Berlin: The best bar in the world

‘You were at the Fish, I hear,’ a Berlin friend told me. ‘I didn’t know you were an old hippie.’ Reputations can cling to places as they do to people. Zwiebelfisch, the Berlin inn he was referring to, has not been a haunt of hippies — radicals, more like, ‘the class of ’68’ — for at least two decades. Now it is a home for all-comers; because, in the eyes of some of us who have spent years staring through a glass darkly, it is the finest bar in Christendom.

Sited on the northwest side of Savignyplatz, west Berlin, it may not strike the person wandering along Grolmanstrasse as a world classic. That is part of its charm. Zwiebelfisch does not draw attention to itself. The square is poky, with all manner of bewildered persons occupying its benches. But great pubs and bars create their own mood. Once you cross the threshold you enter a different world. ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate’, reads the inscription above the door, and you don’t have to be a scholar of Dante to know what that means. Yet in 25 years of drinking there I have never seen a drunk, as opposed to somebody who might be drunk. It is a place where everybody, customers and staff, feels at ease with one another.

The foundation of a great bar is good beer. Proper drinkers do not go to a bar to drink wine or to roam ‘the top shelf’, though it is handy to have an abundance of high-class spirits, and Zwiebelfisch cannot be found wanting. The beer list, though not extensive by German standards, is more than acceptable: Schultheiss, the local brew; Erdinger, wheat beer from Bavaria; Kolsch from Cologne; and Budweiser, the great Czech pilsner.