Staunch Hedonist's Qype profile

Wir waren fünf Leutchen hier gestern um den Geburtstag meiner Schwiegermutter zu feiern.

Bedienung war nett und aufmerksam (da es noch früh war, war der Laden noch so gut wie leer--kann also nicht beurteilen, wie es so da ist, wenn das Haus voller ist).

Die Preise waren fair und das Essen hat von so la la bis richtig gut geschmeckt.  (Ich kann die Lachsnudeln nicht wirklich herzlich empfehlen--waren ziemlich fad, nicht schlecht, aber nicht wow--anderseits haben alle Salate, Vorspeisen und mindestens noch eine andere Nudelgericht richtig super geschmeckt.  Leider muss mein Beitrag bei vier Sternen bleiben, denn ich denke dass mit ein Tick mehr Ehrgeiz hätten sie was wirklich schönes mit den Lachsnudeln machen können und verstehe nicht warum sie einfach nach nichts geschmeckt haben.)

Die Tiramisu war ein Traum und der Espresso war herrlich.  (kenne mich ein bisschen mit solchen Sachen aus, und kann sagen, man wird vom Kaffee hier nicht enttäuscht.  Einfach super, vielleicht der beste den ich außerhalb meiner eigenen Wohnung und innerhalb Berlin verkostet habe).  Noch ein Wort zum Tiramisu--einfact probieren.  Tiramisu ist, in der Regel, nicht wirklich so mein Ding, die hier hat mich aber überzeugt.

Als der Servicekraft mitbekommen hat, dass meine Schwiegermutter Geburtstag hatte, haben sie ihr einen Nachtisch und eine Flasche Wein zum Tisch als Geschenk gebracht.  Talk about service!

I can't believe there are this many reviews about this place.  Naja, it's not as if it matters one way or the other--one hardly plans a trip to the Rote Rose, much less based upon premeditated research.

No, it's a place one goes because it's the only place open, and one lives too far away, or one's friends live too far away from one's apartment to come over, or one's friends indeed live only a few blocks away from one but the lavatory at the Rote Rose looks like a hospital room in comparison to one's own filthy jax.

I've been to the Rote Rose both drunk and sober, and I must say: it doesn't make much difference one way or the other.  Rote Rose is not a bar, it's a dark hollow in the front of a Kreuzberger Altbau in which somebody decided to stick a couple of uncomfortable benches and sell drinks off a truly basic-to-below-average menu, 24 hours a day.  Not sure why I and so many others have wasted so many words here writing about it; it's hardly worth mentioning, quite literally a hole in the wall and miles from approaching anything like an "institution".

I won't comment on the Publikum (besides, user "grosslyoverrated" before me summed it up much more poignantly that I ever could) but will say this: I grew up in a fucking bad neighborhood (the likes of which are unknown in Berlin, let alone Germany) and in my hometown have been, on separate occasions, followed home, jumped, and robbed, and as a result am never scared of anyone, anywhere, ever--except at the Rote Rose.  I don't know if I was actually in any physical danger or not (any more than one is at any given moment--nothing's impossible) but the last time I was in the Rote Rose was the first time in over a decade and certainly the only time since I've lived in Europe, that I was actually a tick nervous.

Fazit: going to the Rote Rose is pretty much the same as admitting you don't have enough imagination to think of a comfortable and/or interesting spot to grab some beers from the Späti and chill in.  Seriously, "all the bars are closed" in the O-straße?  Then take your funky ass home, or pick up some bum bottles of cheap Korn and sit at Planufer.  Or head to the Trinkteufel, the Milchbar, Bar 11 or Wild at Heart.  Rote Rose is for people who don't have a clue what lies in the next block, not for super adventurous culture safarists who just want to get away from the schicki mickies in Luzia or avoid the tourist children in Cake.  You go to the Rote Rose because you've given up/are too wasted to schlepp yourself anywhere else (yet another a good indication that home would be a much better choice).

That said: I still give the place three stars for: being open all night, good location, not giving in to peer pressure and actually making a bar real people would want to sit at just to make a buck, and the nice bartenders.  Really, the bartenders are super friendly and chill, without fail, whoever's standing behind the bar at the Rote Rose is the most pleasant person I've been served by since, well, the last time.

