One of the things we have in common with the Germans is a love of beer, which means wherever you are, you’re never more than a short stroll (or stumble) from the nearest bar. It’s also the case that you’ll probably be able to find a drink at any time day or night.

The Scheunenviertel is the name given to the northern edges of central Berlin. Head for Oranienburger Strasse and you’ll find heaps of bars and cafés, popular with tourists and locals alike. The Oscar Wilde Irish Pub (112a Friedrichstrasse, U-Bahn Oranienburger Tor) is popular with the expat community, partially on account of it's large screen TV's and fry-ups.

Alternatively, the Kilkenny Irish pub, Am Zwirngraben 17-20 (U/S-Bahn Hackescher Markt), is open daily from 10am until late serving huge plates of steaming Irish stew.

In central Berlin, behind Friedrichstrasse station by the river, you’ll find Die Berliner Republik at 8 Schiffbauerdamm.  It’s a sizeable bar, decorated with old photos of Berlin, which serves food, shows football and offers a vast selection of beers (one of which is green!). Every evening it sells beer as if it were a stock market commodity – the least popular beers become the cheapest and the most popular, the most expensive. Prices start at €2.40 and the “market” crashes three times a night.

In the western part of the city, head for the Kurfurstendamm, where there’s a decent congregation of bars and cafés. Try the Beersaloon at 225 Kurfurstendamm, which has 3 bars, serves huge plates of food up until midnight, and has 10 TV screens dotted about the place. Take a look at www.beersaloon225.de.

If it’s an Irish bar you’re after, head for the bottom of the rather grim looking Europa shopping Centre, where you’ll find the aptly named Irish Pub. Here you’ll get football on a large screen TV, and beer served from a 36 metre-long bar, it's also open until 4am.

If you want to check out that zany German sense of humour, head down to Klo on Leibnitzstrasse. Klo literally means loo and that’s the theme of the whole bar. Order sausages to go with your beer and they come served in a chamber pot. To get a better idea of what we’re talking about, visit their website.

To the east of the city centre, make for the Nikolaiviertel, a network of little streets, which contain lots of bars and expensive restaurants, situated by the River Spree, 0.5 miles southwest of Alexanderplatz, down Rathausstrasse.

If you are not in the mood for splashing out for your food, there are plenty of cheaper restaurants in and around the city centre, coving a wide range of international cuisine as well as the usual outlets of McDonalds, Pizza Hut etc.

There are plenty of street vendors selling sausages and the like. For cheap, fast food try an Imbiss stand or their more upmarket cousins, the Imbiss restaurants. A speciality is the Currywurst – smoked pork sausage with curried sauce. A snack from one of these stands is likely to cost you around €3.