Rick Stein's Long Weekend

Zoo Station, where Rick Stein's long weekend began

Two programmes recently featured Berlin - Rick Stein's Long Weekend, and Travel Man's 48 Hours. Both featured quirky hotels, cold weather, art communes and a Trabant tour. The latter was the intended comedy element - there was much bleeping of profanities during these pre-watershed broadcasts. The cars, being made of Bakelite, are hardly robust and weren't easy to drive in their heyday, let alone after ageing the 25 years since the fall of the Wall and now having to manoeuvre through the 2016 Berlin traffic.

Both Rick Stein and Travel Man also featured the same restaurant - Billy Wagner's Nobelhart & Schmutzig, which is on Friedrichsstrasse just south of Checkpoint Charlie. It's the only time I've seen Richard Ayoade impressed by food. He normally has a nibble, sneers, and leaves. But this time he cleaned his plate and gave a thumbs up, speechless. So it must be good. Rick Stein was more effusely enthusiastic, as Billy Wagner did clever things with fennel seed, pork neck, leeks, kale puree, toasted pine needles and Rick's personal favourite - smoked eel. Billy Wagner is - well, if not a bit scary, then certainly intense. He cooks in front of you, hiding behind a Viking beard and a fierce stare. His food is locally sourced to the exclusion of anything else. Not even a lemon will grace his kitchen, because citrus fruits don't grow in Berlin.

Berlin is the home of Currywurst, which I didn't know, although I have eaten it there, from a snack kiosk in Park Sanssouci in Potsdam, because it's all I could afford. As you can tell, the two times I went to Berlin, I had limited gastronomic knowledge and not much money.

Beautiful Potsdam - and I ate Currywurst

Nonetheless, certain things I ate on those trips have stayed in my mind. Berlin is the city where I tried falafel for the first time. Falafel, now readily available in Waitrose, were entirely unknown to me in 1993. I have eaten them since in more authentic cities like Amman or Cairo, but it was Berlin where I had my first taste. I thought them a little strange, but didn't dislike them. Nowadays I love them and even make my own, they have become such a staple in my diet. I ate them last night, for example, as a return to cultured sanity in Leeds after taking my daughter to see Disney On Ice.

Amman

Unfortunately translated accompaniments to falafel in Jordan

I also remember eating a chicken and cashew nut salad in a small bistro just round the corner from Barbarossastrasse in Schoeneberg, the sort of place that had checked tablecloths, candles burning in Chianti bottles, and devoted regulars. It was the salad dressing that was such a revelation to me. Germans are well known for dousing their salads in vinegar, but this was a raspberry vinegar, not too sharp, not too sweet, just enough to make the dish amazing, and unforgettable. Sadly, the bistro seemed to have vanished when I returned to Berlin six years later, but as a friend had taken me there and my geography was hazy, it might have been I was just looking in the wrong place. I hope so.

Rick Stein showed how funky the Berlin food scene has become since I was last there, a ridiculous 17 years ago. And yet he was still very much able to find the traditional grub - the gigantic pork knuckles, cheese spaetzli, meatballs, sauerkraut, all washed down with litres of wonderful beer in bars full of oom-pah music and dirndl skirts. But in many establishments, the dishes have been made more delicate and refined, which has to be no bad thing. In fact someone just won Masterchef by doing just this - taking traditional British food and - in her words - elevating it to a new level.

Traditional German grub at the Leeds Christmas Market

Travel Man: 48 Hours In Barcelona

He's pointing the wrong way!

Why do travel television programmes do this? By "this", I mean send someone off on a nice holiday who obviously doesn't want to go anywhere. All so that they can make snitty comments on our screen for half an hour about how crap everything is when they get there. Why waste all that money on someone who isn't going to enjoy it? Why not send someone who might actually appreciate a five-star boutique hotel at £399 a night instead? Like me, for example. Since £399 is pretty much our current entire annual holiday budget.

Richard Ayoade can be very funny, but Barcelona is wasted on him. Or so he wants us to believe, anyway. He has Kathy Burke with him for company, sniggering like a schoolgirl in their expensive hotel suite at the thought of them sharing a bed. (They aren't sharing a bed.) Throughout their efficient 48 hours in the city, they are only made to do activities that the pair of them are going to hate, whether they involve football, cava, heights or molecular gastronomy. This may make hilarious television in the producer's mind, but it actually makes Richard and Kathy look rather rude in front of their earnest and patient hosts. I may not get the finer subtleties of Miro either, but at least I wouldn't shout "Zippy from Rainbow!" that loudly in public.

On the roof at the Fundacio Joan Miro

But I would like to know how Ayoade got a £45 return airfare to Barcelona (in these days of extra charges on low-cost carriers) without riding cargo in his suitcase. Because Barcelona is fantastic and I would so very much love to go back.

Richard and Kathy missed so much out - the Ramblas, the Boqueria market, the houses designed by Gaudi, the Olympic stadium, the Ciutadella park, the Barri Gotic, much of Montjuic, the Palau de la Musica Catalana, the Museu Frederic Mares with its weird and wonderful collection of curiosities, to name but several. Just look at it all:

Parc Guell

Arc de Triomf

Museu d'Historia de Catalunya

Castell on the Ramblas

Placa Reial

Barri Gotic

Port Olimpic, with Frank Gehry's Whale Sculpture

Sagrada Familia

Casa Batllo

La Pedrera

Olympic Park

Now, I am lucky enough to have spent a whole week in Barcelona, and I realise that anyone with only 48 hours to spend there will inevitably have to miss things out. But given that Richard and Kathy hated pretty much everything they did, why not let them find their own positive? (Would Richard have found any?) And to be honest, we only "did" Barcelona intensively for 48 hours, as that's how long our tourists' transport and museum cards were valid. So you can see a lot of great stuff very quickly. And that we did. We were so exhausted afterwards that we spent the next two days lying on the beach at Sitges. And ate lunch next to Sandra Bullock while we were there. (Sticking to a menu del dia at lunchtime enables you to be able to afford better restaurants.) Sitges reinvigorated us enough to make an excursion further afield up to colourful, beautiful, medieval Girona (although this has always been what Ryanair call Barcelona) before - sniff! - having to fly home. So get me that genuinely cheap air fare, and I will be back there like a shot of Crema Catalana.

Sitges

Girona