ordinary Berliners, some of whom have extraordinary talent, and traipsing through their living rooms (the smallest takes no more than eight guests) while listening to Prokofiev and free jazz, the weekend holds promise.

Piano City Berlin features 70 Berlin pianists and takes place on Saturday, October 23 and Sunday, October 24. Tickets (5.35 EUR) are available only at the festival website at www.pianocity-berlin.com
where you can also view videos of the pianists. The exact address is available only after you make the purchase (although the listing does specify the city district).


Piano City is followed by Musik in den Häusern der Stadt (Music in City Homes), which takes place all over Germany, from November 2 to 7, and features a range of instruments. There will be 19 concerts in Berlin. See www.kunstsalon.de for more information.

Art not just in Galleries

The Art Forum Berlin is on this weekend: the fifteenth edition of the international art show, featuring contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, video art and installations from 130 galleries from around the world. And, as so often in Berlin, the international event is accompanied by local satellite events. This weekend, there are at least three.


The Big Draw
The inspiration for the Big Draw festival comes from the Campaign for Drawing, a charity organization in England, whose ambition is to get people to lose their inhibitions about picking up a drawing pencil and to use it as a tool for thought, creativity and social engagement.

The first Big Draw in Berlin was held in 2009, during the Long Night of the Museums. This year, festival director Anna Chrusciel has gone a step further, transforming more public spaces into art studios for all -- including the Deutsche Bank's atrium off Unter den Linden and the Grüner Salon at Rosa-Luxemberg Platz. Berliners of all ages can be seen in galleries, cafes, U-Bahn stations, even the Botanical Gardens, recklessly wielding sketching pencils, felt pens, highlighter markers, post-it notes, clay, scissors and glue.

Artists lead workshops where you can experiment with working on an animated film, comic strip or poster ad. Fun!






A Taste of Grunge

The Score .03 urban art fair is on all weekend, next to the U-Bahn Gleisdreieck. Its profile piqued my curiosity -- a combination of live painting, street art and graffiti. Berlin has some great street art, if you know where to look for it -- or know people who do --  (my best guides have been a couple of intrepid freshmen students), but this festival tries too hard to be edgy to be genuinely interesting. Not recommended if you don't lean toward techno music and grunge appeal.

Art in the Hangars
Preview Berlin, an exhibition of works from 60 galleries in 19 countries, takes place in the light-filled, freshly painted Hangar 2 of Tempelhof Airport. Use of this space to showcase young gallery-owners without large-scale resources -- including several from eastern and central Europe -- and artists not yet established in the art world is a stroke of genius.

All three events are on till 10 October 2010. For more information, see:
www.thebigdrawberlin.de
www.stroke03.com
www.previewberlin.de

Figaro is Moving In

Yesterday, after almost two years of renovation, and an investment of 23 million Euros, the newly refurbished Schiller Theater opened its doors as interim housing for the Staatsoper, Berlin's State Opera House on Unter den Linden. There is a sweet ironic twist to the turn of events.

Last Night at the Schiller
The Schiller Theater had been the leading light among West Berlin theaters in the 1950s and 60s. Samuel Beckett himself directed a production of Waiting for Godot here in 1975. But after reunification in 1989, Berlin ended up with more cultural institutions than any other German city, and state funds could not support them all. Two theaters from former east Berlin, the Deutsches Theater and the Volksbühne, made the final cut, but the Schiller Theater had to go.

Berliners still remember the firestorm of protest, the demonstrations, the historic Long Night of the Artists -- a final defiant marathon performance lasting through the night -- and then, the closing in late September 1993.

photo: dpa

Now, exactly 17 years later, and in time for the 20th anniversary of German Unification, a newly gleaming Schiller Theater reopens in the west, and the famous opera house from former east Berlin moves in.  The Staatsoper, undergoing a major three-year renovation, is using the Schiller Theater as its temporary home till 2013. Daniel Barenboim, its music director, called it the reunification made complete.

Figaro is Moving In
Figaro is Moving In is the name of a special guided tour offered by the Schiller Theater during the season's opening days. It takes visitors not only through the building but also to production cast members as they get ready for a performance. Tickets for the tour sold out almost immediately, but although you may have missed it, you can still take the regular guided tour, which offers fascinating glimpses of the restoration work required to make a 1950s theater for dramatic productions suitable for a twenty-first century opera house.

The 1950s design elements are still there: wall frescoes, copper embellishments, Murano-glass ceiling lights, iridiscent mosaic in the foyer's front window. The old 1950s cafeteria lies untouched and even the pastel tones of carpets have been retained. But layers of black paint have been stripped from the walls facing the stage, exposing original warm maple wood panels, front row seats have been ripped out to carve out space for an orchestra pit that can take 120 musicians, and engineers have doubled the resonance in the hall (from 0.9 to almost 2.0 seconds). Take the tour to find out more!

Sleepless in Charlottenburg
There is also a series of night tours that takes place after a performance, and a late-night music and literary series (accompanied by champagne) in the foyer called "Sleepless in Charlottenburg". You don't have to be an opera buff to enjoy the Schiller Theater this season.

For more information, dates and times of the tours, go to the Staatsoper in the Schiller Theater website.
Tours cost 5 EUR (regular price). Tours are in German only.
The Sleepless in Charlottenburg series starts in November and begins at 10:30 pm. Tickets are 15 EUR (regular price).


The Schiller Theater is at Bismarckstrasse 110, 10625 Berlin. The nearest subway is U Ernst-Reuter Platz.