It's a scene familiar to any Dubliner. A man is turned away from a nightclub for wearing the wrong shoes.
"But these are Prada," shouts Wolfgang Bocksch at the doorman. Prada they may be, but as far as the doorman is concerned they are trainers, strictly prohibited in Adagio, dubbed "the coolest club in the world" by an excitable tabloid when it opened in Berlin last March.
The scene, however, is a surprise to Mr Bocksch, a Berliner. "What is there to discuss? I'm off somewhere else," he says with a shrug.
He is not alone. Adagio is expensively decorated, with room for 800 party-goers. But Berliners are voting with their feet and Adagio is empty.
On an average Thursday night there are more staff members than clubbers visible and things scarcely improve on the weekend.
Women handing out flyers on the street only manage to coax around 100 people to part with the DM25 (£10) entrance fee.
"I've just come from London, and Annabelle's, a similar-sized club to Adagio, was full to breaking point," says one of the few clubbers in Adagio.
"You just couldn't get in, not even with a member card. That's what Berlin needs."
But Adagio has proven otherwise. Unlike its sister club in Zurich, the club is a DM15 million (£6 million) flop, a failed attempt to create an exclusive hang-out in Berlin.
Bars and clubs around Berlin are open all hours and though never empty, they are rarely fire-hazard full.
New bars and clubs open every week catering to all tastes, but they have one thing in common: no doormen.
Very rarely is anyone turned away for wearing the "wrong" clothes or for having the wrong "look", quite a contrast even to other German cities like Munich or Hamburg.
Berliners, it seems, are not interested in style over substance and few will pay over the odds to drank at a so-called "in-bar".
The elitist door policy at New York's Studio 54, for example, would be incomprehensible to Berliners, particularly those who grew up in the "workers' paradise" of East Berlin.
There is no Studio 54 velvet rope and there is no mystique.
"Berlin, or more precisely West Berlin, was a "front" city, on the edge," says Prof Annamaria RucktΣschl, an ethnologist at the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin.
"The money elite wasn't here, neither was the political elite, so there was a more proletarian we're all in this together attitude," she says.
With the return of the federal government two years ago and the return of many major firms, she believes the "VIP culture" will slowly develop in Berlin as it has in other cities.
Berlin newspapers are desperate to accelerate the process and have created their own glamourous in-crowd.
For months the gossip pages have feted 25-year old blonde Ariane Sommer as the city's new "It-Girl".
Ms Sommer is a fixture at all society events, reporting for her gossip programme on a local television station.
"Berlin is the perfect city for big city nymphs like me," she told viewers recently.
But after only seven months on the air, she was ungraciously fired last week after producers realised that Berliners were not interested in the ramblings of a surgically-enhanced party girl.
Dining in Berlin is as democratic as clubbing. Tables are almost always available at the Paris Bar and Borschardt, two of the city's most up-market restaurants.
"When people call looking for a table on Saturday night and we're booked out, we don't laugh and hang up, the way they do in New York," says a manager at Borschardt, favourite lunchtime haunt of Chancellor Gerhard Schr÷der.
He adds: "I've never thought about why it is different in Berlin, but I hope it stays that way."
Unlike any other major city in Europe, Berlin has built a thriving nightlife with an all comers welcome attitude.
If Berlin were heaven, St Peter would be out of a job.
