Tag Archives: bars
Red Hook Bar Crawl
Red Hook is a lot like the IKEA that landed there: sometimes you have to amass a certain number of things to check out before you can motivate for the trip. With new places like Anselmo’s Pizzeria and Fort Defiance opening recently, however, the time is nigh to hike it to Red Hook for a night on the town. We took the B61 down to Van Brunt Street and started with some fancy cocktails. (more…)
The Chatham Squire, Cape Cod
Cape Cod: land of baseball caps, Red Sox fans, microbrews on tap, and really good seafood. Marie Fromage and I found a lot of all the above on a recent trip to Chatham, Massachusetts. Located on the “elbow” of Cape Cod, Chatham was home to the Nauset Indians and settled by the English in 1665. Much of the town is a historic district, and there are still a lot of (slightly spooky) 18th century houses in town.
One of the most popular restaurants there, the Chatham Squire, feels like it’s stuck in a time warp of its own, though this one may be closer to the Caddyshack-esque golden years of the ‘80s, much like Bertha’s Mussels of Baltimore. Vanity plates and old wooden signs line the walls, the game is on TV, and the beer starts flowing at lunchtime and doesn’t stop until close at 1am. There’s a restaurant dining room here, but the place to be is the bar, which operates like a town lunch counter for tourists and locals alike. (more…)
More Martha’s Vineyard Eats
As will become clear from this article, we didn’t make it out of Edgartown during our entire three-day stay on Martha’s Vineyard. (We did the preppy version of this weekend’s NYT tour.) While the picturesque Victorian town of Oak Bluffs is definitely worth visiting, there’s enough dining in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard to fill a long weekend’s worth of meals, if you don’t mind ending up at the same bar every night. Best of all, you can walk everywhere.
Posted in food, Martha's Vineyard, restaurants
Tagged bars, lobster rolls, Martha's Vineyard, travel
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Inside Superdive
If your idea of a good time in college was smoking clove cigarettes and discussing art films, you can stop reading here. If you got your kicks playing quarters, doing keg stands, and drawing on your passed-out roommate’s forehead with indelible marker, however, then your version of heaven has just landed in the East Village.
A play-by-play account of 30 minutes inside Superdive.
35 Saturdays
If you’ve ever been presented with the challenge of finding an age-appropriate bar for a group of friends in their 30s and up who rarely go out to bars anymore, much less know any of the good ones, this is the site for you. 35 Saturdays breaks down bars by neighborhood and age-appropriateness, and warns you if, for instance, a young backpacker girl was seen crashing into a table full of plastic cups before stumbling out the door (Rudy’s) or if the bar smells. “A smelly bar is typically an Age InAppropriate bar…. Hence, this bar was filled with 22ish-year-old frat boys in flip-flops, shorts and plastic baseball caps. All standing there, glowing from cheap drink and TV-light.” (Boss Tweeds Saloon)
Also noted: the fact that wine bars are populated mainly by women. Seriously guys, you would be shooting fish in a barrel if you so much as set foot in there. But no.
My addition to the list: the 11th Street Bar, 510 E 11th Street, between Avenues A and B, 212-982-3929. Not only is it age-appropriate, it’s dog friendly. And they have about a dozen beers on tap. That’s right – beer, not wine.
Superdive
Wanted: Information leading to the apprehension of Superdive, a new bar on Avenue A
A source informs us that this dark space filled with bar stools opens late night as a BYOB bar. The space is said to contain a piano, and said piano can be played by patrons. The owners are unknown, as are the origins of this bar.
The suspect is believed to be less than a week old. The windows were dark when we last saw it, but it can be identified by the address, 200 Avenue A at 12th Street, New York, NY, a “Superdive” sign taped on the window, and a very large “Superdive” sign sitting on the bar inside. (more…)
Inside The Gates
When any kind of members-only nightclub opens in New York, I generally assume I will never see the inside. But lo and behold, the Gates had a party last night, and the gates creaked open for me.
This spot used to be the Biltmore Room. I never got to visit that place, because as it often goes with New York hot spots, when I first wanted to go I could never get a reservation, then by the time I could get a reservation, no one wanted to go with me. Then Danny Kane reopened the spot as The Gates last month, keeping the gorgeous decor – ornate marble walls and floors – intact. This plus the vibe kind of reminded me of ’80s glitz, when everything was Trump – the Metropolitan era. Crystal disco balls splashing light from the chandeliers off the marble walls? It’s a debutante’s dream of a rec room.
‘inoteca Liquori
CLOSED
It’s not easy to get friends to go out to dinner these days. Even if everyone were feeling flush, the tricks that restaurants have pulled over the past seven or so years – for instance, racking up tabs with numerous $3 dishes of olives or $4 bread – have scared off many of us. On the other hand, small plates are good for commitment-phobes, and if there’s anything people are unwilling to commit to now, it’s spending money. So a group of us ended up at the bar at ‘inoteca Liquori the other night, the revamped uptown outpost of the LES ‘inoteca. Like Kefi and many other inexpensive-but-still-gourmet-feeling places, ‘inoteca is currently undergoing a surge of popularity.
