Fat Ballerinas

maybe you read about the daytime portion of our Berlin trip over on Gatos en Espana, well now for the nightlife!

i know it is a little bit of a stretch, but i am putting this post under art. our visit to Berlin did have an architectural theme, and all of the bars below were praised for their interior design.

our first contestant, i mean bar, is The Green Door. it really does have a green door. behind the door is a very intimate cocktail bar, styled in that classic, trendy 70’s retro feel. out of all the bars we went to, this one was my favorite. Jason had a Chartreuse Vert martini that sounded scary but tasted amazing. he commented that only a really good bartender could make that drink correctly, if the proportions were off by the slightest the drink would have been ghastly.

way to go Green Door! we award you eighteen martini onions, two blue-cheese stuffed olives, and one german radish!

second up is Universum Lounge - Extraordinary space-age Charlottenberg design bar rightly rated by Wallpaper* as one of their best bars in the world. located in the glorious 1920s Bauhaus Universum Cinema, walk inside and you might as well be in a movie - some sort of James Bond-meets-Fellini glamour fest. sounds great, but it was a bit of a let down. the drinks were not extraordinary except in price and the interior looked as though it had seen better days. the “space” theme was cool and the staff were nice. it may have been more exciting if more people had been there, the place was a little dead.

Bad job, universum, we award you four martini onions and a packet of stale crisps.

how sad, no photos.

next…6vorne - featured in FRAME magazine ‘think clean lines, dark walnut features, lashings of Germanic minimalism all bathed in the most wonderful of orange and green lights. this is why ‘6Vorne’ is the talk among Berlin’s fashionistas.’ where had the vision gone? the decor was still there along with “Marlboro” ashtrays, “Redbull” wine buckets, “Smirnoff” glassware, I thought I had died and gone to marketing hell. yuck. the owner was really nice, maybe a bit too “how’s everything”, “how are you doing?”, etc. maybe he was just curious how we had found out about his place or thought we were important. we had a good laugh after leaving thinking that the owner must have thought we were magazine reviewers or something.

On the fence about this one, we award 6vorne nine martini onions and two anchovy stuffed olives

our last, CSA - Friedrichshain used to be a run-down former East Berlin neighborhood, but is now something of a hipster hangout. and one of its hippest hangouts is CSA (the acronym for Czechoslovakia’s national airline which used to be located in this building). it has a stylish Soviet retro feel and is laid-back in a way that lining up to buy your one-way ticket to Prague in the old days never was. when we stepped out of the Ubahn onto the street, the town looked deserted and were not hopeful we would find the bar since we had forgotten the physical address. but there it was, unusually quiet. it was open but we were the only ones inside. We wondered “what time do the Berliners drink”? Had we missed the rush? Oh well. It was a nice place, groovy music, with not a hipster in sight. With damn good drinks and very cool retro airline furniture.

Excellent job, CSA! We award you 16 martini onions, one blue cheese stuffed olive, and a single very fresh oyster!

Over all, a successful haunt of Berlin’s most notorious bars.