per diem eats: Be Sure to Pay Homage to Paul the Octopus Next Time You're in Oberhausen

In the span of a month I had been to Brighton, Nottingham, Lyon, Aix en Provence, Rome, and Milan, amongst other handsome and vibrant European cities, when I was called on to help with the opening of a new American Apparel in Oberhausen. To that, I think most people might wonder – after settling upon a presumed pronunciation (I chose oh-burr-how-zin) – where?

Oberhausen is a city in Germany only twenty minutes north of Düsseldorf by train, which covers less than thirty square miles, and has a population of barely 200,000. In many cities, where it takes more than twenty minutes just to drive through the downtown area, I think Oberhausen would qualify as a suburb at most. Once upon a time it was an industrial centre, generating strong oil, zinc, coal, iron and steel revenue. However, the synthetic oil plant was bombed in 1944. The Altenberg zinc factory – which was a big deal in the zinc world – closed in 1981. The last coal mine closed in 1992. And, finally, the last iron and steel mill closed in 1997, leaving the city with absolutely no industry.

The next thought one might have after learning a bit more about Oberhausen is most likely: why? Well, like any municipality decades past total collapse would do, Oberhausen decided to convert its former industrial park into Europe’s largest shopping centre, which is aptly named CentrO. CentrO includes a 130,000 square foot mall with 220 retail stores and 33 fast food joints, 20 restaurants along a “promenade” outside the mall, a movie theatre, a nightclub, a sports arena, the Gasometer (literally a gas holder, now an exhibition space), an amusement park, a LEGOLAND, and a SeaLife aquatic centre that is home to the memorial shrine of Paul the Octopus, famous for predicting national football matches by choosing between two correspondingly-marked boxes of food. Though these attractions may seem awfully similar to the contents of a Toronto suburb (except perhaps for Paul, he’s an unparalleled match-predicting octopus, I’ll give him that much), Europe is not as riddled with this American model of overpriced remotely located shopping and entertainment packages, and Europeans flock to CentrO from surrounding cities and countries quite literally by the bus load.

In the middle of this fun haven, in the middle of nowhere, American Apparel decided to open up its two-hundred-and-something^thlocation, and I came along for the last forty-eight hours of this endeavour. Now, my metabolism requires that in a forty-eight hour span of time I consume at least six meals fit for a large adult male human. Of the first five of these meals I had at CentrO, four were Starbucks lattes and one was a MacDonald’s bacon cheeseburger, none of which I believe is food fit for any kind of living being, let alone a lanky woman whose body starts to eat itself when it hasn’t been fed something recognizably digestible in more than forty-five minutes. Finally, on the night before the grand opening, as the store had moved reasonably further away from a rainbow flag manufacturer’s warehouse robbery scene towards identifiably being a retailer of some kind, we decided to venture out to the promenade restaurants for a proper meal.

The promenade features twenty wall-to-wall restaurants representing their cuisine’s origin as plainly as possible in their name, such as, “Don Carlos” the Spanish restaurant, “Tijuana” the Mexican restaurant, “Louisiana” the American restaurant, “Wok & Grill” the pan-Asian restaurant, “Franziskaner” the German restaurant, or “Teatro” the Italian restaurant we finally decided upon. To further ensure that customers were well informed of the possible menu options prior to actually looking at the menus posted out front, country flags were often featured as the establishment’s logo. We stood for a moment in the entrance of Teatro, but as the servers made no move perceptibly like coming to seat us, and almost all the tables were free, we sat ourselves. Though the menus were in German we were able to decipher most of the options and made our choices fairly quickly. After struggling through the drink order with our waitress who spoke no English – and resolving to order Cokes all around as it seemed to be the only drink she understood from our various requests – we all decided to simply point to the menu to order our mains; all of us except one, of course, who had several questions to ask about his potential selection. As it is, this former co-worker of mine is not a native English speaker, although he does speak it very clearly. Still, this fact did not help the waitress who did not understand English no matter how distinctly the syllables were pronounced and thus did not catch the cue that she was to enumerate the available sides that could accompany a medium-rare steak. Frustrated, she put down the notepad in which she had successfully written down my order at least, and went to fetch another waiter who, as it turned out, spoke just as little English and as we had not managed to master German in the interim my co-worker had to settle for the same pointing technique the rest of us had used and hope for the best.

Since we had been working in a store that was still closed to the public, we hadn’t yet experienced much of what it was like to be an Anglophone in small-town Germany. We would get the full brunt of it at the store opening the next day when faced with customers’ indignation that there was such a thing as a non-German speaking person present in the country. I think it must be similar to the experience of being an Anglophone in France, although as a native French speaker I can’t say for certain. Regardless, if the Teatro staff had intended on acting as German cultural ambassadors when we arrived, they had thoroughly dispensed with any such hospitable inclination by the time the ordering was through. For the next hour we watched as other tables were seated, had their orders taken, and were served their plates all while we still waited for ours. Our orders finally came just as the time we had allotted for this dinner break had completely elapsed and we were forced to eat our meals rather hurriedly. If you care to know, the steak came with lightly seasoned baked potatoes and carrots, and my fettuccini alfredo – which, yes, I am aware, is basically macaroni and cheese for adults – was perfectly cooked and creamy without being heavy, and lasted me until I arrived in Amsterdam the following day.

I leave you with some TripAdvisor reviews of CentrO in the off-chance this post has somehow mistakenly inspired you to make a detour trip to the mall: