29/01/2026
An ode to hospitality 🧡
The hospitality community is exciting, multi-layered, creative, adaptive, resilient, solution-oriented, pragmatic, and infinitely human. And because of that humanity, it absorbs and reflects, rises and falls, and fully lives through. At maximum intensity and from every angle, what our society is currently experiencing on a broad scale. Hospitality is the place where just about everything that makes up our social life collides.
It is where the vegetable and the farmer meet, the goat and the hunter, the family drama and the political failures, the trade office and the gas company, the teenager and the old tough guy, the blissfully happy newcomer to Berlin and the overworked, frustrated, divorced patchwork dad.
The Iranian dishwasher who made it to Berlin on foot (and got married along the way) feels at home here, just like the Canadian woman who finds everything ‘so Berlin’ and likes to do things with purpose.
The business guy and the Kreuzberg cameraman who only buys his olive oil directly from his favorite Greek deli. The yoga teacher searching for meaning, and the craftsman from Lichtenberg who can’t live without his Mettbrötchen.
Hospitality brings everything and everyone to one table, onto one plate - one that gathers everyone together peacefully. That’s what makes hospitality almost heavenly. It opens up spaces where none existed before: it turns a parking lot into a beer garden, every moment into an experience, a crate of beer into a bar, a piano into a concert, four walls into a hallelujah.
When eating out, who does actually worry about VAT, minimum wage, energy prices, staff worries, family crises, failed airports, bad weather, or broken combi steamers? That’s the everyday reality restaurateurs deal with, getting up to every morning and making the best of it.
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