On the evening of March 14, I sat down at a bar and ordered what turned out to be my last martini for a long time. I was supposed to be in New York. Three days earlier, I had been making plans—sweating in the Russian Baths, singing in Marie’s Crisis, who knew!—even as the static of COVID warnings grew louder. At 3 a.m. the night before my flight, the United States closed its borders to EU citizens. In the days to come, I’d watch as friends lunged for the last flights back to their home countries, racing through closing borders as if trapped in some Kafkaesque video game hell. But on that morning, I stayed.
Beuster is located on Weserstraße, a long strip of candlelit bars in Neukölln. It’s a bit swankier than Ä, but not as overtly cool as TiER, which in the Before Times, required ringing a bell for entrance. The former is the move for a low-key Absacker (the final drink of the night), the latter for a date you want to impress. Beuster is the place to go for last call on the edge of the apocalypse.
To be more precise, Beuster is the place to go for a lot of things. It is the Goldilocks of bars—never too loud and never too quiet. Bright enough for people-watching yet dim enough to be flattering. Approachable pét-nats and old-school Bordeaux. There’s always a vibe, but it’s still possible to snag a seat at the bar. And while a nonsmoking Berlin bar just wouldn’t feel right, Beuster will leave you smelling less like an ashtray than, say, Lugosi or Bürknereck. In short, it is ideal for any sort of social occasion—though it is also one of my favorite bars for drinking alone.
The menu is short and full of unfussy dishes made with care. The oysters are briny Fine de Claires and they come in a little box packed with ice. The bread is warm and goes great with a can of sardines and a smear of salted butter. You should order the mussels or the mustardy steak tartare with a cured yolk, both of which are terrific. The accompanying frites are nothing special, but you will want them anyway.
What I love most about Beuster is that there is always a party. Maybe it’s the Crément, which flows endlessly both by bottle and coupe, but there’s an air here that lends itself to celebrations. It’s not terribly expensive, but it feels fancyish enough to dress up if you feel like it. Whenever I go, there’s inevitably a group of flushed, happy people clinking glasses at one of the long tables. It’s a good place for a toast, to birthdays and graduations, to the beginnings and endings of things.
In the absence of any reason to celebrate, that was where I wound up on that skittery night last March. I can’t say why I went, other than the fact that it was Friday and the thought of being alone in my apartment was harder to stomach than being alone in company. It was the first time a stranger’s hacking cough made me curl into my own skin and the last time I would go near public transportation for the better part of a year.
Inside, the bar was almost empty, the staff on edge. I ordered a dirty martini, which came back wrong—with a kalamata olive and other undesirable twists. It seemed weirdly fitting to have gone back to a familiar place and ordered a familiar cocktail, only to find comfort in neither. I downed my glass and walked home in the cold night air. I’d come for a last gasp of normalcy, but I was too late.
Of course, no one is at Beuster—or any bar in Berlin—these days. The city has been under curfew and, as of next week, will sink into another indefinite period of lockdown. Berliners usually survive the serotonin-killing winters by huddling in bars much like this one—an activity that is no longer comfortable or safe.
I am writing these words from New York, where the days are growing darker and sitting inside such spaces is unthinkable. Bar owners in both cities are barely scraping by and there is no guarantee that Beuster or places like it will exist by spring. We’re on the brink of the unknown again and I could certainly use a drink.
What I’m Reading
Matthew Knott is the only person I know who could fall down a Manhattan air shaft and not only live to tell the tale, but tell it so damn well. Even with multiple fractures and a broken arm, he managed to turn his trauma into this heartfelt essay on New York and COVID and the shocking fragility of life. 'I was howling in pain': how falling five storeys from a New York rooftop changed my life (The Sydney Morning Herald) is a story for this year.
A couple of years ago, Jeff Maysh was on the Longform Podcast and he said something that stuck with me: “I only write bangers.” For Maysh, a “banger” is a story about a woman hunting down her catfisher (not to get all clickbait-y, but the twist at the end will shock you!) or this conspiracy story about a McDonald’s crime ring. Until he sold the movie rights to the latter for a cool million, he lived a modest life and funded the research for these deeply reported, investigative yarns with money from his 9-to-5. In other words, rather than churn out little pieces to survive, Maysh goes for the big fish. He publishes at most a couple of stories a year and his latest one, I Bought a Witches’ Prison (Medium), is him firing on cylinders.
When Falling Behind on Rent Leads to Jail Time (ProPublica) is an incredibly important piece of reporting by Maya Miller and Ellis Simani on a century-old law that disproportionately affects low-income, female, and Black tenants.
Have you also wondered What Is Cheese Powder, Anyway (Food52, Ella Quittner)? Now you know!
“When you lose smell, you are not only losing the world around you—one patient described it as ‘living in a box’—but also losing access to the internal landscape of your own past. As another patient put it: ‘I live in a permanent present,’” (Vogue) writes Leslie Jameson in COVID Has Caused Millions to Lose their Sense of Smell—One Writer’s Journey to a Scentless Life and Back.
“In a world in which the rich want permission to take as much as they can get without feeling any shame, and many of the not-rich are so worried about their own sinking fortunes that they find it hard to worry about the misery of anyone else, Trump is the priest who grants absolution. In a way, he seems to be telling his followers that perhaps compassion is just one more value of the elite culture that he and they hate, like speaking in long sentences and listening to classical music.” Wallace Shawn’s Developments Since My Birth in The New York Review has been making the rounds and it is worth reading as this ugly, endless election season draws to its conclusion.
What I’m Watching
Germany’s increasingly radical far-right has become a haven for conspiracy theories and the largest QAnon community outside of the United States. Melissa Chan reports on its disturbing rise for VICE in How This TV Chef Turned COVID Truther Helped QAnon Boom in Germany.