Eating Eclecticism

As I sit on a 70s leather chair on the edge of a highly eccentric room I’m not sure if I’m intruding on this familial hole in the wall café. Every corner and surface holds some fascination for the eye.  There is a counter full of alcoholic bottles full of Campari and Jägermeißter, and perched on top are glass jars haphazardly stuffed with lollypops, gummies (only Haribo of course since we are in Germany) and straws. Competing for room is a coffee machine, a cash register, a kettle and a porcelain jug of milk. Next to a rusting tin sign for "Standard Motor Oil" a small blackboard, half hidden behind a speaker and candles, presents the menu with simple scribbles of a steaming coffee cup, a wedge of cheese and a little Wurst. Good morning, or more precisely good afternoon, Germany!

I am inspired to write (so I am), draw and take photographs of this random wooden jungle but the waiter informs me “Kein Photos, bitte” [No photos, please]. At first, I think he is joking but he says it again seriously. Now I feel more foreign to this space. I’m not a piece of furniture and definitely not one of the 1950s uber-posed pin-up girls that adorn the walls. It is way to cold for one, to be wearing a swimsuit on the first of November in Berlin (pinch and a punch by the way). I am not regular enough to be jovially welcomed into the warm clutter as others are who hobble in off the street or skip in, holding hands, like the caricature goods painted on the wall with names such as ‘Mehl’, ‘Senf’, and ‘Tofu’, wander off the street. I am alien to this country. I stutter the words, am embarrassed by my limited German that seems to my ears to only consist of ‘danke’.

Yet, I want to make this place my home. The coffees are just too close to my apartment and way to good to shrug off and move on from. They are creamy, sweet without the addition of sugar and have the perfect size cap of foam on top. I do not even miss chocolate shavings that I usually crave and even request more of at other places. I could make this a romantic ritual for one, complete with candlelight… but for now, I will console myself with another dive into coffee-goodness.

Madame Fromage

One of the first people I met in Switzerland, who I was thoroughly entertained by, was a shop owner who I would like to call Madame Fromage. Tall with a Parisienne swan-long neck, she tossed around her arms as she chatted away faster than a TGV train racing between Paris and Zurich. Eine Schauspielerin (an actress) by nature, her shop named Pain et Fromage (Bread and Cheese) was not a place where you could duck-in and out of to purchase last minute ingredients.

Luckily, I was not in a rush. Having just landed in Zurich, I had all the time in the world, or at least four hours, to wonder the streets near my temporary home. I walked into her shop wanting to sniff out her wares, and was granted much more than olfactory experience. Her sales face was like a theatrical mask; she wore bright red lipstick, 100-strokes of mascara and had breasts perked up to her chin. With these she flirted and charmed -or at least tried to- both her male and female customers. However, there is only so much Rose Syrup that you can smell and sample before you realise once again that the queue has not moved; you look up and there she is, languorously draped across the counter poetically espousing the creaminess of Sheep-milk cheese. She is a French version of the domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, minus the curves. And like the majority of French women, it looks like she has never eaten anything other than celerey.

After promising to give the customer a special tour of the shop in her afterhours, suddenly the eyes, lips, boobs and cheese-stroking fingers of Madame Fromage are focused on me. She is physically striking with an accent as thick as bricks and her cheese selection is delectable partly because it is native solely to France. Proud and patriotic,the innocent question of whether the cheese is a product from the Swiss Jura is met with an indignant galluf! Of course it is not!

France, however, is not completely perfect in her mind either and she describes the Côte d'Azur as touristy and kitsch, whilst wearing sequin-pocked skyscraper heels at ten am in the morning.