I met Heinze in Schwarz Sauer, a veteran bar in Kastanienalle, one which apparently popped up four weeks after the wall came down in 1989. It is, locals say, an institution. Whatever, I know it’s open until 5am, every day, and to me that’s a drinking institute.

I’m gehammert, again, on only a few Berliner Pils (disruptive lager, ja – what do they put in it?). It’s all thanks to Heinze and his mate, the barman, Dennis. Yes, German Dennis, or Deutsche Dennis, as he is now known.

Heinze is a tabloid hack, working for a mass-selling paper in Berlin, and he’s telling me some rather fruity things he gets up to, all in the line of work, “of getting the story”. His shady secrets are safe with me (OK, they’re not – bubble gum on string is a good way to retrieve letters from postboxes, apparently).

His secrets are less safe perhaps  with Marta, a rather drunk late 20-something “actress” sipping champagne and ice, who Heinze (OK, OK, not his real name) is keen to “research”. Inadvertently, I set them up. He gets her number and they pootle off home.

For my reward, I’m asked out for a drink the next night, again in Schwarz Sauer, though this time at 7pm. Again, I amble down some kleine bier bitte while Heinze sniffs at a grosse Weissebiere. I notice he is drinking much slower and talking more. His matter of fact asides ring ot like tabloid headlines: “Unemployed punks get €27 from the state to feed their dogs  … each month!!!

Within three hours chewing das fat, he says he will cure any possible Berliner pils hangover with a surprise.

Next door is a currywurst cabin, not the fabled Konopfke Imbisse on Schonhauser Allee, but a place called Curry15. He orders two wurst, covered in the usual phalanx of sweet ketchup and dazzled with curry powder. It’s great, or so I think. Halfway through my mouth is not so much burning but in meltdown. Think chicken nagasaki coated with tobasco washed down with lit petrol and a radiator on full heat as a napkin!

This aint the usual currywurst; this is pain on a plate. If the menu were numbered, it would be G20! The pain hits my tongue, not my lips. My eyes are welling up.

Etiquette and manners burp through my mind.  I’ve disappointed Heinze by withdrawing from a night out dancing to 80s electropop at Kultur Brauerie – well, you would, wouldn’t you – so how, now, do I deal with the burning question. I put down the radioactive sausage and admit defeat.

Heinze laughs. “Wow, my friend, I thought you were enjoying this – lucky I didn’t get you the hot one.”

Heinze has set me up, a little German joke, perhaps… yes, he has ways of making me balk.

He thinks it funny to take me to a currywurst place fabled for dishing out the hottest sauce in christendom. It’s graded one to five on the sharp scale – die scharfeskala – one being “mild”, the other “unterhuman”. I’m served a “three”, thanks largely to the kind lady behind the counter not going along mitt das joke.

“Essen,” she says, holding out some brotchen (bread).

“This will soak up the pain,” laughs Heinze. “Drink will only make it worse.”

The only thing that will ease my pain is for me to push Heinze’s head in a vat of boiling chili sauce. I resist, largely because revenge is a sausage best served cold, plus there is no boiling vat of chili sauce, although there is a large metal shovel nearby (quite why, I don’t know) …

There is, however, a bottle of the “unterhuman” sauce, lifted from the fridge by Eileen – OK, she’ s not called Eileen, but she leaned over to get the sauce, so it sounds apt. (She’s probably called Magdalena, OK!)

I expect the sauce to have a name like Hiroshima Sunday or “Faust – the People’s Sauce”. It is in fact called Magma. Ooh, you can almost imagine the advert, with Satan atop a spewing volcano saying: “Magma, I lava the taste!”

Fittingly, magma sports  a fine thinner layer of dark red liquid atop the more orangey, creamier contents below. “It has to be kept in the fridge for her to handle it,” laughs Heinze.

Heinze tries to make amends, much like a schoolboy pushing himself over to stop his playground chum telling teacher “that he pushed me over and I grazed my knee”. He administers a few drops on the paper plate, which Eileen, the consummate chili firefighter, then douses in sweet ketchup, to cushion the blow.

In seconds, Heinze appears to be in agony craving brot to soften the gehammert blow.

“Try it Tim?”

“Fuck off Heinze!”

Tim Berlin cafes, Berlin drink, Food, Kastianenalle, Prenzlauer Berg, berlin, photos berlin, currywurst, Food, magma chilli sauce

Prenzlauer Berg on trendy Kastianenalle – a boulevard of kitsch designer shops, boutiques, cafes, bars and pizzerias – doesn’t wake till at least 10, when most kaffes slowly open their doors, agonisingly slowly when you are busting for a coffee. It gives the impression that everyone is still asleep until at least 11, when the freelance rush hour starts. There is another rush hour of sorts going on – a steady stream of bikes heading into Mitte, mums and kids on the school run.

But it’s a school run with a difference, en velo. Children are packed int an assortment of ferrying devices: a saddle and foot shelves welded on the crossbar; bikes with kinder saddles over the back wheel; bikes with covered trailers towed behind; or the supposedly de rigeur new Dutch import – a wooden box at the front, bigger than an old market porter’s bike, welded to the front, a sort of mobile playground for kids, big enough to carry three or four under-5s.

Rise at 8am and the traffic is all mamas und papas, taking kids to the kindergarten. I say kindergarten because Pramslauer Berg seems to have a preponderance of kids under 5. Few, if any, are older.

“It’s all down to the trendy web and designer types who moved here in their 20s, about 10 years ago,” says Matilda, the waitress at one coffee shop that does open at 8am. “They grew up, got girlfriends, got married, and had kids. Now Penslauer Berg has so many kids under 5 it’s unreal.

“Prenzlauer lost its edge.”

She is being kind. Prenzlauer Berg is one big playground, for kids; teeming with teething tots or toddling toddlers. A Sunday here is like strolling along the nursery slopes in the Alps. Never mind the uneven or cobbled pavements, the trams, the bikes, the cars – it’s kids you need to avoid.

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