All in Playboy
When people who work in the service industry get off of work, the last thing they want to drink is a complicated cocktail. They want a beer and a shot of whiskey.
The oyster-meets-cocktail bars that are opening across the country today all seem to focus on absinthe and the refined, pinkies-up saloons of centuries past. Eat the Rich oyster and cocktail bar in Washington, D.C., however, is not one of those bars.
In Colonial times, Americans shared bowls of alcoholic punch to pass the time, cure their ailments and celebrate their victories. The founding fathers guzzled down 76 kinds of punch after signing the Declaration of Independence.
In most large cities it’s easy to find a bar or restaurant inside a centuries-old building. But not so in Atlanta.
A crowned prince and a foreign minister walk into a bar. They slurp down some oysters, share a few glasses of Glenmorangie single malt and then when the check comes, they playfully fight over who will pay the bill. This sounds like the set up to a joke, but when it happened in real life, at Jack Rose Dining Saloon in Washington, D.C., body guards flanked the table, intervening to make sure it didn’t turn into an international incident.
San Diego’s Polite Provisions may look like an old-time soda fountain, but it’s churning out one of the most cutting-edge cocktail programs in the world.
Tiki bars are not a retro fad. They are a valid movement in America’s pop art history, says Martin Cate, owner of Smuggler’s Cove tiki bar in San Francisco. To this tiki historian and rum aficionado, the original tiki bar movement of the 1950s spoke to something very specific in the American psyche, and its modern resurgence does too.
Dante is an Italian cocktail bar run by Australians and located in New York City. Did you follow all of that?
Matt O’Reilly, owner of Republic in Minneapolis, will be the first to tell you his bar is not for everyone. “We send a clear message: quality over popularity,” he says. “We don’t sell Budweiser. We don’t need to sell Budweiser.”
Most visitors to Las Vegas are content spending all of their time bar-hopping along The Strip. But ask some locals where they like to drink and one name will keep coming up: Velveteen Rabbit.
When people from Mexico walk into The Pastry War agave bar in Houston, they often ask the bartenders: Is your owner Mexican?
“Before we got it, a Dominican family was running prostitutes and coke out of here,” owner John Reusing says. “We got rid of the coke.
You can do better than a $12 cup of Blue Moon at the ballpark. The concessions at MLB stadiums are getting more creative, diverse and kind of strange, and we’re not just talking about the food.
Employees Only cocktail bar sparked a controversy within the industry that has played out publicly on social media.
Most bars are set up for drinkers to cement themselves to the stools and settle in for night-long boozing sessions. Not so at Union Larder, an unusual, Spanish-style wine bar in San Francisco that’s designed for speed.
When Julie Reiner opened Clover Club in Brooklyn in 2008, some people alleged that she was personally trying to gentrify Kings County.
Call me Alyson. For some months now—never mind how long precisely—I had heard rumors of cocktails that provided a next level of altering. Tales proliferated of the existence of unmarked, rarely seen bottles hidden beneath bars and off-menu drinks that were available to only the trustworthy. In pursuit of this white whale I’ve visited bars across the country, whispering my inquiry to bartenders over late-night drinks, Facebook-messaging the most open-minded bar owners I knew and cold-calling contacts of contacts within the industry: “Can you serve me a cannabis cocktail?”
Finding Backbar in Somerville, Massachusetts, is a bit of a going-through-the-closet-and-getting-to-Narnia experience. Boston’s T doesn’t reach this part of town, and the bar’s doorway is not well marked. Ask for directions on the street and you’ll be pointed down an alleyway in search of a tiny orange door.
According to the sign behind the bar at Tough Luck Club, if you ain’t partying, you’re loitering. That’s why you’ll spot just as many people pounding Jägermeister shots in this underground Tucson, Arizona, bar as people sipping on Jäger-Aperol highballs. The bar somehow has the feel of both a dive and a speakeasy.
