Remake is quite the little find, offering interesting experimental cuisine combining flavours and techniques you’d pay much more in other restaurant in even other parts of Berlin. It’s a shame that whenever I’ve walked past it’s been fairly empty and on the evening we went, it was only us and another table. The food deserves much better than that.
We chose to go with a five course tasting mean, something I’m guessing from the freshly printed paper, changes regularly. This excites me because it means you get to try lots of different things.
Unlike many other places in Berlin, we were actually served a bread basket and this time with a choice of either whipped garlic butter (yum!) or a delicious olive oil both strangely accompanied with a piece of beetroot on a stick. Maybe my pallette wasn’t refined enough but I couldn’t tell if there was something else with it.
Our first dish was based around prawns, and my memory failing me a little bit now was accompanied with some sweet potato, dollops of sour cream constrained by gelatine skin that would burst upon contact with a from and strands of pickled ginger. Firstly, great points for serving three of these giant prawns. They could have easily served a single one and the dish would have been fine and the sweetness of the potato was well contrasted with the slight tang of the pickle and the additional richness and sourness from the sour cream. A great start to the meal.
The second round was a simple dish packed with huge flavour, a yellow capsicum gazpacho with scoop of sour cream ice cream. The dish was wonderfully chilly, not too cold to numb the taste buds and the choice of sweet yellow peppers really shone through the coldness. Instead of a scoop of just cream, they opted for an ice cream, in keeping with the cold theme that I think worked really well as well.
One of the reasons we opted for the five course menu was because the four course wasn’t going to have the pork cheeks and for the most part, they are always, always good things to have. In this adaptation and keeping with the theme of three things, the pork cheeks arrived atop small circular discs of watermelon and based with pureed mint pea. At first, I thought was a strange combination but actually on trying it worked really well. Firstly the watermelon wasn’t as overpoweringly sweet as I’d feared, instead acting as a strange but complementing alternative to the apple one is normally served with pork. The pork itself, not the softest I’ve ever had was still packed with flavour and the green pea puree provided a nice colour and texture contrast to the plate. Well executed and flavoursome I would come back for this dish alone.
Following up on the pork dish was the main star, a stuffed spring chicken served with chantarelles, foam and a clump of minced apricot. Despite being quite a generous portion, I disliked this dish probably the most mainly because the chicken skin was cloyingly fatty and not as crisped up as I’d hoped it been. The chantarelles provided amazing depth to the dish but at these same time seemed wasted with the super sweetness brought about by the apricots.
Fortunately dessert won out without being excessively sweet. We had some poached pears, accompanied by a white chocolate mousse and a scoop of ice cream, all the elements except for the strands of caramel adorning the ice cream nicely balanced and provided a fresher end to the meal instead of a cloyingly sticky alternative I’d feared.
I enjoyed the food in this restaurant and while I feel that I like the idea of a changing menu, they definitely still needed to refine a few elements to their existing dishes. Maybe this is why restaurant are best off to sticking to the normal stuff. We did, however, try quite a different set of flavours and combinations I would never expected and it worked really well.
Name: Remake
Found at: Große Hamburger Straße 32 10115 Berlin
Website: http://www.restaurantremake.de/