This newsletter is named for a column in The Guardian that, like much of travel publishing, no longer exists. Over the course of nearly a decade since I landed a job at Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, I’ve watched the media landscape convulse and contract as VC funding dried up, Big Tech siphoned off ever more advertising revenue, and each twist of an algorithm brought legacy publications to their knees.
To be clear, some of the changes have been positive. There were old gatekeepers that needed to go and all the upheaval has made space for more diverse voices and some thrilling new publications like Whetstone Magazine (have you subscribed? I really can’t recommend it enough). Mostly though, it has left those of us who write with fewer platforms to do so and fewer resources at our command.
Critical journalism written with integrity takes time and money to produce, and there’s precious little of both to go around these days. When I started at T+L, the Editor’s Note contained a disclaimer that writers and editors always paid their own way. That note is gone now, along with the editorial muscle it implied. With budgets stretched gossamer-thin, few publications can afford to front travel expenses. What this means in practice is that journalists increasingly depend on armchair internet research or press trips for information.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with either, when executed correctly, this creates something of a vicious cycle. Only venues with the financial clout to hire PR firms obtain coverage—inevitably favorable, since no one can in good faith accept a comped meal or stay, then badmouth the place. Janice Leung Hayes articulated this brilliantly in her newsletter about Hong Kong’s restaurant scene, but the principle extends to much of service journalism.
So where does that leave us? I know people who swear by TripAdvisor, Yelp and their ilk, but I don’t put much stock in those either. Instead, when I travel, I tend to turn to friends or other writers whom I trust. I tell them I don’t necessarily need to visit the hot new restaurant with the hot new chef on some Top 10 list. Instead, I want the kinds of places they go when they’re off the clock, the kind that form a small, but essential piece of the fabric of a city. I’ve sent dozens of such personal, off-the-record guides to Berlin, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and other destinations to friends and friends-of-friends over the years and that is more or less what I’m hoping to create here.
I know, I know, to write about travel in a time like this! Like most of you, I haven’t done any traveling at all this year. All the grand plans of weddings to attend and wild adventures with old friends failed to materialize. Instead, I’ve had a great deal of extra time to think and very little mental space to do so. Mostly, I’ve been in my studio apartment, cooking too much for one and scrolling through news feeds with an ever-deepening sense of dread.
It’s hard at this moment to imagine a world of porous borders, but I am writing this with the belief that it will come back. So I’ve chosen to anchor this little experiment in the kinds of restaurants, bars, galleries, dives, holes-in-the-wall, and other places I would like to share with you, both because I hope you’ll be able to visit them someday and because I want to remind myself that such things exist. Some may be fancy or famous, but many won’t be. Since places have a way of warping with time and nostalgia, I will stick to ones that I have visited recently. I’m going to start right here in Berlin, because it’s a city I have loved for many years.
My opinions have a way of creeping in, but I’ll mostly leave the hot takes to those who do them better. I will also include a few pieces of writing that speak to me and might speak to you. The format may change with time or it may not. Bear with me. I’m new here.
Of course, I’ve gone and buried the lede. What I really wanted to tell you about is my favorite neighborhood bar, because I missed bars so much when we were all curled in fetal positions on our couches. Bars, by their very nature, represent the kind of intimacy avoided at all costs during a pandemic. The best kind are loud enough that you need to lean close to your companions to speak, but not so deafening that a winding five-hour conversation about anything and everything becomes arduous.
“The thing is, I just love bars. I love the permissive relief of a bar, the just-perceptible sense of entering another world where the rules are ever so slightly different. I love how so many of them feel like caves. I love the small unspoken camaraderie, and the particular conversations one can have with a friend sitting in a tall chair at the end of the bar that one can’t have anywhere else, and I love the relaxingly transactional half-friendships that one establishes with bartenders if one goes back to the same bar even a few times—the sense of being very gently known,” writes Helena Fitzgerald in this beautiful essay, which is incidentally about forming a new relationship with these spaces while sober.
Berlin has an embarrassment of excellent cocktail bars. If you’re willing to wait for the city’s worst-kept secret speakeasy, Buck & Breck in Mitte pours fussy, Prohibition-esque drinks behind an unmarked storefront and will probably impress your visitors from out of town. Lugosi in Kreuzberg is smoky and full of svelte people in black drinking Monkey 47. Geist im Glas in Neukölln serves spot-on whiskey sours by candlelight.
