Pankow’s most disgusting restaurants

There’s a new restaurant reviewer in town: the Health and Safety Office of the suburb Pankow. Last week, for the first time, they published on the web a list of restaurants that made the grade of completely disgusting. It’s part of a “Smiley” campaign, where restaurants that rank the top in cleanliness get a nice little sticker on their window and those that don’t reach basic hygiene standards get publicly nailed.

A large number are Asian restaurants or take-aways.  Many of the restaurants (listed here) have complained about new plan of publishing the list, saying that these issues were all already dealt with last year when the inspection took place and now their establishments are up to scratch. The most common problems were cleanliness in the kitchen and bathrooms and failure to correctly refrigerate food, although quite a few got done for not having warm water in the kitchen, staff smoking in food preparation areas or broken dishwashers.

One, the Damla Bistro (Berliner Allee 39) was selling off cheap beer as a more expensive brand while the Dubliner Irish Pub on Gleim Strasse had a mouldy beer cellar. The worst seemed to be Sangeet (Kastanienallee 2) which had a rat infestation in the cellar. Yummy.

At the other end of the hygiene scale, five eating establishments did get awarded a Smiley sticker. However three of these were old folks homes so unless you’re planning on sticking around for a LONG time, you won’t be able to sample their award-winning sterility.