Once upon a time in New York, there was a terrifying neighborhood called Chinatown. The streets were narrow and full of people, the odors exotic. Butchers displayed flattened pigs’ faces in their windows. On one streetcorner, there was a chicken in a glass box that would, in exchange for quarters, play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe for tourists. But Chinatown was not for tourists: it was for the Chinese of New York. Real New Yorkers would tell you that the only real Chinese food was to be had in Chinatown, at places where no one spoke English. If you weren’t careful you might find yourself eating eyeball soup or some other delicacy you hadn’t known existed.

This is undeniably a racist caricature of what Chinatown was really like, but it was the defining image of the neighborhood for New Yorkers who lived outside its boundaries – including me. These days, Chinatown is quickly losing its hard edge, as its valuable real estate gets bought up by outsiders and its restaurants are converted into Citibank branches. But that’s just a question of details: the concept behind Chinatown – a fully enclosed linguistic and cultural community installing a fortress in a bustling foreign city – lives in, right here in Berlin. It’s changed, of course: now the language is English and the ghetto dwellers hail from Brooklyn, London and Melbourne. But just like the Chinatown of old, it allows locals to experience the smells, sounds and tastes of those exotic places, all within a few busy blocks of Neukölln.

Creating a ghetto within the ghetto

The entrance to this Forbidden City is easy to miss: a restaurant on Flughafenstrasse called „Papilles“ is the beginning of a strip of establishments that have chalkboard menus in English. Papilles offers „Food & Drink“, „Good Wines“ and, a single concession to the local dialect, „Bier“. Inside, Papilles is staffed by a friendly, bearded young man with a beard and a young white woman wearing a kind of headscarf. It’s tasteful in the extreme, treated wood floors and pale gray walls tiled in black; most of the patrons at a given moment are using one Apple device or another. The coffee is Bio, the people are mellow, the vibe is pleasant; so far, so good.

Across the street from ’Papilles’ are Curious Fox Books and the restaurant Lava, serving Italian food in the English language. Down the hill to Weserstrasse, there’s Silver Future, Yuma Bar, Hangover; turn onto Pannierstrasse and you have Café Futuro, Dots Coffee, Every Day is Sunday. And on and on – the tiny area bounded by Karl-Marx Strasse and the Landwehr Canal is home to dozens of Anglo establishments, and new ones seem to open every week. Here, in a neighborhood that was long dominated by Turkish immigrant families, the Americans, Australians and British have established themselves as a rival cultural power, creating a ghetto within the ghetto.

It’s a good place to be jobless

For a tourist in search of real Anglo lifestyle, Neukölln is chock-full of bars with cocktails that are otherwise only available at the most prestigious hotels and restaurants. For the morning after, there are massive American and Australian-style breakfasts to be had to soak up the hangover. And in between are a range of hamburgers, Steak Tartares, and Club Sandwiches to put Chicago to shame. It’s a dose of Brooklyn and Melbourne, created with attention to detail and painstakingly sourced ingredients. These places are so authentically Anglo that, often enough, the waitresses and bartenders don’t speak German. Just don’t order the eyeball soup.