I'm in a trendy Berlin eatery. The chef has sat down at my table and is expounding on archeology, and everything he is saying is wrong.
The chef is Gordon W, a 48-year-old Canadian who is a founding member of the Klauhutte Bangzeit 200 (KBZ200), an artists' collective cresting the wave of expat creativity that is transforming Germany's capital into the coolest city on the planet.
The phony story that W is telling me with a straight face concerns the recent excavation of a tandoori oven from the ruins of the Roman Coliseum. Proof, he says, that the common horizontal pizza is predated by an exotic vertical pizza of the ancients. W's restaurant, Der Imbiss, located on Berlin's hip Kastanienallee strip, has a tandoori oven and cooks Indian nan bread which is transformed into the "vertical pizzas." Every one of them comes with a heaped side dish of playfully warped myths and legends.