Lucky Star Dinner, 6 December 2008

As this is the last dinner for the year, I was originally going to organise a swanky event but then I thought that 2008 hasn't been such a great year with the credit crisis and the economic downturn and all that. At least, it had been a pretty stressful sort of year for me though I hope it's been a lot better for you. So instead of a posh dinner, I decided on a nice heartwarming traditional (but slightly unusual) Chinese-style dinner.

To be honest, I'm not sure if this is Sichuan or Cantonese cuisine though it looked quite good when I had a look some weeks ago. However, I can assure you that this is not an expensive dinner though it is guaranteed to warm and fill you up. And the main dish, steamboat, can involve a lot of nice hot meaty soup. The Lucky Star in Friedrichstrasse 127 is quite a new restaurant, and hopefully we can try it before it gets too popular. The place is near the end of Oranienburgerstrasse, right next to Oranienburger Tor U-Bahn so it's not difficult to get to. For those of you curious about the place, the website is www.restaurant-luckystar.de and one can have a pretty good dinner for under 30 Euros, I guess.

Put down in your diary now that this dinner is on Saturday, 6 December, and I'll be in Berlin just for this event, after having had to skip the last couple of events due to working outside Berlin, so I'm really looking forward to seeing some old friends again. As I said, the restaurant isn't that big, so please let me know your bookings by the end of November and all those that make the list will get a confirmation email on the 1 December, with details of where to meet for our usual cocktails before dinner.

See you all soon!

Chris

How it went on the night...

It turned out to be a Sichuan steamboat, which meant that one of the stocks was actually pretty spicy hot! Far too hot for some people but I kinda liked it. There were 3 kinds of trays, a vegetable and noodle mix, some seafood (mixed with quite nice sliced beef belly and fried tofu) and a meat tray, and the idea was that we dunked everything into the boiling soups and waited for them to float up before fishing the cooked food out with metal nets and eating it with a peanut sauce, which proved optional for me. Overall, most people really enjoyed it very much and it was also a novelty for most of us. It was pretty good value for money, for sure, although I felt that it was almost too much of the same food after a couple of rounds.

After dinner, some of us headed off to the Sharon Stonewall to watch some gay DJs bop away wearing rather unusual beehive hats...