Cookie

In a club you say hi, maybe buy a drink, and move on. In a restaurant you sit down and actually talk to people. That’s Cookie, Heinz Gindullis, explaining why he moved from running Cookies—the legendary Berlin nightclub—to running Cookies & Cream and Crackers. For decades he was the person you knew if you went out in Berlin, the kind of figure who shaped the city’s nightlife through the 90s and 2000s.

On the surface it’s a strange exit. Nightlife to food. But the way he talks about it makes complete sense. Club culture is transactions. You exchange money for a drink, energy for experience, and then you leave. Restaurant culture is different—it’s about sitting down, about talking to people, about depth instead of volume. After decades of the first, he moved toward the second.

What gets me is that he doesn’t sound tired or disillusioned about it. He sounds interested. Nightlife consumed his entire adult life, and now he’s thinking about responsibility, about how food culture evolved, about what a great club and a great restaurant actually have in common—both need taste, both need to know your people well.

There’s something about aging out of a scene built for youth. You move from being the insider, the legendary figure, to being the operator, to finally just sitting at the table. Cookie doesn’t sound resentful about any of it. He sounds like he stayed curious, stayed thinking.