(that's a lot of words for a place not worth mentioning.  maybe i'm missing something after all.)

great bar, prices ok, bartenders seem happy enough to make you a coffee at midnight where many other "classier" places give you the evil eye for asking after they've cleaned the machine.  

i'm finding it very difficult to understand all the reviews about the place being violent or throwing people out for the mere crime of ordering a beer.  are the staff unconditionally friendly, no.  And places where they are, they are usually required to be, i.e., places i tend to avoid, because one remains human even when one stands behind a bar.  is the floor clean enough to eat off of, no, it's a bar, not a hospital.  is it normal to get beat up for requesting service, no, not there, and not anywhere else either, and if it happened on such a regular basis, why are they still operating?  i find it hard to believe that customers are getting beat up left and right and failing to call the police.

but who knows?  most of the severely negative reviews were written by users with two or fewer reviews to their name.  maybe another bar in the area views them as a threat, or maybe somebody who got fired or a former stammkunde who got snotty after being asked to pay his three-year-long tab has been busy behind the keyboard.

feuermelder is actually one of the lesser punk Punk Bars I know of in berlin, i can think of a handful that are far more radical than they are.  it's watered-down enough that "normal" people can very comfortably sit and have a few drinks and a couple rounds on the pinball machine without feeling out of place.  although i'm tattooed and pierced, i'm also female, visibly foreign and prefer hip hop or house music.  i don't make the impression of being (or even liking) punk at all, but i also don't make the impression of being a stuck-up a$$hole or a sucker.  maybe the people who've had bad experiences here--assuming they're not all the same person, that is--don't realize that wearing a black flag patch on the back of their leather jacket doesn't grant them automatic entry into the "club".  Get the idea that anybody gives a sh*t about you one way or the other out of your head.  Aggressive people (who can be found anywhere, not just in the feuermelder) can smell fear and uncertainty; if you're wearing a shirt made of steak it's maybe better not to walk into the dog pound.  And maybe, just maybe, the very essence of the problem is the try-hardness that comes with worrying yourself into a lather about whether you're being accepted with open arms by a pile of drunks in friedrichshain and just get on with ordering your fricking beer and having a good time with your friends.

you don't need to be a punk rocker to go to the feuermelder, das ist ja reinster Blödsinn. you just need to feel comfortable in alternative settings, and not worry about other people's opinions on whether you fit in. like everywhere and everything in life. punkt.

Ayayayay.

If you haven't been to the English book shop in the back, go.  Now.

After living in Germany for six years, and suffering through what passes for "English bookshops" in this town, I positively want to kiss these people.  The selection of history, politics, current events, and pop science is enough to keep me busy for the next several months.  Tons of nerd stuff like comics, sci-fi, fantasy and popular novels, too.  

Even for a cheapskate like myself, I was happy to fork over the sixty bucks for four fantastic books.  

Go.  Now.

You're welcome.

Clean, air-conditioned, simple but ample breakfast.  The dining room on the roof affords a truly spectacular view of the city; this was, for us, the highlight of the hotel.  The hotel is located in an awkwardly scruffy neighborhood, full of faceless apparel wholesalers, but is within walking distance of many attractions, including the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the Aqueduct, if you like a bit of a walk.  It is also very close to the Yenikapi regional train which takes you out to Yesilkoy beach if you fancy a bit of a bathe and a break from the hustle and bustle of the city.  Service was mostly mute, but there's not much either they or we could have done about the language barrier, at that point.  I would stay there again, although, I do think I prefer to stay closer to the Taksim part of town next time we go, if for no other reason than to be a bit closer to the young, hip, buzz of the city.  Fazit: you won't regret it, but it won't change your life, either.  I wouldn't *not* stay there again, let's put it that way :)

Pretty much everything that needs to be said has been said.

Türsteher not any more unfriendly than anywhere else in Berlin, that said, I do think they think a bit too much of themselves.  The point of having a stringent selection policy is that the crowd, once you get inside, is made up of real party people.  I found that the crowd inside was made up of squares and tourists.  Naja.

Music was OK but given that this was supposed to be their "birthday party", one would have expected a bit more.

Dancefloors: Oh.  My.  God.  First of all, PEOPLE.  Wooden dance floors?  Hardly let one move and slide as one might wish.  Low-ceilinged, unbelievably humid, damp, wet, and smoky.  The air was literally liquid.  Twenty minutes in one room and I thought I had come down with the flu, twenty minutes spent outside of it and I was fine again.  I am sure I'd be laid up in bed now, had I not had the good sense to get out when I did.  Thank goodness the weather was nice enough to dance outdoors or I'd be half-dead by now.  Would not like to know what it is like there during the winter.

The outside parts are pleasant enough, again, in nice weather.

Toilets: for someone who spends 20 hours every other weekend in Berghain/P-bar, the loos here were too much, even for me.  They smelled like a horse-stall, even when freshly cleaned.  Disgusting is not the word.  Too few of them, and the smell!  Lord awmighty.  

It's worth going once, just to see the place, but it's not somewhere I need to make my second home. The unfriendly staff is no skin off my nose, when a place is worth it.  I can't say that for KH.  

