Just the other day I headed around the corner to one of the city’s favourite East German retro locations: Kaffee Burger. Yeah, you probably know it. If you've stayed in Berlin for more than two nights you definitely do. If you somehow missed it, then there's no other way around it: you're going to have to come back.
It’s not a Café at all of course. It’s a unique hovel of original retro furnishings and papier-mâché walls, with all the trimmings. It’s a club and a bar all in one – but it’s not like any of those horrible big places that you are thinking of called “Melt” or “Liquid” or whatever. It’s a genuine former East German bar to start with and there is way too much brown. The drinks board still shows prices in Ost-Marks. It feels like everyone's a communist brother or sister, united together in good spirits. Actually, everyone’s a tourist (or pretending to be one) and is probably trying to get laid.
The music is good fun too - mainly because the slide from Indie to Pop just happens so seamlessly and, most importantly, because no one is afraid to dance. Most nocturnal Berliners spend all their night at a club looking for an excuse NOT to dance. And there are so many ways to do that: you can smoke, continuously order cheap drinks or just stand there looking bored and play with your fringe. That’s not the way in Kaffee Burger though. People dance and sweat and kiss.
At about 3am I was standing at the edge of the dance floor looking across to one of the older guys who I had come in with - he was still whipping around like a frog in a blender. Beside me a young American couple, who had just got to know each other, had broken off their snogging and were looking on in amazement: “Who let that bald guy in? He's going crazy!”, she said.
I went home at 5. It was Monday after all.
