American Convenience in Berlin

Food is everywhere in the streets of Berlin, which is a major bummer when your food budget is in the single digits. Fast food, Slow-Food, fine dining, authentic Bavarian cuisine, you name it and some representative of it is crammed onto the crowded streets of Berlin, particularly on pedestrian heavy streets like Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden. When it comes to fast food in Mitte, the part of Berlin that I've spent most of my time, there are a couple of American fast food joints that stick out for me, not only because they are American. I have to emphasize that this about Stadt-Mitte. My poor tired feet have wandered all over this area, but have only made into the western part of the city three times and only as far as Charlottenburg (the big palace on the west end that gives that area of the city it's name and isn't really a Burg at all, but I suppose that's another post). I can't speak for the area that Western culture has spent the longest amount of time colonizing. An annoying sign on one particular building swears that McDonald's has fifty stores in the city, but I've only seen five, all within sight of a train station (except for the one at Checkpoint Charlie, but come on, that's the center of Americana in Berlin).

As I mentioned, there are two franchises that stand out. Dunkin' Donuts is the first and you find it everywhere that there is a serious amount of foot traffic, including the swankiest parts of the city: Friedrichstraße, the KuDamm, Unter den Linden, and the Sony Center. I think this is kind of strange since coffee and sweet baked goods are something that Europeans have excelled at longer than Dunkin' Donuts has existed. I have a vivid memory of eating the donuts in Prague and being distinctly disappointed in them. That has kept me from trying them now, so I don't know if they have gotten better. I have reservations. I know their coffee is better. It could just be a tourist thing of course, all of those high foot traffic areas I mentioned are tourism magnets

Subway, on the other hand, has managed to find its way onto quite a few streets that have little, if anything, to do with tourists at all. Berlin is a tourist magnet (I believe someone mentioned that it is the third most visited city in Europe, after London and Paris), so, in the middle of city, you will never be entirely free of tourists, but they are decidedly less dense in places like Prenzlauer Berg and the border between Wedding and Mitte. But the fact is, if you wander off the beaten path, there are good odds you can get your 5 euro foot long (something is lost in the translation since 5 euro is not cheap in the slightest). I was initially surprised by Subway's apparent success, or at least it's ubiquity, but then I realized that Subway sandwiches are just a variation on a much older bakery theme: belegtes Brot, a staple of Bäckereien/Konditoreien everywhere. They are not threatened in the least by Subway, don't go feeling bad for the natives, they are doing quite well. Right now, it seems like everything in Berlin is doing well or headed that way. Twenty years after re-unification there is still much to do, including renovating all the stuff that they put off renovating when they needed to start renovating.

The only variation that Subway offers on the belegtes Brot theme is that you get to choose what you beleg the Brot with as it were (apologies to those who know what the German should be). The subs that offer the same kind of meats and cheeses are priced competitively, but quickly soar when non-traditional combinations (like Sweet Onion Chicken Teryiaki) are on offer. Germany is a country starved of good service, so adding service to a familiar item is a great business move. I have not been impressed with the quality of the sandwiches nor with the service itself, but then again I have certain expectations when it comes to service. The reasons that Germans are starved for service are as much cultural as economic and procedural, so the Subway experience here isn't going to blow any Americans away. And since I'm on a value kick, the Bäckerei offers better value as well.

Now, I bet when I said I was going to talk about American restaurants not called McDonald's, you thought I was going to talk about Starbucks. You did, didn't you? Their, uh, colonial ambitions are legendary (and were legendary even in 2000). And you will find Starbucks everywhere you will find people who want to be cool, who are cool, or who just want to look at the cool people (that brings us back to Friedrichstraße, where I was inspired to write this). Starbucks has accomplished something completely different from Subway or Dunkin' Donuts. Cafe culture is also older than Starbucks and they also offer essentially the same concept - a well understood part of European food culture offered back to them with an American emphasis on service and choice. Subway and Dunkin' occupy niches, expanding on a tiny part of what already existed; Starbucks hit European food culture where it lives. There are no Subway clones, it stands alone, but Starbucks has at least two major chains who do exactly the same thing that Starbucks does without being Starbucks (Einstein and Balzac - they are found quite a bit more often than Starbucks and a Starbucks is never completely free of such competition - Germans are sensitive about globalization).

Starbucks hasn't just inspired clones, I feel like it has revolutionized coffee delivery as well, by introducing the idea of having it on the go. You see "Coffee to Go" advertised everywhere in the city, with only variations on the spelling of coffee. Every Imbiss, Bistro, Cafe, Spätverkauf, and Curry stand offers "Coffee to Go." Sadly, I am not a nutritional anthropologist or a food historian, so maybe I'm getting cause and effect wrong here and Starbucks cannot be credited with this cultural shift. I only have the experience of two distinct points in time (though I visited my first Balzac in 2000, so Starbucks has been pushing boundaries and buttons in Germany for at least a decade), so perhaps someone with a more continuous experience in Germany can tell me about the development of this "Coffee to Go" concept. Starbucks didn't invent it in the States either, but they way they do business forced McDonald's, even in the States, to respond to a market that had a brand new sense of how it should be served. I could be wrong, but if you can make McD's change its business model, I don't think I'm too far off in giving them credit for "Coffee to Go."