The bar I love the most, though, is Die Legende von Paula und Ben (Gneisenaustraße 58, +49 30 2803 4400), which has been around the corner from all four of my Berlin apartments. Turadj Rahimian, who hails from Tehran, opened the joint in 2004 and has staunchly resisted media attention ever since. It has no website, no social media, and while it is theoretically open Monday through Saturday, its hours are not subject to the tyranny of Google Maps. I stumbled across it by chance six years ago and it has been my go-to for a low-key date, a boozy venting session with a friend, or a solo nightcap ever since.
Die Legende, as everyone calls it, is not a dive bar in the strictest sense—the drinks are much too good. While I learned to make an excellent Negroni at home during lockdown (guided in part by wise words from Alicia Kennedy), it will never match the feeling of having someone else making something with care and precision just for you. Here, the Negronis come in cut-crystal glasses covered in a thick layer of frost.
The menu makes no mention of buzzwords like “bespoke,” but for something special based on a preferred spirit or flavor profile and the results are always somehow exactly what you wanted. For years, my order here was something called “It’s Fucking Hot in Mexico,” served in a rocks glass with rosemary, silver tequila, and other ingredients now lost on me. The bartender who used to make it has moved on and I never got the recipe, but in my memory it was perfect.
Despite the cocktails and the chandelier, Die Legende has the soul of a dive. Although the surrounding neighborhood has changed beyond recognition in the last 16 years, just about everyone here is a regular who has been living in it for at least that long. During the darkest months of this year, when elbowing into poorly ventilated spaces was not yet taboo, I would sit at the bar absorbing a nicotine contact high and rekindling my rusty German. These days, the chairs have sprawled onto the sidewalk. On long, dwindling summer nights, I stop by and order something just to sit, socially distant, but in the company of strangers.
What I’m Reading
Have you read Carey Baraka’s ode to The Joy of Eating Mutura, Nairobi’s Blood Sausage of Ill Repute? (Serious Eats) It’s wonderful. Baraka deftly explores the sociopolitical factors threatening Kenyan street food vendors and the “gentrifying” impact that mass-produced sausages have had on edging out this traditional fare. This is also a great example of the added level of depth and complexity that comes from commissioning writers with a meaningful relationship with the culture they’re covering.
Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X’ (The New York Times) is a deeply disturbing story that is still unfolding. Katrin Bennhold has been doing some truly incredible reporting digging up reports of covert radical right cells within Germany’s military and police structures.
Off Assignment, an alternative travel site, (which I have occasionally written for) was part of the inspiration for this newsletter and this Letter to a Stranger by Jasmine Ledesma is a prime example of what makes it so great. I like the line “I’d been running on self-made electricity all week.”
I Was Bloodied and Dazed. Beirut Strangers Treated Me Like a Friend. Vivian Yee’s firsthand account of the tragedy in Beirut is wrenching. You can also listen to her speak about her experience on The Daily podcast today.
“This complicated, shared understanding of restaurant kitchens was often used to justify the work and the hours, and the unreasonable expectations in service of excellence and glory. It also explained away the gross, systemic deficiencies of the business, and normalized abusive work cultures,” writes Tejal Rao in the Twilight of the Imperial Chef (The New York Times), a clear-eyed examination of the power structures that were already long overdue for a reckoning.
Of all the terrible food writing tropes I whose deaths I will never mourn, the “Western man goes to another country to eat bugs to show us how adventurous he is” is right at the top of the list. Having lived in Thailand, where insects are a widely consumed form of high-quality protein plagued by class stigma, I’m aware of how loaded these conversations often are. In Roasted Winged Termites Are My Favourite Monsoon Snack, Even If Others Might Not Find it 'Appropriate,' (VICE) Jahnavi Uppuleti unpacks the roots of the cultural prejudice.
How a Cheese Goes Extinct (The New Yorker) is a surprisingly moving examination of grief and lost cultural history by Ruby Tandoh.
I haven’t quite understood why the kids are into swanning around in nap dresses like Victorian housewives concerned about their wandering uteruses. Apparently, Once upon a time, there was cottagecore (Vox)and Rebecca Jennings breaks down why so many people are latching onto the faux-bucolic aesthetic in a time of madness.