Fazit: if it's a DJ you like, and the weather is nice, and you're with your best ever friends, you stand a chance of having a good time.  But if you're just looking for something, anything, to do on the weekend, do something else.  Really.  

I wanted to give this place five stars, indeed, as we sat there enjoying our meals, I thought to myself, I am going to go home and write a five-star review about them on Qype.

Unfortunately, both cuppacaku and prissila's experiences had something in common with ours, which was that while the food left no room for complaints, the service was a bit off.  Indeed, I was surprised to learn it had been open as long as it had; although I walk that was a couple times a week I didn't realize it'd been open more than a couple of months.  Aber anyway.

In the beginning you get one pappadum per person (!!) with three sauces.  Not sure what the point of this is or why they are so geizig with the pappadum.  Perhaps if you ask, they will bring you more for free.  I dunno.  We got exactly two, the lady dining solo at the next table got exactly one.  Maybe this is how they avoid "having to" reuse their pappadum (as I have seen done at Amrit).

Drink order came wrong, but who knows, maybe I mumbled when I ordered it.  Waitress looked appropriately repentant, I kept the mistake drink.  No biggie.

Despite the very reasonably priced lunch offers I decided to go with the Chicken Vindaloo, mostly because I didn't want to settle for something else just to save like three bucks.  Well, maybe six bucks, if you include the soup I bought to accompany my meal.  Which was a bad idea, not because the soup was bad (it was great, the Murgi Cremesuppe, I recommend it) but because I was way too full less than halfway through the meal.  The soup isn't served with bread or anything (something I love about Amrit) but it's a solid soup, mine had plenty of chicken in it, unlike some places that serve meatless meat soup.  Husband's lentil soup was very good too, better than mine, which I found on the creamy side (crazy the things you get when you order stuff with "cream" in the name, eh?).

Husband got a vegetarian option off the lunch special menu, I thought it was meh, but he (German, in case anyone cares) thought it was amazing.  He particularly liked the diversity and amount of vegetables, indeed, it did look very colorful and appetizing, if not a bit light/lightly seasoned for my taste.  (I like my Indian food like I like a winter jacket--thick, heavy, and makes you sweat after a couple of minutes.)

My vindaloo was positively LOVELY.  A bit different than vindaloo I have had elsewhere, but far from lacking in flavor, richness and good spicy hotness.  (My Scolville threshold is a bit reduced after having grudgingly become accustomed to seasoning catered to the German palate, so it toed the line of being TOO hot, but that's only an indication that I need to eat more spicy food.  They did good, I appreciated the challenge.)  The rice was also heavenly.  Usually I think of rice as pointless, flavorless carbs (and therefore to be avoided) but their basmati was like... an adventure.  Should have paid better attention to the seeds in it, maybe caraway?  All the grains lovely and separated and shimmering and chewy and gorgeous.  Maybe one day I'll go there and just have a bowl of that.

So the service was less than what you'd expect from a profi, but the food was good and plentiful and we were very happy campers indeed.  Their five star rating was in the bag.  Until.

Until they managed to push the ONE button I have.  I don't ask much, but I do have one big, big pet peeve.

Do not.  Take fifteen minutes.  To make me pay.

As pressilla noted--you wait, and you wait, and you wait.  However, at this time, we had the advantage of sitting outside and having a very good vantage point of who was doing what and where.  Unverschämt is the word.  We told the server we wanted to pay, he stopped and had a friendly chat with the next table, then ambled off casually.  He continued to do this for what felt like forever.  Our table had been cleared and there we sat, getting gray hair after gray hair, wrinkle after wrinkle, I developed osteoperosis, my husband lost a tooth, in short, we waited about 60 years for him to finish faffing about and bring us the motherloving check.  If you think you're too busy to bring us the check right now, then do everything else a liiiiiiittle bit faster.  But there was zero hustle in his game.  He had all day, why shouldn't we?

Anyhow.  Now armed with the proper forewarning, I am fully prepared to go back again, on another day when I don't mind the wait so much, and am not cranky, and sleepy, and way too full from the fantastic soup.  I feel optimistic about their chances to convince me of their five-star status next time... will be sure to write an update.

First and foremost: get there early.

Getting there early doesn't insure that you won't still wind up sharing your table with other diners (they'll sit two people at a four-top table and immediately, before there are even any other occupied tables in the place, try to seat two more people with you.  I get the logic, but it is a bit awkward.  Presumably, when it's fuller, later, this is less of an issue, but in the first hour, it's kind of weird.  Aber naja), but it does ensure you'll get a seat, and get your food rather more promptly than not.

