Tag: bars

Guzzling round the globe

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Drink well and travel often.” — Anonymous 

Read, write, gab and guzzle — those are my priorities when I hit the bar scene on my world travels. I do this often, with gusto and curiosity and, of course, thirst. 

Bars, lounges, pubs, with their discrete quirks and personalities, present windows into a country, its culture and people. Dim and cozy, they are places in which to unwind after long days of investigation and staggering amounts of relentless walking. Drop on a stool, plop into a banquette, the body at rest. Let the slurping begin.  

In my travels I become quite the barfly — using the excuse, Hey, I’m on vacation! — bopping between the dive and the divine, the joint with the jukebox, brews and “Pulp Fiction” posters and the immaculate, high-design haven where cocktails shimmer in candlelight. I won’t deny a fine old-fashioned pub. There, Guinness is god, soccer roars on a Times Square of screens and that aroma is deep-fried you name it. I smell nirvana.

Teetotaler or tippler? Dry January — keep it. This is drenched January, considering how my brother and I behaved on our recent jaunt to Hong Kong. We drank not to excess, but often, be it at a bar, a restaurant, a hole in the wall, like the Japanese-themed joint with 10 seats next to our hotel. (We adamantly don’t do clubs. We’re not teenagers.)

Drinking is a spiritual event — spirits abound. Getting wasted is far from the point and is the poor man’s demolition of brain cells and his dignity, not to mention his liver. (“The liver is evil, it must be punished.” — Anonymous) Drunk? No, just buzz me in.

I like bars that allow dogs. They’re good company and rarely slur their words. 

Soccer may flicker on screens in some bars, but people-watching is my spectator sport. If luck abides, it can lead to meeting locals and fellow travelers, which I’ve done countless times. Some of my acquaintances remain email pen pals years on. They hail from Turkey, Vietnam, France, Japan, Lebanon, India and Spain. 

I’m not the most people-ly person, but these contacts are nourishing, even edifying. There was, for instance, lovely Lina in Beirut, a non-drinker who wound up driving me up the coast of Lebanon for a full-day tour that I never would have managed on my own. No strings attached.

I’m a promiscuous sipper, be it bourbon or beer, though I prefer my cocktails on the sweet and sour side, a little sting. My brother prefers the bite of bitters and high-proof browns. Gin and tonic is my go-to, but I enjoy perusing, and sampling, an inspired cocktail menu, and quality lagers are always an option (IPAs, not so much). I had a gin drink, the Pickled Cucumber Gimlet, at the suave, view-dazzling Avoca bar in Hong Kong that featured pickles and “fire tincture.” It was delicious — sweet, sour, a zap of spice. I ordered it again.

The stylishly casual bar in the Château Royal hotel in Berlin boasts of its “artistry, dedication and genuine hospitality,” and it earns those bragging rights. My brother and I liked it so much last October, and became friendly with the servers over six days, that we even had our morning coffee on its velvet barstools.

And that’s the thing. What makes a bar extra special, what makes you yearn to go back, are the people tending it, from the wildly tattooed and the wisecrackers, to the terse, humble and the tidily dressed, who (hopefully) have an impish twinkle in their eye.

Chatting with them you learn their names, where they’re from, how long they’ve worked there, and what, if any, are their day jobs (usually it’s something admirably offbeat and artistic). And it’s a mutual, symbiotic relationship. “You wanna be where everybody knows your name” goes the song. Well, yeah.

You might think these dimly lit haunts are precipitants of mortality, death’s lubricants. I counter they are refuges of relief, little saviors on life’s pocked avenues, pitstops of pleasure, at best taken in moderation. I drink, therefore I am.

Those great bars, whose names, courtesy of coaster and cards, we always remember. And those great bartenders, real heroes whose names we always get, and always, alas, forget. 

“Drink. Travel. Books. I went broke, but I had a hell of a time.” — Anonymous 

A fantastic bartender at the great Hong Kong restaurant Ho Lee Fook (a pun, say it slowly) serves me a zesty whiskey sour. She also created her own cocktail that she serves in tiny glasses gratis, a nice post-meal touch. We liked it so much, she joined us in another swig.
Knockout gin and tonic in Paris. A little frou-frou, but yum-yum.
Mixing our drinks at famed Italian restaurant Carbone in Hong Kong. That spread of food is the dessert cart.
Alkymya is a sublime little bar in Naples, Italy. That extravagant plate of bites is complimentary, and all the more amazing for it.
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Tiny bar in Tokyo — maybe eight stools — that I haunted often. Fun bartender on the left, and the colorful owner.
This friendly guy in Berlin makes his own top-notch gin — the name of it eludes me, but the recipe includes coffee — and he’s concocting a superb G&T for me.
At this lesbian bar in Hong Kong, The Pontiac, the signature cocktail is the Hobnail — blended Scotch, ginger, Averna, bitters and orange oil. Excellent. That what she’s making.

