Last week I was in Germany, in Weimar and Berlin, specifically, and on Sunday I got to do something that I’ve only done in one other city: To spend a day walking around and looking for the best of its most typical street food. Berlin’s most typical street food – aside from its ubiquitous doner kebap stands – would have to be the curry wurst.

Curry wurst is classic street food. It’s usually sold with fries and the wurst is smothered in a red sauce – which may or may not be ketchup, depending on who’s serving and who’s asking. It’s usually served on a cardboard plate and is best washed down with a beer, IMHO.

I’ve been to Berlin four or five times, and every time, my friend Micz keeps promising me that we’ll finally get to try a curry wurst. Something always comes up to prevent me from trying one – one time it was that we had to help a friend install kitchen cabinets from Ikea – but this weekend the time had come.

The idea was similar to something Tony Ozuna and I did in Los Angeles a few years back – there we traveled all around East LA in search of LA’s best taco. (We found it at King Taco, btw.)

In addition to being gastronomically-demanding, you can learn a lot about a place by checking out its street food culture. I found out, for example, that the number of curry wurst stands seems to be on the decline – partially because the vast majority of fast food stands are operated by Berlin’s Turkish residents, who not only prefer to sell food they know how to make, but also because the sausages used for most curry wurst are made of pork.

That said, we did come across a place that sells “Turkische curry-wurst,” which used a beef sausage. It was pretty good, but there were better curry wursts to be had.

I put all my findings up on a Google Maps page – along with my Flickr photos. Click here to see what I found.

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