Where I Drink

There are few greater joys in life than to wander the streets of Charleston in the evening, the light and shadow of the holy city and the sea salt in the air guiding you near the haunted past, toward cobblestones and the maze of the French Quarter. The quiet of the port pierced by the occasional gull and the stopped-up cannons at every turn bring you back to the age of Henry Timrod, when ships brought the Carolinas “Saxon steel and iron to her hands, And summer to her courts.” As a believer that liquor has seasons, in the summer I shift to good gin, and for the most inventive cocktails on the East Coast there is no comparison to Gin Joint.

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.

Near the lake in the quaint beach town of New Buffalo, a rotating sign carries the silhouette of a shaggy mutt. A line forms near the door for the boring beachy fare, churned out at factory pace. The souvenir hoodies are out the door as fast as they can print them; the Stray Dog has become a destination in itself. I’ve seen their signature motto — Sit! Stay! — everywhere from Santa Barbara to Brooklyn. You probably have too. And don’t get me wrong, the Stray Dog is great at being what it is: the quintessential beach-town bar. But I prefer it here, half a mile south, in the uncelebrated version of a beach-town bar. There’s no merch store, no zany southwest eggrolls, no Jägermeister dispenser, no television. Just ten velvety bar stools and endless respite.

On the edge of Glasgow’s West End, the posh bar scene melts away for just a moment at Elderslie Street, where Orwells has sat since the 1980s — though the location has hosted a pub since 1877. To give you an idea of the bars I usually frequent: until moving to Scotland last year, I did not. Bars were not a place I passed time. Bars are expensive. The company is unpredictable, the menus too often full of candy-colored cocktails with “funny” names like “Screaming Orgasm” that taste like anything but. Yes, I know I sound like a killjoy. My drink of choice: a $15 handle of Burnett’s lovingly tipped into a slow-sipped White Claw in the comfort of a friend’s home. You will not find trendy concoctions at Orwells. On my first visit, Eighties hair metal blared from the jukebox.

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.

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.

I was born in Wisconsin and I’ve learned a curious thing traversing it. There appears to be a state law requiring at least one bar at every intersection of its rural roads. I’ve noticed this most often driving at night: there’ll be a neon sign advertising Old Style or Leinenkugel’s hung in the front window of what looks like a farmhouse living room, and several cars nestled up against the house like sucking pigs. There is something homey about a rural bar. The knotty pine, the “first dollar” framed above the cash register, neighbors ironing out local prejudices and asserting the superiority of the Packers despite any evidence — if anyone’s brave enough to produce some.

In the historic downtown of York, Pennsylvania, near the courthouse where the Articles of Confederation were drafted and a farmers’ market built in the days of horse-drawn carts, you’ll find a curious building called the National House. Constructed in 1828 as a hotel, its porches and airy galleries recall antebellum New Orleans. In its days as a hotel, it hosted guests like Mark Twain and Martin van Buren. Now it’s the home of my favorite bar. The Hound opened in 2012, in the early days of the craft beer boom. Its thirty rotating taps offer seasonal brews from local favorites like Tröegs and Victory, mixed in with ten-ounce pours of funky sour wheat goses or boozy imperial stouts.

Ask anybody who’s really been in a band what being a musician is like, and they won’t tell you about the moments that make it into the Hollywood biopics. To them, the experience is not the hero-shot onstage, or the girls they picked up after a killer set, or anything you saw in Ray or Bohemian Rhapsody. The reality of being in a band is of driving from place to place. Think of Bob Seger’s baleful “Turn the Page” with its opening lyric setting the place: “On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha,” where he’s “ridin’ sixteen hours and there’s nothin’ there to do.” This raises an issue of where to drink in Miami.

Foie gras doughnuts, check. Rooftop location, check. Framed collection of fountain-pen nibs on the wall, check. Where should a scribbler with aspirations to the higher life turn his feet in Toronto, if not to the Park Hyatt Writer’s Room? At seventeenth-story level, the higher life seems within easy reach. The Writer’s Room is the renovated and rechristened edition of the historic Rooftop Lounge, a famous hotel bar that first opened its doors to the public in the Thirties. Before the renovations, it boasted Toronto’s longest-serving bartender, Joe Gomes, who worked there for fifty-seven years. His fondest memory, he said on retirement, was meeting John Wayne. Everybody who’s anybody seems to have popped by for a drink at some point: Leonard Cohen, Brangelina, Hunter S.

When I search my memory for a favorite bar, I’m struck by thoughts about bars of legend that I can only fantasize about. My drinking life is a tale of three cities — Chicago, New York and Paris — but since I’ve spent most of my adulthood in New York, it’s hangouts in Manhattan, some long gone, that first come to mind. And establishments where writers and reporters liked to drink hold for me a privileged position. I wish that I could have bought a cocktail in the 1930s for the tragically brilliant novelist Dawn Powell at the now defunct Lafayette Hotel in Greenwich Village, or at the nearby Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 8th Street.

The late Christopher Hitchens once lamented that he left London for America because the “piss and vinegar” of the city had been swept away by an antiseptic tide of money. Manhattan, though, still has plenty of both, not only in the subway but also in the form of a series of old-school pubs that have somehow resisted the modern mania for restoring the life out of anything old and authentic. The granddaddy of them all is McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th, opened in 1854 and America’s oldest continuously operated bar. The front room of McSorley’s has no chairs or tables. There is sawdust on the floor. The place accepts only cash and has no till. It serves only two kinds of ale (light or dark) and house soda. A sleeve of crackers and a chunk of cheddar are the staple bar food.

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.

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.