Pfifferlinge or Chantarelle? - Magic Mushrooms In any language (Bluhms Cafe Restaurant Bar - Bremen)

Member Name: koshkha

Product:	Bluhms Cafe Restaurant Bar - Bremen
Date:	12/09/09 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely staff, nice unusual menu, super location

Disadvantages: Nothing springs to mind

There are two types of restaurants that I like to review: ones that turn out to be surprisingly good when I've expected little and ones that leave me wishing I'd stayed home and re-alphabetised my bookshelves. Fortunately Bluhms in Bremen was one of the former experiences. I need to point out for the benefit of the grammar geeks amongst the readership, that the omission of the apostrophe is intentional and double-checked - I didn't just get it wrong.

Regular readers - well those that have a good memory anyway - may realise I spend a lot of time in Bremen and those paying particular attention will know my favourite dining companion in Bremen is my colleague Sabine. I'd booked her up for a night out several weeks beforehand when I first had my dates confirmed for this visit and for once we actually had a plan for our evening. We were going to go and have drinks on the roof terrace of the Beluga building which sits on an island in the Wese river and then off to find some tiny restaurant in the historic Schnoor district. The plan went awry when we got to Beluga and found that the roof terrace was closed, presumably because of the high winds. I guess risk-averse German companies don't want customers being blown off their roof. It's probably bad for business.

So the plan adapted quickly and the next thing I knew we were in Boettcherstrasse, a cute and arty little alleyway that I know to be Sabine's favourite street in the city. We only intended it as a short cut back to the market square but we started to dither and look in the windows. I found a wall mounted menu outside a small café-restaurant and the next thing I knew, we were hooked. Neither of us had eaten at Bluhms before or knew anything about the place but it was a sheltered little street that meant we could eat outside without being blown over and there was something appealing about it that we just couldn't resist. I think it was something to do with the menu offering lots of dishes based on a seasonal wild mushroom called a pfifferlinge which my post-eating research revealed to be the German name for the chantarelle mushroom. Offer me a wild mushroom and I'm putty in your hands.

We deliberated over the inside-outside choice, decided it was a bit warm inside and opportunities 'al fresco' don't come along often enough so we took a table outside. The waitress came out to bring us menus and to take drink orders and we settled down, wrapping our handbag straps round the chair legs because the street is a tourist hotspot and a perfect place for a bag snatch. Such security was entirely unnecessary as hardly a soul walked past all evening. It was quite fun to be eating in the street right opposite the windows of the Hilton Hotel restaurant where the prices were much higher and the view was the same. We were well placed for the 8 o'clock glockenspiel playing on the special clock on this street and had lovely views of one of the museums.

The menu was very cute - not a word I'd usually apply to a menu. It followed a theme based on what I'm told is a popular Bremen saying - that "three is a right in Bremen". Apparently this is something to do with there being three historic rights of Bremen dwellers - you know the kind of thing: things like the right to wear a yellow coat on a Tuesday when the moon is in the 3rd Quarter and to graze your pigs on the common-land. Neither of those is actually one of the rights but it's that sort of thing and my German skills didn't stretch to working out what the real ones were though I think it's something to do with wearing fur and sailing boats on the river so I was heading in the right direction.

Taking this triple theme, they lay out the menu with three options on each page; so three types of soup, three types of starter, three salads, three meat dishes, three fish dishes, three so-called Bremen Classics, three vegetarian options, three snacks, three small kids' dishes, and of course three desserts. It's an interesting gimmick but I would imagine it's quite a challenge to be so restrictive. In addition to the trios, there's a page of specials - all of which on this occasion were based around the seasonal mushroom and included a soup, a salad, a frittata, and a couple of meat dishes to which I paid no attention.

Knowing we'd have dinner out we had intended to save ourselves but it all went a bit wrong. Sabine's colleagues had been 'cleaning out the freezers' in the company basement and found a massive chocolate cake and several boxes of cake bars. This is pretty typical where I work. It's rude and irresponsible to throw away good food of course and we'd not wanted to be accused of being wasteful so you can imagine that we weren't as hungry as we really needed to be by the time we came to eat. I've learned by much enjoyable experience that German restaurants don't 'do' small so I chose the mushroom salad and Sabine went for a mushroom cream soup.

Our drinks arrived and the waitress returned with a plate of slices of ciabatta bread with three different types of flavoured butters. One was a spicy paprika, one a very Germanic interpretation of curry and the third was 'something pink', by which you can deduce that I didn't work out what it was. The bread was exceptionally good, slightly grey in colour, nice and chewy in the middle with a crisp crust. The paprika butter was delicious and the curry not too bad.

My salad was an absolutely beautiful combination of some of my favourite things. There were plenty of the rusty orange little mushroom pieces, lots of peppery rocket leaves, tiny halved cherry tomatoes, lots of toasted pine-nuts and lashings of finely sliced parmesan squares. If I wanted to make one tiny grumble it would be that there was really a bit too much dressing on the salad so that there was a deep pool of it left in the bottom of the bowl when I finished. The waitress had brought more of the excellent bread with our dishes and I suspect this was meant to go with Sabine's soup but she was happy to share and I got to dip a piece in her soup to try it. It was creamy, rich and every so slightly curried in flavour with plenty of mushrooms.

In another review of a Bremen restaurant I whinged on about a nasty waitress who lost our order and didn't bother to light our candle until the meal was nearly over. This waitress was totally different. Each time she came back to see us and found our candle blown out by the wind she insisted on lighting it again, even though we said it wasn't important.

There's only so much being good that I can deal with so I tempted Sabine into sharing a pudding of honey parfait with caramelised cherries and Brazil nuts. The portion was more than generous and plenty for two. I got most of the cherries and nuts and we shared the parfait which was made from 'Tannenhonig' or fir-tree honey (I might have translated that wrongly) and Sabine swore she picked up a taste of fir-trees in the parfait.

By this time it was getting a bit cooler and darker outside but we were enjoying our evening so much that we moved inside to get hot drinks and keep chatting. The restaurant was already empty so we had plenty of time to look around at the décor. One wall was covered in gold lacquer which seemed to glow as it reflected the light. The floors were or dark wood and the tables were dark with sparkly runners down the middle. The normal height tables had light wooden chairs and there were several places where you could sit at a raised bar on bar stools. I suspect these are more used for the lunch service.

The two staff we met - the waitress and a nice chap who was writing out the menus for the next day's lunch on the blackboards and might well have been the chef - were absolutely delightful. The waitress explained it was only her second day in the job so I was impressed that she'd basically been pretty much in sole control for most of the evening. Nobody hassled us to hurry up and move on and they seemed almost reluctant to bring the bill, which at Euro28 for a beer and a glass of wine, a soup and a salad, a big pudding and two hot drinks, seemed like pretty good value to me. I suspect Bluhms is probably more popular and busier as a lunchtime venue rather than a place for dinner but we both really liked Bluhms and I have a funny feeling it won't be our last visit.

Bluhms is open from 11am to 10 pm from Tuesday to Sunday.

Summary: It would be easy to miss this lovely restaurant