Food & Drink

On Washington’s U Street, nestled between a dry-cleaners and the city’s most notorious gay gym, lies Exiles, a modest Irish sports bar marked by a warm blue neon sign and a Bills flag. “It’s a Bills bar and they’ll play a Jets game for me,” boasts Carmen, a local sitting at the long wooden bar. Red Liverpool soccer scarves drape over bottles of whiskey. A large Guinness bell hangs in the middle of the bar. “What can I get for you darling? I almost didn’t recognize you with your glasses on,” says a tender voice with an Irish accent. It’s Donagh. Pronounced “DUN-AHH” according to a sign at the bar. He’s a bartender and one of the owners. “Donagh and Paul will make you feel right at home...

I was sipping a beer on the patio behind Ten Cat Tavern with my friend Charlie, debating which was the better Chicago bar: the Long Room up the street, or the Ten Cat. The Long Room was a neighborhood bar that had once been a dive bar. Ten Cat, according to Yelp, is a dive bar now. This requires explanation. For old-school relics like me, calling a tavern a dive bar has not, historically, been a compliment. When we moved into the neighborhood thirty years ago, the Long Room was Blue Bird Liquors, a Chicago dive bar in the traditional mold — a combination packaged-goods store and neighborhood shot-and-a-beer joint. Blue Bird Liquors didn’t have the wall of TVs obligatory in modern bars. Considering how dark it was, I’m not 100 percent sure it had electricity.

Sometimes, I pretend that I worked the wine beat thirty or forty years ago. I picture myself in formal wear, kicking back in gilded settings, sipping perfectly aged first growth, trading bons mots with winemakers. We’d spend hours solemnly considering the slow, steady, seemingly eternal rise of wine culture, and how inevitably it would soften the cruder edges of society. It would be so merry, yet cerebral — but also something we could feel good, even morally superior, about participating in. Instead, I’m in 2024 wearing yoga pants and guzzling mineral water (must hydrate!) by myself holding Zooms with winemakers, sweating over the fact that scientists say climate change imperils up to 73 percent of the world’s current wine-growing regions.

If the dozens of cartoonish stereotypes that flood my mind when I think of France — grand Bordeaux estates, snails and frog legs dripping in garlic butter, elegant women striding down the Champs-Élysées, a glittering Eiffel Tower at night — a stein of hoppy beer is nowhere to be found. France is not known for its pints. And yet, much to the concern of its vineyards and winemakers, that could be changing. “There has been a real explosion of breweries all over France in the past few years,” says Alexandra Berry, a Paris-based beer and hops sales consultant and the author of From Earth to Beer: The Expression of Terroir in a Glass. “General sales in wine have started to decrease in France in part because the industry has started to seem a little dated and overrated.

In the old days (2019), mimosas and Bloody Marys were really the only the socially acceptable forms of alcohol that could cross your lips before 12 p.m. To drink earlier would be a worrying indicator that you’re an alcoholic, or worse, a professional writer.  That benighted era is safely in our rearview.  Of all of the widespread cultural habits that have emerged post-Covid — obsessive hand-washing, a prickling fear of close-talkers, a desire to squeeze every morsel of conviviality possible out of even the dullest social exchanges — by far the best is the wholesale rejection of A.M.-drinks policing. And the biggest winner is the breakfast wine.

On December 5, 1933, exactly ninety years ago, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, formally lifting the ban on alcoholic beverages that defined the Roaring Twenties. Of course, that wasn’t the first time someone tried to outlaw the world’s most popular drug, but it’s probably the best-known case study where the contrast between intended results and reality reached absurd extremes. And yet, the best part of a century later, the same mistakes haunt us.  Saloons had a reputation as pretty rowdy places, filled with whores, card playing and drunken cowboys. The Anti-Saloon League formed to shutter these dens of sin. The League’s leader, Wayne Wheeler, who spearheaded the movement towards Prohibition, told different parties what they wanted to hear.

Everyone talks about how your twenties are a period of change physically, emotionally and financially; of self-discovery and exploration and excitement. But no one talks about the hangover. Not the metaphorical kind; the head pounding, nauseating kind that greets you in your late twenties. I long for the days when I was twenty-one, when I could easily make fresh bread, go on a hike and write a book the day after clubbing two nights in a row. OK, maybe I didn’t do those things, but I very well could have. Waking up fresh-faced (ish — my skincare regime was non-existent back then) and refreshed after a shower and a coffee, the idea of a hangover was an urban myth and something I’d blissfully had no experience of.

While Republicans make a symbolic point of permitting smoking in the Capitol complex whenever they’re in power, no one’s lungs really seem to have been in it since John Boehner held the speakership. Back rooms in Washington aren’t what they used to be. So it’s nice that the oddly named Morton’s The Steakhouse — which as a Chicago-based chain is now really Morton’s The 65 Domestic and International Steakhouses — is one place where Washington’s journalists and politicians can still enjoy the complex aromas of cigars, steak and corruption. One person whom it’s almost unavoidable to see at Morton’s is the recently deposed chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, SenatorBob Menendez.

The sun is ebbing, casting a wash of orange and gold on a city inching towards autumn. There’s that tinge in the air — the crisp, promising whiff of cooler days. Inside, the curtains dance with the gentle wind as the melodious clash of helmets and cheers from the first weekends of football beckon. This isn’t any evening; it’s a bridge between seasons. It deserves an ample companion; a drink that blends seasons, cultures, flavors with the same seamlessness as summer memories fade into autumn anticipation. Tonight, it’s the Oaxaca old fashioned.  Ah, the old fashioned. The name says it all, doesn't it? It harks back to a time of simplicity, of elegance. Of not making a song and dance about, well, a drink.

I had never given Brooklyn much thought beyond the odd walk over the bridge and down into Dumbo, outmaneuvering the hordes of Instagrammers trying to get that perfect shot of themselves on the cobblestone streets with Manhattan Bridge in the background, perfectly framing the Empire State Building between its nervous legs. What with the tourists and the hipsters it never quite felt like my sort of place, so I happily stayed on the wrong side of the bridge, ignorant of the treasures that were hiding from me.  That all changed on a chilly November evening a couple of years ago when my friend Zack invited me to meet up for drinks at his local, The Long Island Bar, nestled neatly between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill.

The downtown streets of Georgetown, Texas, are a grid of pastel storefronts and Victorian architecture, centering around the domed and columned Williamson County Courthouse (named after the judge known as “Three-Legged Willie”). America’s fastest-growing city looks like a time capsule from the old Southwest. But thirty miles south, Austin — or “Silicon Hills” — is undergoing a tech boom. Microsoft, Musk’s gigafactory and a host of tech startups have unleashed a flood of yuppie commuters into Austin’s surroundings, rapidly transforming not just Georgetown, but what we think of as quintessentially Texan. Rodeos, the Alamo, cowboys and outlaws — will we one day think instead of smartwatches and Bill Gates? I doubt it.