Cafe Einstein

Since I've moved to Berlin I've wanted to go to this place. Hear me, they are a chain now and you can go to them anywhere. I also have to say that it's not hard to find a fantastic brunch in Berlin and there is no need to spend anymore than 7 Euros on the whole thing. The problem is, that you hear about these places. Where such and such brunched, or in this building with this history, and so on and so forth. So, here's the deal on Einstein's. It's named after Einstein. They - that's right, "they" - say that you have to go to the original, even though there is one in my neighborhood, four blocks away, that has the exact same menu.

So, Tori and I set off on the U2 at 9:15 yesterday morning (if you live in Berlin, you know that this is both an unheard of hour to be heading to breakfast on a Sunday, much less on the U2 which is hands down the SLOWEST train in the underground system, not only that but we waited 8 minutes for the train) We hopped off at our stop, got in the elevator and Tori yells, " - well on second thought I won't tell you what she yelled, but it was immediately apparent that she was not just yelling out of excitement that we were finally going to Einsteins on Ku'damm. So, 40 minutes later we had the bag that she inadvertently left on the train back and we were headed over to "the Original."

We got to a rather dodgy building and walked in. It is an old building, with tall ceilings and a very typical Berlin color scheme. Some random mix of light blue, soft pinkish orange and of course, gold. We sat and ordered. The prices weren't ridiculous. The coffee was fantastic, we didn't feel packed in, and the people watching was excellent. I'm not sure that we couldn't have had the same experience on Unter den Linden, sans the color scheme, but hey... it was the experience right?

I do have to say that as we sat there we laughed, having read about the rich history of the intellectual minds who have sipped their coffee and buttered their brotchen within these walls. We were obviously only adding clout by doing the same. As part of our intellectual conversation we discussed that we do really prefer the shops on Ku'damm over Potsdamer Platz or Alexa - and by shops we distinctly mean the chain stores. We talked about how we don't know the word for incentive in German, but Germans know it in English and can ever produce it when they have been drinking, and then we talked about how we don't even need to word for incentive - we can get around it. We then patted ourselves on the back that we knew the word for Ivory in German and were almost sure that we would be invaluable in any kind of evening where one of those word games was played due to our expansive knowledge of rarely used and conversationally worthless words. We then discussed what we've been reading (as the table across from us reviewed some sort of script) which is a book by an author called Michael Ende, and the book is written for 6-10 year olds. We were almost sure that we were the EXACT people that "they" were talking about when describing intellectuals at Einstein's.

After Tori's two coffees, my fresh squeezed OJ, espresso machiatto and entire bottle of water (I hadn't had much sleep and had had a some less than hydrating liquid beverages the evening/early morning before this) we decided that we couldn't be bothered with spending out entire day trying to carry on the intellectual tradition of the patrons of Einstein's and so we paid and left. Proudly marching out and saying that though it was good, we would have been as content with our Upper East Side location (spoken like true East Berliners.) We waited at a broken lift for like 10 minutes and then finally realized it was broken, we are too intelligent to be bothered with noticing such obvous details as the lift being broken. So we walked over to the next one which was empty and waiting for us, realized upon departure that we were at the platform for the train to Pankow (precisely as it was arriving), so we walked to the other side, waited a cool 8 minutes - hopped on the train, got to Zoo Station and realized that actually, Pankow was the exact train that we wanted. So we got off, walked to the other side to return the exact direction from whence we had come, looked up at the sign to see how long the train would be... Correct, 8 minutes. I took this picture while we were waiting;
Needless to say that we eventually made it home, but I am not sure that we will ever get those 24 minutes back that we spent waiting on the trains to go to the restaurant that we could have walked both to and home from in the same amount of time that we spent simply waiting on the train to then travel to. But hey... we went to "the Original" that "they" all say that you have to go to. And the truth is, on a lazy Sunday morning we really lost nothing. Now Einstein's on the other hand may have been a bit dumbed down by our presence, but hopefully that script reading table made up for it.