Sophieneck, Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse
parklife (with permission to transform)/CreativeCommons
I’m so, so angry and frustrated that I can’t show you the pictures I took of this place, because it’s my favourite pub in Berlin. You find it in the Scheunenviertel, the streets north of Alexanderplatz and Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, just a few minutes east off Oranienburgerstrasse (which I know I keep going on about). Sophieneck (nothing to do with a neck - it should arguably be written Sophie'n Eck) means Sophie or Sophie's corner, and it’s on the corner where Sophienstrasse meets Grosse Hamburger Strasse, where you’ll struggle to buy a hamburger of any size.
What can I say about Sophieneck? In winter you enter through the main door, pull back the thick curtain and face the bar, slowly discovering the atmopheric interior; in summer people sit outside, or stand smoking now – although it’s a one-room bar and so I think could allow smoking again following the Constitutional Court’s ruling that applying the smoking ban in its current form to one-room bars is disproportionate, it’s chosen to stay non-smoking on the inside – and you enter from the side if you like. What never changes is the warm but clear light from the low green lamps hanging, almost as though it were a library, over the tables and from the candles all around. This pic, if a bit festively wintry compared to the way I saw Sophieneck last night, gives you an impression of how it feels.
You sit at any of the collection of apparently scraped-together, worn wooden tables and chairs with which the place is furnished, some with leather green or red upholstery. The cornered two-seater with the iron bits is my fave, by the way. On all the walls are vintage metal advertisements, for Schultheiss beer, Gold Dollar cigarettes, Ricard, Leibniz-Cakes, Tetley’s Ales even, and Kathreiner’s malted coffee. That used to make children gesund und kräftig, apparently. And look up at the gorgeous green beading – is that what you call it? The bit where the ceiling meets the walls, anyway, is painted with carved bosses or motifs (can you tell that I struggle with architectural vocabulary?) and is very much in place here.
The only thing that could possibly improve it would be to do away with the music which is just noticeable in the background, though not always, to be fair. If they did that, Sophieneck would be the best pub in the world. As it is, though, it’s damn good. The food is perhaps solid rather than brilliant – I had (and took a photo of – grrr!) a nice Kassler last night, mind, with sauerkraut and potatoes.
It’s a fine, fine place, and if you like pubs you’ll love it. It has a website, too, with a couple of pictures I’m glad to say and a sort of impressionistic panorama thing.
UPDATE: I've realised it's the fact that they cook meals that means they can't use the one-room pub exemption from the smoking ban. Silly of me to have overlooked that.
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