Though the majority of the space is given over to dining, the “liquori” aspect of this new ‘inoteca shouldn’t be overlooked: the bar is turning out excellent cocktails. The extensive drinks menu features six pages of cocktails, many of them seasonal, and over two dozen wines by the glass. (more…)
New Brooklyn Bars: Sharlene's and High Dive
Where some see a recession, others see an opportunity: At Sample last night, D. and I heard about the opening of not one but two – count ’em, two – new bars by the owners of Commonwealth. Soft-opening tonight is Sharlene’s in Prospect Heights, in the old Mooney‘s spot on Flatbush. Sharlene, a bartender at Commonwealth, is opening her own spot with the Commonwealth owners as partners. They spent six months renovating the place and waiting for a liquor license. Mooney’s was once known as the neighborhood dive bar that served underage Brooklyn kids – now some of the same people (grown up, of course) will be working here as bartenders. Should be interesting to see what the face lift brings about.
Opening in PM Space: Griffin
After the total bust that was last night’s NYLON party at the Thompson LES – where one solitary dude worked a door mobbed with people then declared the party closed at 9:45 – Nomes and I headed to a nearby swanky cocktail lounge.
Lo and behold, what should we discover from a source there but that a new club Griffin is opening in the old PM space in late April. It will have an “antiquey” theme with fancy, expensive cocktails – $18 for a regular drink, $26 for a “specialty cocktail” (because the $18 cocktails aren’t special enough?). If the bartender training at Little Branch is any indication, Sasha Petraske seems to be consulting on the cocktail menu.
The PM space is a great one, but the question remains – will the same dude who usually orders five Ketel One and sodas instead opt for for two gin rickeys, two Moscow mules, and something made with egg whites for $18-$26 a drink when the crowd is three deep at the bar? Let’s hope not.
Death & Co.
Addendum: Eater reported on Thursday, March 1, that Death & Co. may be closed for good. We don’t know yet. I am embarrassed for my delusional East Village neighbors. Death is harmless – honest!
Addendum 2, March 19, 2007: Excellent news! Death has been resurrected…for now.
You need only turn to the recent news about Death & Co. to confirm that East Villagers are really as crazy as they seem. Seems the neighbors are against renewing the place’s liquor license next year not just because of people lingering outside smoking and talking, but because the exterior of Death & Co. reminds them of a Nazi train car.
Thrilled by this macabre piece of news, I rushed over to Death & Co. The exterior is indeed forbidding. There are evil iron bird wings and wooden plank slats, which I suppose, if you were Sylvia Plath, or if you were hallucinating on back pain meds and continually staring at the place from an apartment across the street, could look like a a Nazi train car, a really fancy, first-class one, say.
The velvet curtains at the door part to reveal a place that looks a lot like East Side Company Bar, Employees Only, Little Branch, or any one of a number of retro speakeasies that have opened up in the past couple years. Where was the death? I expected dinge and cobwebs, maybe the damp smell of the grave or of an East Village squat. But this place was clean and almost bright. On the bar stools, where there might have been brooding, anemic, stringy-haired rockers, there were happy clean people ordering expensive (but darn good) cocktails. My heart sank.
One recent evening, my friend and I joined the rank and file of young hipsters at the tables running along one side of the room. We compared notes on handbags with the girls at the table next to ours. We had some fancy cocktails – she the Blood & Sand, which was not on the menu, but which our waitress helpfully recommended, I the Bobby Burns, another scotch cocktail that wasn’t as sweet. The ice cubes at Death & Co. are the big, satisifying kind that keep drinks colder. Though these may also remind you of Little Branch, their provenance can be traced to Flatiron and Pegu, from whence the bartenders.
The chef should get major kudos for food presentation. They really take the phrase “small bites” to a new level here: nearly everything can be consumed in one bite, without the help of a knife or fork. The fish & chips arrived as little bites of fish wrapped in tempura. My heart went out to whatever guy in back had spent hours painstakingly tying the salad bites into little nubs of lettuce. The mac & cheese arrived on large spoons, as is the fashion. The delicious jarlsburg-parmesan combination was deepened with just a trace of truffle oil. Even the filet mignon was handily served in bite-size formation, cut into rounds, padded with bacon, topped with a petite potato and skewered with a pretty bamboo stick. As an added bonus, it also tasted good.
Unfortunately, the sauces that came alongside were a problem across the board. The salad dressing was low on taste, the fish sauce too goopy and mayonnaise-y for the tempura, and several sauces just seemed to go in too many directions at once, as if the kitchen were attempting fusion in one tiny little side dish. If the focus is going to be on dipping, the dips had better be good.
But let’s face it: Death & Co. isn’t about the food. It’s an excellent bar where drinks are prepared with TLC. To make a gin based Mig Royale, the fedora’d bartender shook up all the non-fizzy ingredients, decanted them into a martini glass, then, with much showmanship, lit a match and held it to an orange peel over the glass. He explained that it was to caramelize the orange. The result, topped with champagne, tasted like orange sour ball candy – sublime.
Though at one point beset by a large group that broadcast the vibe “I work in midtown!”, the crowd here is still cool. Let’s keep it that way. On another evening LeNell Smothers, the bourbon queen of Red Hook, sidled up to the bar with an entourage. (She’s the one in the hat in the shadows, center, in my stealth photo above.) “They’re here,” the bartender said reverently. “The biggest drinkers in the city.”
I was sad that this gin joint seemed disappointingly bereft of death. Alas, I found myself wondering: where are the rockers of yesteryear? In the 80’s, there was a punk rock club in the East Village called “Downtown Beirut Bar,” so named because it was meant to evoke a bombed-out hell hole of a place, which it truly was. Now, even death arrives in highly stylized form.
But I suppose we can all drink to that.
Death & Co.
433 East 6th Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A
212-388-0882
