Peter Pane — Restaurant in Berlin

Berlin Central station spat you out into the cacophony of the street, hungry for a slab of meat between two slices of bread? Enter and sink into a seat.

Your exhausted sigh is echoed by the equally exhausted sigh of the cushion as you let yourself be enveloped by the restaurant’s whimsical ambience and not unlike an irresponsible adult exiled to the kid's table, you feel ridiculed, yet oddly at home. But instead of the straightforward fast food experience you expected, you get a lesson in patience.

Any squinting attempt to make eye contact with the waitstaff fails pathetically as they move past time and time again, move with palpable indifference, dressed in polyester pants and apathy. They look in your direction, but never at you. Their vision slips off your shape like it would an optical illusion; you're a floater, a phantom haunting their periphery. This is no ordinary neglect, you begin to suspect. And as if by the connecting train to Bielefeld you're going to miss, you're hit by the grim reality of what has happened – you've entered at the moment of handover. The very second you crossed into Peter Pane, you dropped clean through the cracks of the service industry and into the liminal space between two shifts, where the responsibility of one server ends and the other has not yet begun.

Any rational person would get up and leave – you decide to pretend like you're waiting for a friend.

No one is holding you hostage and yet you find yourself bound to your chair. Captive of some archaic social contract, a prisoner of politeness, you read and re-read the menu until the words blur, until the paper is worn thin by your fingers. Classic Cheddar, it says. Nacho Macho. You keep turning the pages until they are more familiar than the names of your loved ones. Sir Choc-A-Lot. You watch the other guests, smiles greasy with satisfaction. Golden Snaggets. Good God, you’d kill a man for a single Snagget. You forget what it felt like to taste anything but the tangy, synthetic bite of free condiments as you continue to wait, subsisting on Mango Curry Sauce (370 kcal / 100g) and the hope that one day, someone will notice the agony behind your eyes.

The murmur of conversation, the clatter of plates, fade into a distant hum as minutes bleed into hours, hours into an existential haze. Frantic commuters pass the street outside with purpose, zigzagging akin to electrons shocked by their first taste of voltage, but you, oh, you’re not going anywhere. You will never grow old, you're caught in this window seat, caught in your own courtesy like a fly in amber and you spend a lifetime contemplating the sight of some guy balancing on the redundancy of riding a bicycle while wearing roller skates on his feet, as if one mode of locomotion couldn't possibly have been fast enough to get where he was going, so he decided to use two.

A strange clarity dawns on you then and you drop the menu. You have no use for it now. You've left hunger behind, conquered the need to be served, to be seen. You've been bored for so long, you've transcended the concept of patience. The friend you're waiting for isn't coming; you made them up. All at once, you see right through the absurdity of your suffering. You rise, shedding the last vestiges of your former self. The staff still don't notice you. Nobody does. And you step out into the street with the ethereal lightness of someone who no longer gives a [redacted].

Your train to Bielefeld...

The burger tasted like frozen patties. The atmosphere was nice, but those benches were really tiny, the tables were the same. Probably they tried to get the most seats out of the restaurant, even if we looked like herrings or oversized adults at the kindergarten's dining tables. The waiter was kind of OK, but we had a girl, who showed up to take our order (after waiting on a waiter for 15 mins), she realised at the table that she has no pen on her, then disappeared, came back in 5 mins, she finally started to write down our order on a little piece of paper, the meantime the waiter showed up too and she just left without saying a word. So we needed to repeat everything to him. It was also a little weird, because they have those machines, where you can send the order straight to the kitchen, so it makes everything faster, but you hardly get a smile or an eye contact from your waiter. There are more and more restaurants working with these machines. So impersonal. Then 2 of us finished earlier eating. (Usually the waiter should WAIT for the last person to finish and then he can clean the table.) What should I say to this? Probably they had more reservations for...

First of all I was astonished how expensive a burger at a run-of-the-mill franchise can be. But what actually happened would have been a terrible experience at any price point: I ordered just a burger (10€) without any sides. After some 25 min I got a burger with fries on the side. When asked whether everything was fine I pointed out that I had not ordered fries. The waiter asked if I wanted them anyway. My reply was basically "it would be a shame to throw them away, wouldn't it?". So he told me I can keep them for the full price ( which I later looked up was 4,50€, he did not mention this). I said I was not willing to pay for something I had not ordered but as they would have to throw them away maybe he could leave them and I would snack a few fries. The waiter, however, insisted that I pay full price or he will throw them away now. Seriously! It was their mistake! They could have offered the fries at half price or something. And he absolutely did not seem to mind the fact that food would be...