Wine tasting — look at the size of that “tasting” pour! — in Goreme, a small town in the region of Cappadocia, Turkey.
Our heroic bartending crew at the hotel bar at Chateau Royal in Berlin. True pros. True mensches.
Wonderfully friendly and accommodating bar gang at the barely year-old Socio in Hong Kong, which focuses on libations from the South Pacific. They gave us a generous sample of a unique Australian whiskey when we asked about it. Great drinks, lovely people.

Very cool bartender pouring my drink at Avoca, on the 38th floor of our Hong Kong hotel. He’s only been bartending for three months. Already he’s a master.
Owner/bartender at Bar Jake in Tokyo. The tiny place is a liquid tribute to “The Blues Brothers.” It’s goofy.

Words and whiskey

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Back when I regularly haunted bars, usually dive bars and usually alone, I would carry along some kind of reading material, a newspaper or, in a burst of middlebrow bravado, a New Yorker magazine. Something less intense and more foldable than an actual book.

Knowing that poring over prose looked odd in a place of revelers, pool pushers and loud music, I tried my best to be inconspicuous, settling down at the end of the bar, bathed in the neon splash of beer signage, or at a far-off table near the bathrooms, where the perfume of urinal cakes and dollar-store Glade lent a dubious olfactory ambiance.  

Reading in public is acceptable in cafes and airports, but in bars it seems to be a pretentious faux pas, some sort of performative act. It could be a sly “pick-me-up” gesture, a “dating hack,” as LitHub recently put it. 

That never occurred to me. A woman reading alone in a bar might be misconstrued as a come-on, but as a guy reading the police blotter in the paper, that was hardly the case. I simply wanted a whiskey with my words, then get out of there. At times I felt like a noir character — bruised alienation with a newspaper under his arm, trench coat optional.

Only once did someone mock me for reading in a bar, an annoying professional acquaintance who wanted me to join him at his table to gab. He teased me for reading a magazine, as if I was showing off, when really I was blissfully absorbed in my own inky world and couldn’t care less what anyone thought (proof: I was drinking Miller Lite).

I was having none of it and, in more polite terms than these, I told him to buzz off and leave me the goddam hell alone, that I’d rather read a mediocre Shouts & Murmurs than have to fake my way through vapid conversation and be as social as a mannequin.

In general, most good bars are too dark for reading, like Club De Ville in Austin, although the late Longbranch Inn, also in Austin, was ideal, especially on slow weeknights. The lights were strong but not glaring and you could always find a good half-hidden spot at the massive wood-carved bar, which looked like the bow of an ancient ship encircled by mermaids.

One of my favorite reading bars is the gloriously art deco Vesuvío Cafe in San Francisco, which shares Beat Generation bona fides with legendary bookstore City Lights, right next door. Have a drink, stroll on over, browse the shelves, buy a book, go back to the bar and read. In that case, a book in the bar couldn’t be more fitting. (Just don’t get Ginsberg’s “Howl.” That’s a little too on the nose.)

I’ve also written in bars, a lot. That’s when I’m traveling abroad. After a long day, I crack open a moleskin notebook and record the day’s doings, the contact info of people I’ve met, and attempt the occasional pen and ink sketch, which are invariably doomed to violent preschool abstractions. I draw as well as I play the tuba.

Bars are unique reading arenas. Bars are special. They’re where you unwind with a funny movie review by Anthony Lane or a lyrical music profile by Michael Corcoran while sipping a cold one. It beats sitting on your sofa doing the same. For bars are communal. You’re around people, and that might just afford a whisper of hope. 

Maybe I look dopey sitting at the bar, alone, nose in a periodical. But believe me, I am rapt and content. Content as could be.  

Not me. I don’t have a beard or such a suave sweater. Also, I think he’s Spanish.

Roamin’ Rome

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Monday, shaking off a sleepless redeye flight and some wretched jet lag — both cruel and not recommended — I strolled around my hotel neighborhood in Rome, which sits in the shadow of the Colosseum, that 2,000-year-old stadium of sport and slaughter. (I’d tell you about the tour of it I was signed up for, but I was turned away because I wasn’t carrying my Covid vaccination card — since I was expressly told I wouldn’t need it — and that’s a lesson learned. I think I handled it well. I stormed off in a hissy.)

I hit a wine shop and picked out an eight euro bottle of red, then walked some more and stumbled upon two crumbling basilicas of God and grandeur. Naturally they’re festooned with stunning artwork, from grim statuary to crackling frescoes that make the shrines vibrant museums in their own right. Cool and dark, they emanate that dank churchy smell that’s as singular as old books. I wish I could bottle that funky perfume. 

