Food & Drink

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.

Cockburn is always looking for a good roast to accompany his morning swig of Bailey’s. Luckily, if you’re a card-toting member of the Grand Old Party, own at least one gun, and supported the Iraq War when it was in vogue, you have a plethora of options. On his search to find a coffee that can’t be cucked, Cockburn initially found Black Rifle Coffee Company, which might bring with it a connotation of Ben Shapiro or National Review to any attuned Republican ear. Veteran-owned with blends named “AK-47” and “Coffee, or Die,” the company has poised itself to become any patriot’s official blend, even recently becoming the official coffee of the Dallas Cowboys. Of course, this is not without controversy, on both left and right.

Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Athenaeus of Naucratis, a shadowy Egyptian-born Greek who floruit somewhere in the Roman Empire during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus, i.e., around 200 AD. Athenaeus was a rhetorician, grammarian and epicure. But he is known to posterity primarily as the author of The Learned Banqueters (Δειπνοσοφισταὶ), a sprawling, miscellaneous work that touches on, well, just about everything: food, philosophy, fermentation, fabulation and many other subjects, not all of which begin with the phoneme “f.” Henry James called the three-volume Victorian novel a “loose baggy monster.” None was so loose or so baggy as Athenaeus’ compendium. There is a bit of Petronius’s Satyricon (c.

Some people think that wine is a serious business. I am often tempted to think that myself, but then I remember an amusing cartoon by James Thurber called “The Wine Snobs.” It shows four people sitting around the dinner table, each holding up a glass of wine. There is an air of resigned dubiousness emanating from the table as whole. But the W.S. himself sports a big smile and says enthusiastically “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” Been there, done that. We’ve tasted some pretty fancy wines together in this column, and I hope there will be plenty more to come. At the end of the day, though, wine for most of us is chiefly about pleasure and camaraderie, not connoisseurship.

What’s in a name? Sometimes, quite a lot, especially when seen through the benign lens of sentiment. By the time you read this, April, which is not the “cruellest month,” will be upon us and the morning mercury will be edging upward, coaxing forth the crocuses and daffodils. But in the last several days, dawn has come to where I live in Connecticut accompanied by temperatures in the teens and twenties. March has entered clad in its traditional lion’s mane. I feel especially grateful, therefore, that duty called me and a handful of colleagues to Palm Beach, just as February gave way to March, on behalf of the New Criterion, the magazine I edit, and Encounter Books, the other phalanx in my campaign for world conquest.

Passive news absorbers across the nation haven’t been able to avoid this thing they heard about some guy named Poutine, who’s, like, Russia’s Orange Man, invading Ukraine, which is, like, a peaceful society of hunter-gatherers and supermodels who live harmoniously with nature, talk to animals, and invented Democracy. This is a super important, really bad thing. The Crane people have been forced to take up arms and defend their way of life. Now, Americans across social media are also stepping up to let you Cranes know they’re paying attention, they care, and they’re ready to strike back at the invaders. Yellow and blue are this season’s black square.

It's been many years since Cockburn popped in to the DC watering hole Sign of the Whale. Tucked into an underrated bar district on M Street about a five-minute walk from Dupont Circle, the Whale was once a popular hangout for interns and thirsty twentysomethings, the Joseph A. Bank-clad worker bees who make the city go. Now it's recovering from a devastating fire. Just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday, smoke began to billow out of the Whale's upper-level window. Firefighters rushed in and doused the flames, which thankfully didn't spread to adjacent establishments like Camelot and the 1831 Bar and Lounge. No injuries were reported. The owner of Sign of the Whale released this statement Wednesday night: Sadly we had a big fire today.