CôDung

Come to think about it, my first going to CôDung was rather unpromising: Me, not too big a fan of sushi in the first place, only going because I was overruled in a doodle survey by my friends, and I remember how I saw the neon green decor and thought that it rather appealed to my 18-year-old self, and while my 18-year-old self surely appreciated a good cocktail, didn't care too much about good dining.

But as unpromising as my going there was, as revelating was my being there, and any doubt I might have had quickly blown away upon my first tasting the Fuji Roll, a fried sushi roll epic in taste. This is what I believe to be made of the world's happiest tuna, gently massaged in a perfectly tempered bath of slightly soy sauce-flavored marinade, to be afterwards carefully bed into its breading. This is what I believe a tuna burger in Futurama would taste like, only that the softly cooked, luscious inside is so perfectly contrasted and complemented by its crunchy outside. This sushi - turns you into a sushi believer.

So apart from the ravishingly delicious fried sushi rolls, CôDung is home to (other) sushi and Pan-Asian cuisine (and yes, I had to google "Pan-Asian"), serving a fully flavored Tom Kha Gai soup (perfect hangover food), many so-worth-gowing-there-sushi creations of their own (like "Sweet Love"), and (worth mentioning) many of their dishes with a decoratively arranged salad on the side that is topped with highly addictive tomatoes (which must be either marinated, or grown on a magical patch).

With a couple of outside tables on the pavement, two floors (downstairs the colorful bar, upstairs a couple of small origami cranes hanging inbetween the paper lamps from the ceiling) and a terrace so highly popular in the summer that I have to yet make it to, CôDung quickly became one of my favorite places to spend any lunch break with colleagues or dinner date with an old friend, and with some really good cocktails on the menu - also appeals to a side of my 18-year-old self that I surely stayed loyal to.

My hipster friend gets so sad when his food's coming to an end

CôDung
Färberstr. 43, 90402 Nuremberg
T 0911 / 48973469
E codungsushi@gmail.com
W codung-sushi.de/

Opening hours:
Mon - Sat 11:30 a.m. - 11 p.m.
Sun 5 p.m. - 11 p.m.

Cucina al Centro

If you're anything like me, then returning from any Italy vacation will always put you in a certain funk, and you’ll spend all the way back home gazing out of the window with a myriad of questions going through your mind, with one of the simpler ones being: Why don't we have food like this? Not like in a tablecloth, "Would you fancy another 29-Euros-bottle of our excellent house wine, sir?"-way, but as in: have some hearty pasta fresca before you head out to the cinema with your friends. And while most questions stay unanswered, some – don’t, and luckily there’s an answer to the “Why don’t we have the food” question, which is: We do. At Cucina al Centro, the most wonderful place to stop by whenever you’ve missed the food from or the feel to your last stay in Florence, or Rome.

Barely a five minute walk from “Weißer Turm”, where the city center seemingly begins and it ends, but still situated on a street you would intentionally have to go to (or, as in my case, follow hopelessly wrong directions to happen to walk through), Cucina al Centro serves (amongst others) a tasty selection of pasta dishes you’d only expect to find in that small family-run trattoria you stumbled upon on your last trip: from the wonderfully aromatic linguine with celery you grab for a quick lunch (ignoring the aglio - loving the feta) to the deliciously creamy comfort food which is the truffled linguine you absent-mindedly twirl your fork in while mumbling on about the events of the past week (slightly melted parmigiano on top. Oh so good).

And whether you’re enjoying the soothing aesthetic of the dining room with the intricate blue tiles, gathered your visiting relatives around the long wooden table in the rustic back room with the low pendant lights, or got one of the highly coveted window sill seats in the main room where the high table in the middle is a popular stopover for a quick espresso and a glimpse in the newspaper, does the sheer presence of lovely co-owner Dolores always give you this warm, welcoming feel like you've just come home to something,- and whenever you feel the memory of powdery-scented espressos, warm walls, luscious pasta aglio olio, gradually fading away, eventually bringing back to your mind all those questions again... Is Cucina al Centro - always a good idea.