My brother came a day later, Tuesday, and we’ve been strategizing for weeks about what to eat in Rome and Naples. The cities are lousy with pasta and we’ve vowed not to settle for only that and the ubiquitous pizza. Our sights, and bellies, are set on fresh seafood, veggies (eggplant parmigiana, thank you), charcuterie, risotto, roasts and more from the Italian smorgasbord. I plan on gaining 75 pounds. Tonight is the cutting-edge Osteria Fernanda — creatively plated, self-consciously contemporary Italian food — and I expect nothing less than the orgasmic …  

Several hours and a nine-course tasting menu later, we are sated. And euphoric. It’s the kind of feast where your eyes roll back and superlatives involuntarily pour out at each course, like the “eel with marinated Campari vegetable, acid rice sauce, soia and umeboshi” or the “venison cannelloni with black cardamom and forest wine.” It sounds fussy — I can barely pronounce some of the ingredients — and it is. But sometimes you have to go for it. We did and the rewards were golden.

I’m leaving a lot out — the churches, the museums, the astonishing new Ai Weiwei sculpture, suspiciously inexpensive sushi and a fall-apart sandwich seemingly made half of mayonnaise — but I have a question to ask: Where are all the bars in Rome? 

Try as we might — our efforts are bold and valiant — we cannot locate a single bar bar for a simple nightcap. Wine bars are plenty and some touristy eateries offer trendy cocktails, but where do you get a neat Scotch in this burgh? It’s a conundrum we plan to unravel. It’s getting serious. 

We finally asked a taxi driver about this and he said, “Rome is a museum. It’s not Milan.” And we laughed knowingly. When we got to our hotel we went to the itty-bitty “bar” there and each ordered a neat Scotch. We still have sleuthing in our plans. We go to Naples on Thursday, then back to Rome, which has some ‘splainin’ to do.

Reading, a loner’s sport

~ Chris ~ 8 Comments

I read in bars. It’s spectacularly geeky behavior, but as I often haunt bars alone, white pages peppered with black typography make excellent company. If it’s early and bar seating is available, I’ll even brazenly crack my laptop at a corner stool and read and write. I haven’t spilled a drink on the laptop yet, knock on formica.  

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I don’t know many loners (why is everyone so umbilically peoplely?), so my bar-book habit isn’t totally understood. Once, while I was relaxed and swimming in words, a colleague razzed me for reading The New Yorker in a neon-drenched corner of a Texas dive bar. I told him to buzz off and returned to an exceptionally chucklesome Shouts & Murmurs. Not exactly high drama, but the point is: Some just don’t get it. 

And I get that. If I wasn’t such an insatiable reader — I bring reading material everywhere (I even read a book on line at Disneyland) — I’d regard someone with a book and a beer in a bar as exotic, or sad, possibly pretentious. “Reading a book seems to say: ‘I’m going to be here all evening, drinking this one light beer, so please rescue me from a lifetime of loneliness before I go home to the cats who will someday eat my corpse,’” quips The Daily News.

Funny. But what that misses is what a bold gesture reading alone in public is, and not a piteous one. Bar readers know they appear out of place, irretrievably nerdy, kind of lame. But they also know what they’re doing: enjoying two of their favorite things — words and wine; Tom Wolfe and Tom Collins — in a refuge away from home, where, despite the hermetic aspect of the reading experience, one is still surrounded by the healthy buzz of other beings. The book (or magazine or newspaper), after all, can easily be put down — unlike phones with most people, who are truly and perversely debilitated by their devices. 

“The person at the bar reading a leather-bound copy of ‘Great Expectations’ isn’t pathetic,” Thrillist avers, helpfully. “They’re mysterious and brooding and potentially full of more intricate webs of life-challenging secrets than a YA section at Barnes & Noble. All this is diminished if you are reading from an iPad. Or anything by Dan Brown.” (Those last two lines are funny because they’re true.)

And yet another critic of sipping a White Russian while nipping some Dostoyevsky on a barstool calls reading in bars a “standoffish, even hostile gesture. It signifies that you have little interest in celebrating or commiserating with your fellow patrons.”

So what and boo-hoo. And anyway, that writer’s observational faculties are comical at best, foolhardy at worst. A “hostile gesture” — reading? Maybe if you’re poring over “Mein Kampf,” “Dianetics,” or “Fifty Shades of Grey.” But a book can be an invitation, a conversation starter (especially if you’re reading any of the above titles). And it beats people-watching or glazing over the Times Square spread of LCD TVs. 

Unless it’s you and your child cuddled in bed, or an author appearance at a bookshop event, reading’s a solitary experience. A book, a beer and I. That’s why I’ve never understood the allure of book clubs (note the smooth segue to our next topic), those small-talk nightmares all about chit-chat and socializing and rarely about the book selected by an unreliable committee.

I already have a long list of books I really want to read without being assigned something I might kind-of sort-of want to read in a circumscribed period of time. In other words: homework.  

