Berlin, beyond the schnitzel

In Berlin, you know what you came for. The schnitzel as wide as the plate, the fries, the sweating beer mug. The crisp roast, with its potato dumpling and red cabbage. At Schnitzelei, the cutlet comes with a fried egg and fried capers. At the Hackescher Hof, the meat cracks under the fork. It's good, it's heavy, it's exactly what you expected. The postcard works.

But that's not what kept me. What kept me was the Vietnamese food.

Not airport Vietnamese, with its lukewarm bo bun served off a conveyor belt. The real thing. A bowl of noodle soup with wontons, which are Chinese dumplings. The broth is clear. The cilantro goes in at the last second. Scallops barely seared, with a cilantro leaf on each one. In Berlin, Vietnamese is not a fallback. It is a real cuisine, found everywhere, especially in the east.

There's a reason for that. It's a history I didn't know before I tasted it.

Berlin is one of the few cities where the two Vietnams meet. In the west, there are the "boat people". They are refugees from the South who arrived after the fall of Saigon, in the late 1970s. In the east, it's something else. They are contract workers from the communist North. East Germany, the GDR, recruited them for its factories. There were close to 60,000 of them in the GDR when the Wall came down. Overnight, their contracts were worth nothing. They were offered a bonus to go home. Many stayed, with no real status, through the racist attacks of the 1990s. To survive, they opened shops, nail salons, wholesale markets. And restaurants. The Vietnamese food you eat in Berlin today comes from there. These people lost everything at once. They rebuilt something solid.

Maybe that's why it moved me more than the rest. A schnitzel is a tradition that repeats itself. A bowl of soup in the east of the city is something made by hand. By people who left one country, then stayed in another.