PROLOG

"La vida es sueño" – Life is a Dream, wrote Calderón de la Barca nearly four hundred years ago. Looking back, the past three decades also seem like a dream: the emergence of a small group of Thai restaurants in Berlin and Spain, their golden years, their struggles, their disappearance.

The restaurants no longer exist today. Yet for many people they remain bound up with memories: of long nights in post-reunification Berlin, of conversations between artists, diplomats, students, chefs and travellers, of the scent of fresh herbs from Thailand, of a piece of the wide world that suddenly became possible after the fall of the Wall.

The Story of a Group of Thai Restaurants in Berlin and Palma

THAI FOOD MAGIC
MAOTHAI

This account wishes to lift a little of the veil of forgetting that time draws over everything. It is meant to remember places that have vanished, the people who made them possible, and a time when Berlin was in a state of awakening — raw, improvised, and full of unimagined possibilities.

At the same time, it is an expression of gratitude to the guests who remained loyal to us for decades, to friends and supporters, to all those from politics and public life who helped, but above all to the staff and chefs from Thailand, without whose dedication and skill this story could never have been possible.

From the archive

Original narrative · Deutsch · PDF ↗Original narrative · English · PDF ↗Original narrative · Español · PDF ↗Original narrative · ภาษาไทย · PDF ↗Original narrative · 日本語 · PDF ↗
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