“Nearly everyone who’s been in a book club has a bone to pick with them,” writes SFGate. “Big personalities dominate the discussion. You’re expected to read a thousand-page brick in a single month. The books you pick are too literary, or not literary enough. Janice didn’t pitch in for wine and cheese.”

So there is this: As part of a verifiable “introvert revolution” springs the Silent Book Club, an actual book club often called “Introvert Happy Hour.” It started in San Francisco eight years ago with two gal pals reading together in a bar. It now boasts 180 chapters worldwide. 

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“The concept is simple yet revolutionary: Members meet up at a bar, a library, a bookstore or any venue that will host them. Once the bell rings, silent reading time commences. After an hour, the bell rings again,” NPR writes. 

“Other than that, there are no rules. Liberated from the orthodoxy of traditional book clubs, participants can bring whatever they’d like to read and chat about anything, before and after the designated reading time.”

Yes, but, it’s still a club, and I’m not partial to organized bodies, be it team sports or religion. So this one, despite its fresh, sensible rules, will have to be a pass. I simply don’t understand why strangers feel the need to congregate and read together. 

People are needy things, squeezed by social pressures and expectations, FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome, and other insecurities. For me, loneliness isn’t the goal; solitude is. I extract myself from others for a while, book in one hand, beer in the other. Call it eccentric. Call it snooty. I call it peace. I call it bliss. 

Tippling Dixie

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Sure, I took a nip on my trip this week to Charleston, South Carolina, not on the basis of “When in Rome …,” though there was a bit of that. No, I just like a good cocktail or Scotch or beer, particularly in a nicer establishment, like a fine restaurant or stylish bar/saloon. (Or salon: Where I get my hair cut, they serve free Prosecco, a nice Kardashian flourish.)

And, as part of what became something of a foodie journey (see that part here), I hit a lot of those places. My slogan: No driving, no hangovers, no regrets.

Right before my three-day trip to Charleston, I blogged about the award-winning small-batch boutique distillery I had my sights on, High Wire Distilling Co., on bustling — one might say boozy — King Street.

I made it, and took the short tour — the place is fashionably cozy and drips with hip — and partook in the tasting flight. The tour was $5, as was the tasting. (I also bought a bottle of the Hat Trick Extraordinarily Fine Botanical Gin for a reasonable $27.)

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The High Wire tasting flight. Left to right: Hometown Vodka; Hat Trick Extraordinarily Fine Botanical Gin; Hat Trick Barrel Rested Gin; and New Southern Revival Brand Rye Whiskey. Especially for how early in the day these were imbibed — noon shots on an empty stomach? — each libation exerted kick and fire and were exceptionally complex.

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At this upscale bistro I sipped the Nordic Witch — “bright and herbal, this witch is ready to head south for spring” — made of Old Tom Gin, Strega, Linie, Aquavit, Lime and Peychaud’s. It was superlative, swirly and tangy, but it was so small, I didn’t even take a picture of it. 

With dinner I had a Classic Whiskey Sour that hit the spot:

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Husk has one of the coolest, most coveted little bars in the city (big patio for you patio people), with potions to match. Waiting for a dinner table, I ordered a tasty Gin-Based Drink Special, whose name and ingredients I foolishly didn’t commit to memory.

But here it is:

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During dinner I got the toothsome and bracing Option Bee: Earl Grey-Infused Local Gin, Yellow Chartreuse, Honey, Lemon and Egg White. Below:

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My penchant for gin is glaring and at this classy, streamlined drinkery I stuck to my beloved botanicals with the assertive “Clover Club” — Hendrick’s Gin, Raspberry Preserves, Dry Vermouth, Lemon and Egg White — followed by the satisfactorily simple “PGT (Proof Gin and Tonic)” — Hendrick’s Gin, Lemon Bitters, Cucumber.

Proof’s a neat place on crawling King Street, and I would have returned with more time.

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Slathered in ersatz grunge and lacking snarly attitude, The Griffon touts itself as the authentic dive bar in Charleston, and apparently a lot of people who haven’t been to Charleston’s The Recovery Room or Dirty Franks in Philly actually believe this. This bar is a poser dive if ever there was one, a faux dump made to look beaten and badass with floor-to-ceiling wallpaper compiled of signed $1 bills. It tries awfully hard, and it made me kind of sad. The Griffon is the Planet Hollywood of dives, a cosplay simulacrum, a movie set. Spotless bathrooms? Yep. Tourists only. I had a $4 bottle of Miller Lite. Then I skedaddled.

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  • Finally, for non-alcoholic, caffeinated elixirs I spent mornings at the sleek, slightly industrial, mid-century and mini-menu’d Revelator Coffee Company on — where else? — King Street. Fully recommended. Free WiFi, tip-top drinks, cheery baristas.

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