Food & Drink

Regular readers will recall my fondness for Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” That crisp declaration is not only elegantly framed but (in my view) true. In this it differs, it saddens me to acknowledge, from the Duke of Cambridge’s even more robust confidence that he was “opposed to all change, at any time, for whatever reason.” I am not sure whether that mot was a testimony to the duke’s utopian inclinations or merely his stubbornness. But it is sharply at odds with the realities, if not, perhaps, with the governing temperament, of most of its main actors in the world of wine.

It was nine on a Monday morning, and whereas my fellow commuters were heading to the office, or their classrooms or a lecture hall, I was on my way to Parcafé in the Dorchester Hotel, right next to London’s bougie shopping district, Mayfair. It’s a place to buy Ferraris and Bugattis and shop at the Row and Goyard and be passed by an endless convoy of black Rolls-Royce SUVs. Waiting for me at the hotel would be a man with a little golden cup, containing a freshly brewed portion of mankind’s favorite black nectar. And his is the best, uncut stuff on the market. The man is Amir Gehl, founder and CEO of Difference Coffee, which sources some of the best, rarest coffee beans in the world.

There’s nothing quite like the third swig of a gin and tonic at the end of a long summer’s day. Or of an Old-Fashioned combating Old Man Winter’s chill. The bite on the tongue. The slow burn in the belly. The gradual easing of emotional and physical tension. Except for the hangovers. There’s nothing quite like those, either. As I — sigh — age, I’ve developed a relationship with alcohol that has become increasingly love-hate: I love it, it hates me. A slight intolerance to booze, German/Irish heritage notwithstanding, has always given me a rosy flush that on round three deepens to an unflattering scarlet that could be mistaken for theatrical rouge.

Some undetermined time in the long past, possibly in 1890s Montana, a miner had finished a long and tiring day and needed a refreshing beer. But after aparticularly taxing shift, a beer wasn’t going to cut it alone. He asked the barman for a shot of whisky as well — and washed it down with his pint. It’s hard to call the boilermaker a cocktail, and inventing one certainly wasn’t on the mind of our tired protagonist. To this day, mixing beer and spirits is not generally the province of mixologists; it’s a combination more often favored by partygoers looking to get slammed as entertainingly and quickly as possible.

Want to get drunk, fast? To most, that’s the point of the Long Island Iced Tea. It’s not so much a drink as a chemical formula designed to make an enormous percentage of alcohol consumable in a single glass. When I worked at a cocktail bar, a man once ordered two, and I asked if he would like me to hold on the second until his guest arrived. He replied, “No thanks, they’re just for me.” He proceeded to down both within a few minutes, for what surely began either a wild or very bad night. For the unfamiliar, Long Island Iced Tea contains almost every liquor you can imagine and no actual iced tea (though it shares its color).

Are the rich different from you and me as F. Scott Fitzgerald posited in 1926? Or do they just have more money, as Ernest Hemingway allegedly retorted? Whatever the answer, they’ve certainly become wealthier. While many of us normies have been sweating fallout from inflation and skyrocketing interest rates — buying a dozen eggs, never mind a new home, requires major budget adjustments — we can take comfort that at least the 0.001 percent are doing fine. According to the latest Oxfam International Inequality Report, the five richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes since 2020 — from a measly $405 billion to $869 billion. What do they sip as they stroke their fat white purebred cats atop piles of gold? It’s wine you won’t find at a store.

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.