Outside Pasternak, Smith takes a walk across the street to a small park that includes “the city’s oldest water tower”. I opted for the borscht, beetroot soup studded with large white beans that reminded me of the white bean soup Smith routinely orders in M Train while writing at Café ’Ino, her beloved New York coffee shop. Here she sits in her favourite spot, on a plump leather couch beneath a photograph of Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita – which Smith was once obsessed with – and dines on caviar served with a shot of vodka and a cup of black coffee. Nikolai, where Smith goes for a walk, suggests it’s the hotel at Soho House.Īfter checking in, Smith immediately heads to nearby Pasternak, a Russian restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg decorated in the manner of an elderly Eastern European relative’s living room. Although she doesn’t name it, this description along with its proximity to the church of St. Prompted by a meeting of the Continental Drift Club – an obscure society Smith belonged to that was dedicated to the memory of Alfred Wegener, the originator of the theory of continental drift – Smith’s visit to Berlin begins with her checking into a hotel that’s “a renovated Bauhaus structure in the Mitte district of the former East Berlin”.
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