Global Bars, Part 3 – WohnZimmer
Photo of Wohnzimmer interior from Les Amis de l’apero, used with permission
The slow stroll-past; one of the definitive moves of holiday drinking. Focus on a likely target, about which you know nothing, and decelerate to an overseas amble – the kind of pace never adopted at home, under any circumstances. But deployed on holiday, it gives time to assess likely drinking destinations without the need to come to a complete halt, and therefore commit to going in or turning on your heel in front of a plate-glass window of Europeans, enjoying a night that you won’t become a part of. The stroll-past is a face-saving exercise as much as anything. “Ooh, there’s one. What’s it like? How busy is it? What kind of drinks do they sell?” – these questions and more flash through your head, as you weigh up the decision.
From the outside, having slowed up to a shuffle, a bar at the corner of Berlin’s Letterstrasse and Schliemannstrasse didn’t really answer any of those questions. A small round porthole; darkness within. Some unusually-matched chairs glimpsed through the windows. But it’s a long way round the outside of Helmholtzplatz, and this was the last option. We weren’t even certain of the name of the place – not until we Googled it afterwards, in fact. WohnZimmer is quite hard to pin down; it looks like a café – which it is, during the day – but at night, the L-shaped room knocks out the cocktails in semi-darkness, groups of people wobbling on unevenly-legged chairs. At one point, my left front chairleg actually went all the way into a floorboard crack, near tipping me over.
It feels like a salon; opulent-looking furniture mingling with the upcycled. A chaise longue takes up a fair bit of space by the door, proving popular until the continual stream of cold air entering with newcomers puts the occupiers off. A white sliding partition hides what looks to be a dedicated smoke-free room at one end, and at the other, a large cushioned carousel chair takes up most of the space. The actual bar is a small semi-circle of formica with a couple of stools in front – it looks like something Don Draper would stride up to. Behind it, a man dressed in joggers mixes cocktails and dishes out beers – bottles of Berliner Pils, cap flayed off and handed over (although Erdinger comes in the trademark bulb-topped glass).
WohnZimmer is located towards the middle of Prenzlauer Berg, a district of Berlin that has one of the highest concentrations of children and new mothers in the city. The epicentre of this is undoubtedly Helmholtzplatz – a long, thin tree-lined oblong of playgrounds and paths. Maybe this is why WohnZimmer is cautious of outlook, being faced with so many young and exuberant families. By disguising what it obviously is with a collection of furniture that looks like it could have been taken from an apartment of an elderly relative, it comes over as quirky, yet still fitting in with the family-vibe of Prenzlauer. It hides in plain sight. WohnZimmer would be the kind of place you’d never notice, if you weren’t doing the holiday stroll-past.
