Soup n Songs

My friend’s mum Anneliese has filled my belly with some delicious soups since I’ve been in the ‘dorf, but to tell you the truth, it’s tricky to find good soup when you’re out. Just the other night, an Irish colleague lamented her lack of success here in the hunt for a worthy soup. We were jiggling our hips at the time, standing at the bar in [Q]Stall. “Ha!” I cried, “look no further.” And I pointed across the hallway to [Q]üche.

[Q]üche and [Q]Stall are two businesses side by side in the Altstadt. On the left, [Q]üche is a tiny kitchen that serves salads, baguettes and the best soups in town. It’s the babe of Julia Renzel. On the right is [Q]Stall, a DJ bar owned by her partner Karlsson. Julia and Karlsson live together in a flat upstairs.

 [Q]Stall used to be Kuhstall (cow stall) and was owned for years by Julia’s father. Apparently it lived up to its name in the old days and used to attract a rough and ready crowd from Bolkerstrasse and the ice hockey stadium, so when Julia’s boyfriend Karlsson took it over, he wanted to define the change. So Kuh turned into Q, which in German sounds the same. Later when the shop next door became vacant, they decided to grab on to it to avoid getting any unwanted neighbours. They played with the word Küche, which means kitchen, and got [Q]üche. 

The soups in [Q]üche are a blend of traditional hearty styles with a modern touch. Last week I had the tomato soup. It was thick, a little rich and spicy, and fleshed out with bite-sized chunks of ripe tomatoes, zucchini and carrot, spiral pasta, basil, pine nuts and a generous pile of freshly grated smelly parmesan. Wunderbar.

The soups come with slices of typically lovely German bread and a dollop of herb butter. They have worked out exactly the right amounts of everything. The butter with its freshly chopped herbs looks a little scarce at first, but it’s the dollop that just keeps spreading. I was full at the bottom of my bowl, and it’s the kind of food your body thanks you for eating. You feel the osmosis of sustenance as it warms your belly.

Julia has run [Q]üche for eight years and makes the soups herself. She takes her ideas from many places but never sticks fast to a recipe. She’s got the feel for what goes well together and told me it comes from her twenty-five years working in “Gastronomie” around the ‘dorf, and growing up in a family in which food and eating were always central. Having the space in the Sauerland, they grew their own fruits, picked them and made marmalades and other condiments such as the apple mousse beloved with pork in this country.

The [Q]üche menu changes daily, and it’s small, which is lucky because it’s never easy to make the choice. The other soups on offer that day were a potato with tuna, cream cheese, parmesan and watercress, and a Thai vegetable soup. It was also hard to resist the spicy lentil salad with mango and pawpaw. [Q]üche caters to all kinds of eaters. One soup always contains meat, the others are vegetarian, and there’s always one with no lactose. People allergic to wheat get extra soup instead of bread.

The soups are about the €4.50 to €4.90 mark and salads are around €6 to €7. If you really find it too hard to choose, you can have one soup and then a Nachschlag (after hit)— a small bowl of another for just €1.30. You can also have a second helping of the same one for this price if the first doesn’t fill you up, or if the flavours simply drive you to greed.

The kitchen is right there in the shop and you can see the big pots of soup simmering on hotplates behind the counter. You’ve got a choice of places to eat. If it’s warm enough and not raining, there are tables outside amongst leafy bamboo on the cobbled street and you can watch the passers-by as they ogle your soup enviously. You can also sit on the bar stools inside and enjoy a magazine or greet new customers as they enter. It’s a small space, but it’s bright, airy and welcoming and you can relax to the familiar clang of the soup ladles. Or you can go next door into [Q]Stall.

[Q]Stall is a larger room with a small square bar in the middle. The thick, mustard-coloured paint wallows on the walls with layers of life and old bricks below. Photos of musicians line the walls. My favourite is behind the bar: Elvis doing the splits so low he’s practically pashing the floor. Olive green pipes and tubes hang low from the ceiling and the lighting is soft. And there are ceiling fans. Not that it often gets hot enough to get them going, but as a far northern Australian in the ‘dorf, I feel instantly at home when I see a ceiling fan.

There’s a variety of clientele eating at [Q]üche during the day: Students discussing their new theories on life, bankers, workers from the galleries and opera house, lawyers from the court, bartenders before they knock on and shop assistants after they knock off. The music playing while you eat is always good as well. During my tomato feast, I was treated to Johnny Cash, Guns n Roses, The Clash and The Pixies.

A sign on the door to [Q]Stall says “Be nice or leave”. And you get the feeling they mean it. [Q]Stall transforms on weekend nights into one of the hottest and simultaneously most relaxed DJ bars in the ‘dorf. It starts to fill up at about 11pm, and by midnight it’s buzzing. The very small dance floor next to the DJ of the night gets packed but dancers only smile as you knit your hips on your way through to the bathroom.

The boss, Karlsson, aka Mr Q, DJs himself every first Saturday of the month in a session called Mr Q’s Record Hop. He plays Rockabilly, 50s R&B, Western Swing and Jump Blues. If you follow the link on the website to his MySpace link, you can see his damn fine taste in music, and while you’re there, check out the YouTube clip of a piece of genius from Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.

There’s a well-established network of quality DJs at [Q]Stall. The Memphis Train (with gorgeous token sideburns) plays Groove, Rock and Rare Soul Shakers. And then there’s the Beat, whose Dancefloor Jazz meets Indie News and Classics. Last Saturday it was the Takeover DJs (pictured above), with Rare Soul, Funk, Hip Hop, Rocksteady, Indie, Garage and 60s music.

It was the perfect venue last weekend for a farewell to the lovely ladies Claire, Melissa and Sharon who will leave a gaping hole in the ‘dorf.

http://www.qstall-bar.de/

Kurzestrasse 3, Altstadt, 40213 Düsseldorf