There are still a lot of people visiting the page including a list of non-smoking places when searching for smokefree restaurants and pubs in Berlin. As of Jan 08 a non-smoking ban made a lot of public place smokefree but parts of it were declared invalid by the “Supreme Court” of Germany a while later. This happened because the judges ruled that it is unfair if bigger pubs are able to create separate smoking rooms while smaller pubs do not have the space for that. The Berlin senate is working at a new version of the non-smoking ban.
So, how is the current situation? The simple rule is like this: If it looks like a restaurant or cafè, profits in big parts from offering food then in almost all the cases it is smokefree, if it looks like a pub or bar basing their profits on drinks then it is not smokefree. The new law being worked on at the moment will have some paragraphs telling pubs that are offering food to not allow smoking but due to the fact that there are only a few people running around in the city being employed for controlling restaurants and pubs the chances, that they’ll find the black sheeps are very small. Summarizing what is happening you could say: If you wanna eat or drink a coffee smokefree - no problem, if you just wanna have a drink or beer in a smokefree pub - forget it, stay at the restaurant and drink there.
Before the non-smoking ban this page was visited very often for its list of non-smoking restaurants/cafes/bars and at least for the restaurants it is not necessary anymore, for the pubs it would contain no entry so far because at least I don’t know of any pub that is smokefree in this city.
