Review: The Berliner Bar, Beeston, Nottingham

An honest review of new cocktail and pizza joint The Berliner Bar, in Beeston, Nottinghamshire.

FYI, The Berliner folk didn’t know I was planning to review, and I paid for my meal myself.

I SO wanted to love The Berliner… but I didn’t. I have high hopes they’ll work out the kinks though (although your entire food offer being off is a pretty big kink). Short and sweet summary of my thoughts:

The good stuff:

❤️Nice friendly staff

❤️ Good ambience – if you’re young and single in Beeston, the Berliner is definitely the place to come to scout out the alternative, cool people. It fills a niche that nowhere else in Beeston is currently meeting (I don’t think)

❤️ 2 for £8 cocktails daily until 9. Both the cocktails and the offer are good, but could do better. The cocktails are passable, but nowhere near as good as I’ve had elsewhere in Nottingham…. but maybe the staff are still getting the hang of it!

The kinks:

💔 The food. This is the biggest issue. The Berliner boasts of gourmet pizza and cocktails. All that’s on their menu is five pizzas at £10 each (see the menu here), leaving no room for missteps. What I would expect is five absolutely amazing, completely nailed pizzas where the flavours work incredibly well, the ingredients are premium, the pizza dough/crust has some character (it’s sourdough or otherwise flavourful) and… they’re delicious!

Instead, our pizzas were reminiscent of the doughy, boring ready made pizzas you get in a supermarket. I am really not exaggerating when I say I have made better pizzas myself, at home. For veggies, the food situation is dire – you have two pizzas to choose from, a margarita of the old school – tomato-ey and covered with bright orange cheese and dried oregano, or a veggie pizza, which is the above but with spinach, pepper and red onion.

Hilariously, we ordered two veggies, and one was okay, but the other was doughy and raw looking – I cut into it and sent it back as it was indeed raw. The staff helpfully got me a new pizza ordered and refunded me for that one, but there are clearly sadly lots of issues here.

💔 The food again. It’s just that important, unless you just want to be a bar, in which case, get the cocktails bang on. As my friend Emma who I was with pointed out, they need some great sides – seasoned fries, sweet potato fries, mozzarella sticks, etc, that people can order while having drinks.

💔 The inside lacks finishing touches (plywood doesn’t a style make – though there is a cool mural). They were also missing napkins for the food and no hot water in the toilet when I visited. Sure they’ll got those worked out soon.

Overall, It feels like The Berliner was opened in a rush, without the care and attention to detail that would have resulted in a better experience for customers. I’ll give it a few more months and then return to try the food again – I’ll report back!