The Longer Conversation
The Cookies club ran on a kind of studied opacity—members-only, the entrance off Friedrichstraße, the usual Berlin ritual of wondering if you’d make it past the door—and Heinz Gindullis, who everyone called Cookie, built it into one of the defining rooms of the city’s underground between the late 90s and mid-2000s. Not because of any single night, but because of a cumulative quality of attention that serious club culture demands and rarely gets. He sold it eventually. Now he runs Cookies & Cream, a vegetarian restaurant, and the bar Crackers.
In the fourth episode of the Telekom Electronic Beats podcast, he sits down with host Gesine Kühne and talks through the distance between those two worlds. In the club you say hi quickly, maybe buy someone a drink, wave and move on,
he says. In a restaurant it’s different. You sit down—topics come up, you talk longer with the guests, you learn much more.
There’s something in that I keep turning over: the club as a space for managed velocity, the restaurant as a space where you actually have to be present.
Cookie talks about Berlin’s club culture in the 90s and early 2000s—a period so thoroughly mythologized now that it’s hard to hear clearly, but which he lived from inside the machine. He talks about the emergence of the food scene, the structural parallels between running a high-end restaurant and running a good club, the weight of responsibility in both, and the subject nightlife culture perpetually avoids: aging into it. What it means to keep showing up as the room perpetually renews itself around you with people who don’t know yet what you know.
Previous episodes featured DJ Hell, Westbam, Sarah Farina, and Johanna Grabsch. The whole run is on the Electronic Beats site, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. What I keep coming back to is that line about sitting down. In the club you wave and move on. In the restaurant you learn more. I’ve spent most of my life choosing the kind of room you can wave and move on from. Cookie had to close his before figuring out which kind he actually wanted.