Last saturday I was on a culinary world trip through Cologne with my friend Katja. :)

We started at “Hola Mundo” – a Latin American Shop at Luxemburgerstr. 13
The owner (Mercedes Adjelleh) is originally from Peru and showed us some typical food and drinks from her home country. A lot of different sorts of corn – even purple corn! – and potatoes (mostly dried ones, that you have to pickle in water over night before you can prepare a meal with it).
There was a little room behind the shop where Mercedes had prepared some Peruvian food for us :) which was extremely tasty! A huge piece of cassava (in german “Maniok Wurzel”) which looked like a white potato and was served with peanut-potato-meat sauce. Extremely yummy!
We had some time to browse through the store and after everyone had bought some mementos we continued our journey.

Next stop was the Indian restaurant “Govardhan“ (Roonstraße 3) – a vegetarian restaurant in Vedic tradition. The owner told us about Ayurvedic way of life – that everything is about good karma. For example that you should cook with love and in a good mood because your mood influences the food. This is also why they don’t eat meat or fish – because of the bad karma that runs into the animals flesh when it is butchered. A very interesting perspective. I think I’ll buy myself an Ayurvedic cookbook soon to enlarge upon this topic ;)
We were served a vegetarian turnover filled with potatoes and peas and we could choose between 3 different sauces (Mango & Cilli / Herbs / Sweet & Sour) – of course I tasted all of them ;)
The food was okay, but the highlight was the Mango Lassi which was spiced with cardamom. I bought some VATTA tea and spices for home and then we left the place.

From India we went just around the corner to the next continent: Africa. To the Ethiopian Restaurant “Fasika“ (Luxemburgerstr. 17) to be exact. It was very interesting to notice that by entering the restaurant you entered a complete new world of scent. :) In this place we were served the ethopian national dish “Doro Wot”. The base of this meal is “injera” a leavened kind of pancake which has a consistency of a sponge. Welllll, it was not my thing ^^ The Injera was filled with a vegetable mix of mainly potatoes, meat with a very spicy sauce and a kind of cottage cheese. We were invited to eat with our hands by taking some Injera and wrapping the single toppings with it. There was also the possibility to try Ethiopian beer.

Our last stop was the Vietnamese Catering Phong Lan where we were supposed to take a little vietnamese cooking class. The owner Tuan Jung Dinh is a trained florist and loves to decorate ^^ Probably this is why the whole restaurant looked more like a bric-a-brac shop or a museum or … I don’t know what. But you wouldn’t expect a place where you could eat or take classes in vietnamese cooking ;)

We made vietnamese spring rolls with rice paper that was dipped in hot water to make it smooth and then filled with salad, cucumber, fresh basil and coriander as well as chicken or tofu and after that the whole thing was rolled. Katjas roll was extremely big :D and mine too ;)
Unfortunately we were all already sated so we couldn’t eat that many rolls any more.

All in all it was a very nice experience – the whole tour – and gave me a new insight into Colognes multicultural world :)

If you wanna do the same tour or another one just check the website of Kulturklüngel Köln!