My hipster friend likes to play with his food (formerly known as "Rigatoni with turkey") 

Cucina al Centro
Hintere Ledergasse 26, 90403 Nuremberg
T 0911 / 2427127
E info@cucinaalcentro.de
W cucinaalcentro.de/

Opening hours:
Mon - Sat 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.

Esskursion

Whenever I drove past Esskursion (and so often I did), I always wondered what this curious storefront to Pirckheimer Straße was about - a large window right next to an antiques store (that one I got), with the yellow lettering and prayer flags on the window framing the long table you see behind it. Seemingly too small to be restaurant (with only one table that seats eight, maybe ten), it was not until my hipster friend asked me to tag along to a cooking class that I found out that Esskursion is, in fact, a restaurant - one-man-run by trained sushi chef and traveler Norbert Weidner, who brings his travels (to India, Thailand, Burma, Laos) to the table - à la carte at weeknights, and in cooking classes on weekends.

The classes start at 1 p.m., perfectly allowing for you to build an appetite while seated at said long table in front of your chopping board (the only prerequisite to the cooking class being that you bring your own chopping board and knife) and listening to Norbert Weidner - a man who would travel 300 miles across India to beg the The Bangala head chef to teach him the secret to the Chettinad cuisine - telling of the origins of each and every dish.

So the Thai cooking class we went to was a wonderful afternoon spent in between chopping garlic, ginger, cilantro, passing on Nam Pla, garlic paste, green cardamom and getting carried away by the strange beauty any story of anything remote has to it. And while one minute you're chopping chicken meat, secretly wondering how good this can actually taste (will be served on lettuce. Chopped chicken meat on lettuce? Well okay...), the next minute, after "Mr. Hana Bi” Norbert has spooned some toasted sesame oil onto the marinated meat and you've tasted its bold, aromatic warmth against the vinegary freshness of the lettuce leafs, to never let go of this taste ever again, all you want to do is dunk your face in it and stay forever so.

From the Pla rad prik (pan-fried fish) to the Gaeng massaman (beef curry), every dish another delicous stop on Norbert Weidner's culinary world map, the food at Esskursion is by far the richest in taste of any place I've ever been to, with the place itself having such a homey feel to it, it brings to mind those times when you were lucky enough to score an invitation home from your roommate, and spent all Sunday afternoon at his mom's tiny kitchen table, being fed and feeling less homesick.

Very happy to have her chopping skills complimented. 

Esskursion

Pirckheimer Str. 44, 90408 Nuremberg
T 0163 / 752 53 78
E ess-kursion@hotmail.de
W esskursion.de/

Opening hours:
Wed - Fri from 6 p.m.
Sat - Sun Cooking classes (Achtung! Held in German) at 1 p.m.
Catering on demand

Welcome to Nuremberg. Or as the Nurembergers would say: Allmächd.

My very grown-up respond to any situation that ever saddened or scared always having been simply "going away", I was ready to put this elaborate, emotionally mature plan into action yet once again when I graduated from university, and applied to almost any job in any city as long as the city it was offered in promised to meet my minimum requirements as comes to distance (remote!) and size (residents) - to find a job in the one city that managed to meet just the exact minimum of said requirements.

So welcome to Nuremberg (Gesundheit?), 500,000-resident "Perle" as the Germans would say, in the heart of what on more than one occasion I was corrected to be "Franconia, not Bavaria". A city so lovable and at times naïve, that "Driver confuses pond with parking lot" makes the news and even its graffiti looks rather like taken from a sportswear company's ad campaign - set against a history partly so disturbing, it makes you take relatives to the Adidas Outlet instead of sightseeing to avoid ending a visit in a depression.

So here it is. A blog about - the things you can do here. Or the things you end up doing when you're bored or you're broke. Let's see. In the end, I guess it's all just an excuse to use my new Nikon. In the end - è solo un trucco.