As for the amazingness of the food, so decried here by my fellow Qypers: how surprised do you really want to be?  I got news for you:

1. This is Germany.  There are lots of younger and/or more well-traveled Germans who appreciate exotic food, but in my not-very-well-researched-and-certainly-not-provable-opinion, your average German won't touch something spicy or strong-flavored with a ten foot pole.  I think Kimchee Princess does all right considering they do want to make money after all, not just serving food to a niche market.

2.  This is Germany.  For everybody who thinks they're experts on Korean food because they spent a semester there or had a layover in Seoul airport--what do you expect?  I could understand the disappointment if it were a smaller restaurant, a more mom-and-pop sort of affair that had no excuse for failing to satisfy its niche market of Europeans who think themselves experts on All Things Korean (since there are certainly not enough Actual Koreans in Berlin to make the bottom line), but this is a huge, cavernous place.  If you're not willing to compromise on your expectations of 100% authenticity, you're probably better off not looking for it in a place with a huge capacity, that has to satisfy as many people in the time they have, as possible.  If you know anything about the culinary market in Berlin, you know that most foreign food has to be modified if they want to sell a whole bunch of it.  Try a smaller restaurant instead.

3. This is Germany.  How completely frigging amazing and awesome is it that you can get anything remotely approaching Korean food in a town, and indeed, in a country, in which the most exotic thing the majority of natives have eaten is a "China Pfanne"?  80 million people, at least 60 million of which find ginger "scharf".  Absolutely amazing to have something like this here.

That said--the food is not going to knock your socks off.  The sides are quite nice and I was very pleasantly surprised to be served garlic spears (which I have not seen in six years of living in Berlin), but the marinated meats are nothing to really write home about.  Next time I go I will try one of the noodle or rice dishes rather than the table-side barbecue.

Fazit: a nice enough place to eat decent food, worth it if for no other reason than it's probably the most interesting thing you can eat in the Görlitzer Park area.

After visiting their website and securing that the show on that night was one we wanted to see, and the food looked like something we wanted to eat, we took the advice given on the site and made a reservation for a table.

First, the positives: food was good (although the dressing on the salad was positively awful--very mayonnaise-y--would ask for oil and vinegar next time).  We both ordered the steak with Bratkartoffeln and salad.  The steak was perfect, potatoes you can't really mess up, and the side salad was large and colorful and diverse.  The waiting time for the food was very long--we waited maybe 45 minutes, an hour?  Obviously we weren't in a rush but it did take quite a long time, I think because the kitchen is a one-man affair.

The music was top.  I was surprised that in such a small room (we sat in the room in which the band played, at the table closest to the stage) that it wasn't overwhelmingly loud, even with a microphone hooked up to the sax.  I can imagine that it might be a bit less pleasant had there been horns in the band, although I wouldn't mind that either.

The service was attentive and friendly.  The girls were definitely busy but they took care of us very well.

The negatives: um, yeah.  So, the thing with the reservation?  Couple of problems with that.  First, when you make a reservation for a table, you're not asked where you'd like it to be, which is not a big deal, unless they happen to take it upon themselves to seat you at a table with a €15 per person surcharge.  Even that would have been OK, if at any point along the way we'd been informed.  Neither on their site nor while making the reservation was it mentioned.  They simply sat us at a table which had a sign on it, informing you of the charge--the first we'd heard of it.  Of course it would have been both pointless and embarrassing to take an hour-long trip out to the place and then turn around because we were too cheap to cough up the money, and we decided to make the best of it and enjoy ourselves, but next time, we'll take a table elsewhere.  And, this is the kicker--you pay €15 to sit at a table they they then fill with other people.  In our case it worked out OK because our table was big enough to accommodate the three other people they jammed onto it, but there were other tables who wanted to order dinner and couldn't because there was literally no space for the drinks of five other strangers plus your food.  One guy just got something small he could place in his lap, although he would have preferred to order a proper dinner.

Apart from that it was a very pleasant evening and we will go back.  

Let’s call it 4,5 stars. The location doesn’t suit everyone, and indeed, my Begleiter insisted upon walking a block and sitting at the river, but I would have preferred to eat right there, right in the middle of a busy intersection and underneath the train tracks. Next time I go, I will do exactly that. The service was heavily English-speaking/American/something-else-English-speaking-ian, which didn’t bother me terribly, but I could see how it might annoy those who are weary of the hipster-foreigner takeover of Schlesi. The people-watching in this little corner of the world can’t be beat. You get a fantastic mix of commuters, Easy-Jet tourists, Bahnhof musicians, cyclists, and hungry Berliners; the energy is electric.

And for the food. For me personally, if all I really want is a damned good burger, I might go to Bei Onkel (Fuldastraße, Neukölln) or White Trash, but if I want is a pretty damned good burger, some chunky fat chili fries and some excellent people-watching, I’ll go again to Burgermeister. Prices fair, food good, worth a visit or ten—especially in nicer weather.