Food & Drink

There are many different reasons to like a bar. Because it does the best cocktails. Because it is the cheapest around. Or the most expensive. Because it’s a great place to meet people for sex. Because all your mates go there. Because it is ubertrendy. The colorful, ornate, majolica-tiled, lushly colonnaded bar restaurant of La Roca, in Nogales, Mexico, isn’t really any of these things. And it certainly isn’t ultra-convenient: you must cross a border to get there from Nogales, Arizona. Why do this?

It is not often these days that I get to return to the Beaumont, an old inn in the Kentucky Bluegrass first visited half a century ago. The cliché that time and distance make the heart grow fonder has truth in it, as I have relearned this season. The Beaumont has been in the food and lodging business since 1917. It is owned and operated by branches of the Dedman family whose roots reach back to the early days of trans-Appalachian settlement. The original building dates from the 1840s and was once a girls’ finishing school. The young ladies in crinolines are long gone, but not a certain air of gentility. The Beaumont has a worthy watering hole — the Owl’s Nest — refashioned from an old carriage shelter in 2003 when liquor-by-the-drink finally came to Harrodsburg.

During a recent chat with my twin brother, I told him about a wholesome community event I was preparing to attend. Being the evil twin, he joked, “You should bring a flask.” This idea got us talking about just how, when, and where one is supposed to use a flask. Is one supposed to use a flask? My experience has often been that flasks are shady things, carried by alcoholics or sipped from covertly at events that would be intolerable without a numbing agent. Yet I wonder sometimes if any public behavior these days is really off-limits. America’s major cities all reek of weed, a cohort of busy moms recommends micro-dosing psychedelics, it’s socially acceptable to self-identify as a cloud, and people actually vape in public.

Shaker Heights, Ohio This year, Cockburn’s annual call for Christmas party invitations took him all over the country: DC, New York, even to one to “the longest-running libertarian-hosted Christmas party in Ohio.” What type of libertarians were these? he wondered, as visions of a drug-laced hors d'oeuvre platter and laissez-faire lovemaking danced in his head. “The party has spawned one marriage and three children,” Cockburn’s invitation said, confirming his suspicion (and hope) that all libertarians are also libertines. The Ohio party was advertised as “multi-generational,” and Cockburn’s would-be hosts helpfully added, “We managed to kill no one attending during Covid years.

Since I became a Republican, it seems my friends only want to drink at private clubs overlooking Central Park, where men are required to wear jackets and something called “slacks,” and the fur-clad old ladies have hairdos best described as architectural. I’ve never felt comfortable in these places and prefer the company of another old lady, the dowager of downtown and empress of the East Village: Ludwika “Lucy” Mickevicius. When I first started going to Lucy’s, she’d still let you smoke inside, if she liked you, and today the drop ceiling remains stained a hearty beef-stew brown, reminding you of freer, more reckless times.

The last of Mrs. Cockburn’s turkey was scraped into the trash can late on Monday night. As she trudged up the stoop of her Dupont Circle manse, she caught a glimpse of her bedraggled husband through the window. Dimly lit by the glow of their hearth, Cockburn was slumped in his armchair, eyes twitching with discomfort. Both sleeves of his Charles Tyrwhitt shirt were rolled up; an IV drip was affixed to each forearm. The crumpled correspondent shifted in his corduroys as the clear fluids trickled in. Mrs. Cockburn shook her head as she entered the house and headed straight upstairs. “The Ritual” had begun early this year. Cockburn usually wouldn’t kick off his fierce pre-party season hydration regimen until Advent at least.

Nothing has done more damage to the watering hole than Bar Rescue. In each episode, the show’s protagonist swoops into some troubled landmark Toledo bar, guts its history in the name of “open concept,” installs some LED lighting to cut costs, adds some overpriced microbrew, and yells at the backwoods staff — his anger a thin disguise for his McKinsey consultant personality. As a finishing touch, he’ll add a crabcake to the menu. Rescue complete. This reverse-Road House consultant is why every bar in America looks the same: bland, bloodless, stocked with minimalist Ikea furniture, cut off from the past. Don’t let the “unique” seasonal IPA or over-sized Jenga fool you. You are staring at conformity.

The best bars are empty. And empty bars close, which is a shame. I used to like drinking Polish vodka in the Russia House, up from Dupont Circle, in Washington, DC. The site is currently shuttered because some over zealous internationally correct ideologues smashed it up after Russia invaded Ukraine and it hasn’t come back. The Russia House never seemed to be that popular. It had a sort of fake glamour and contrived shadiness that I liked. I could never afford the caviar, so the prostitutes left me alone. DC snobs would call it “basic” — but then DC snobs are basic, so who cares what they think? I hope it has reopened by the next time I’m in Washington. Spare a thought, too, dear Americans, for British pubs.

If Paris is cafés and London is pubs, New York is bars. Most of the legendary Big Bagel bars have been Irish: P.J. Clarke’s, still going strong, and the now-shut Elaine’s, where Woody Allen, Jackie Onassis, and Norman Mailer partied and gossiped protected by the formidable Elaine. But for me, although a regular at the above watering holes, there’s one that stands out because it was there where I cut my teeth as a young man about town, where I met Joan Collins, Janet Leigh, and Linda Christian — and debutantes and models galore. That was Orsini’s, at 43 West 56th Street, just off Fifth Avenue.

Cockburn joins the rest of the world in mourning the good Queen Elizabeth II, a stalwart figure of grace and warmth who endured much during her long life and seventy-five-year reign — often, incredibly, with an impish twinkle in her eye. The Queen worked as a truck mechanic during World War II, served alongside fifteen prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, lived through fourteen US presidencies, and weathered the marriage scandals of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, the heartache of Diana’s tragic death, Meghan Markle’s endless attention-seeking antics, and an exhausting schedule of public appearances. It's no wonder the woman liked to enjoy a drink — or four?

Pennsylvania’s liquor laws are... vintage. But not in a single-malt Scotch kind of way that means they improve with age. The state legislature did move the needle to the right side of draconian in 2016, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1983 assessment of “Pennsylvania’s backwardness” being “a hangover from the administration of Republican governor Gifford Pinchot, who was elected on a ‘dry’ platform in 1930,” remains accurate. The Inquirer reported that after Prohibition was abolished in 1933, Pinchot led a special session to establish the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and “state stores” to make the purchase of alcoholic beverages “as inconvenient and expensive as possible.

Writing about and — the necessary preliminary — drinking wine is a voyage of discovery. I won’t say that any new vineyard has made me feel quite like “stout Cortez” who, according to Keats, “star’d at the Pacific — and all his men/ Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” But wine is in a deep sense about more than the fermented juice of the grape. It is about place — terroir, of course, but also place in a larger sense: place as habitation, place as community, which means place as the stage whereon manners, romance, technique and custom perform for the gods of pleasure. It is also about history and personality and their distillate: money, which ushers in snobbery and its accoutrements.