Berlin

Leuschnerdamm 25, 10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg

Henne opened on 24 June 1908 as Wirtshaus zur Hirschecke. Since then Berlin has managed two world wars, several political systems, division, reunification, redevelopment, gentrification and an absolutely heroic quantity of architectural interference. The restaurant mostly kept making chicken. For decades this was not merely an old pub somewhere in Kreuzberg. The Berlin Wall ran about five metres from the building. Henne served people beside the sector boundary, survived a city split in half and then watched the Wall disappear almost directly outside its door. Photographs from its history show children playing beside the Wall and the tavern operating through a situation that would normally be considered fairly damaging to foot traffic. The menu has responded to more than a century of upheaval with magnificent indifference. The famous order remains half a crispy chicken, potato salad, cabbage salad and beer. The recipe is still secret because apparently four things on a plate can sustain a century of mystery. Henne belongs because Berlin has produced endless examples of reinvention, while this place makes an equally strong case for not touching the fucking thing once it works. The Wall fell. The chicken stayed. The chicken is the better monument.

Friedrichstraße 105B, 10117 Berlin

Grill Royal opened beside the Spree in 2007 and Berlin's art world almost immediately began using it like a staff canteen with better tailoring. The timing matters. Post-Wall Berlin had spent years building a global identity around abandoned buildings, cheap rents, clubs, improvisation and the idea that having money elsewhere was morally preferable to having it here. Then artists became successful. Galleries became businesses. Fashion arrived. International collectors appeared. Somebody needed dinner. Grill Royal supplied oysters, steak, contemporary art, wine and a room completely uninterested in pretending prosperity was happening somewhere else. This made people uncomfortable. Cities are allowed to change. Underground cultures eventually acquire expense accounts. At least order good wine.

Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin

There is too much writing about the Berghain door. The door is only the threshold. Inside is the institution. Berghain grew from Ostgut's queer techno culture and moved in 2004 into a former East Berlin heat-and-power station, giving techno an eighteen-metre turbine hall in which ordinary nightclub scale became irrelevant. Panorama Bar occupies another level and another musical mood. Weekends stretch until clocks stop being useful. Photography is prohibited, preserving something increasingly rare: the possibility of being somewhere without simultaneously producing evidence that you were there. Its fame is absurd. Its reputation is absurd. The volume of internet commentary generated by people rejected at the entrance is certainly absurd. None of this makes the club less important. Berghain does not need to become obscure again to remain Berghain. That particular sophistication game can continue elsewhere.

Ritterstraße 24–27, 10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg

Ritter Butzke opened illegally in 2007 inside former factory halls of the old Butzke works, a nineteenth-century industrial company that eventually specialized in plumbing and water fittings. An anonymous complaint helped bring that first incarnation to an end, after which the club reportedly spent several months in the former Karl Marx Party School of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party before returning legally to Ritterstraße in 2009. A techno club temporarily operating inside a former Communist Party academy because its illegal factory club was shut down is a story Berlin did not need to invent for branding purposes. Ritter Butzke has since become a far more established operation, with several floors, courtyards, installations and a musical range centered on house and techno. It is more playful and less monolithic than Berghain; the former factory feels like a collection of rooms that gradually discovered dancing rather than a cathedral built for it. Berlin club culture is not one aesthetic involving concrete, black clothing and a person at the door looking disappointed in you. Ritter Butzke represents another strain: improvised, decorative, social, historically semi-legal and perfectly willing to let the night wander through several rooms before anybody remembers the original plan. It began illegally and survived long enough to become part of the city around it.