Anima

Listening bar in the Locke hotel on the Spree: café by day, records on a Berlin-built hi-fi by night, with small seasonal plates and cocktails.

Anima sits on the ground floor of the Locke hotel at the East Side Gallery, right on the Spree. From seven in the morning it is a café with a view of the water, where people also come to work. In the evening you sink into comfortable armchairs and the music moves to the front. The model is the Japanese kissaten: cafés where records played over a good system at a time when hardly anyone could afford one at home.

Thibaut Machet and Robin Ordell have been DJing for years and both lived in London, where listening bars have long been an alternative to the pub. They opened Anima in September 2023. The sound system was custom-built by the Berlin company H.A.N.D.hifi, the mixer comes from Resor, also from Berlin. On weekdays the house record collection plays, at weekends DJs take over. Next to the turntable stands the sleeve of the record that is playing, so you know what you are hearing.

Food was never meant to play a supporting role in this bar. The kitchen sends out small seasonal plates with a Mediterranean lean, made for sharing. At the start, the handwritten menu listed pork sliders, mussels in tomato sauce and beef tartare, with profiteroles for dessert. To drink there are house cocktails and natural wines.