THE DIVES ARE DYING

Esquire the BEST BARS in AMERICA 2013

OUR ANNUAL CELEBRATION, ONCE AGAIN GUIDED BY ESQUIRE’S FAVORITE DRINKING PARTNER AND THE WORLD’S FOREMOST COCKTAIL HISTORIAN, DAVID WONDRICH. IT’S A TRICKY TIME FOR BARS: ARE THEY PLACES TO ESCAPE REALITY. OR ARE THEY PLACES TO MARVEL AT HOW A DRINK GETS MADE? SO, AS WELL AS ADDING TO OUR EVER-GROWING LIST, WE ASSESS THE STATE OF THINGS: THE BARS, THE BARTENDERS, THE DRINKERS. DRINKING ITSELF.

THE DIVES ARE DYING

FOR LOTS OF REASONS, GOOD OLD BARS ARE GOING AWAY: REAL ESTATE PRICES; ALL THESE NEW PLACES MADE TO LOOK OLD ARE HORNING IN; OLD BARS SMELL FUNNY. MAYBE THIS IS A BAD THING.

DAVID WONDRICH

God might not open a window every time he closes a door, as the Joel Osteens of this world keep trying to convince us, but I’m pretty sure that every time he opens a brand-new speakeasy, he closes a fine old dive bar. During the earliest years of the present century, this seemed like an acceptable trade. There was no shortage of joints where you could sit in the gloom drinking cheap Irish whiskey and bottled beer in the company of the un-

deremployed and aged while “Walk Like a Man” spun on the jukebox. Not in New York, where I live, and not anywhere. But a place where you could have a civilized conversation with a friend while sipping a perfectly made French 75, just like Tallulah Bankhead used to drink? Hell, even in New York there were only four or five of those, and most cities didn’t have any at all. The balance was off.

That got righted. The last ten years have brought us a host of new let’s-do-this-right cocktail bars in every major city and a whole lot of towns in between. Their cocktails are impeccable: They can all make a flawless manhattan and a daiquiri that yanks you back to Old Havana. The bars have magnificent sipping spirits, small

plates of chef-styled victuals, clever design touches, and, alas, very little that distinguishes them from any of the other craft-cocktail bars that have opened in the last ten years.

That’s not their fault. The one thing that best differentiates a place is time: time to grow a culture of its own, accumulate a fund of anecdotes, nurture characters, find its own, unique ways of doing things. Given a decade or three, the survivors of this vast crop of new bars will grow into real, living places. But right now, the bars that have already done that—old bars, shabby bars, dive bars, bars where the customer isn’t always right—those bars are disappearing. The balance is off again, this time on the other side. When Timboo’s, a Brooklyn dive so divey that even I was afraid to drink there (I was saving it for my old age), can be kicked out to put in Skylark, a place where you could sell timeshares; when that most personal of bars, San Francisco’s Owl Tree, can have the hundreds of stuffed, carved, painted, embroidered, and metaphorical owls that made it a shrine to C. Bobby Cook (its late owner/bartender) and eccentric drinkers everywhere shrunken into a couple dotted around a sad little alcove in the back left to Mr. Cook’s memory; when Bill’s Gay 90s, the admittedly somewhat shabby 80-year-old former speakeasy that was Manhattan’s best surviving example of what a pre-Prohibition liquor saloon was like, can be shut down so that the landlord could install Bill’s Food & Drink, which is to the old Bill’s as Kraft Singles are to farmhouse cheddar, then it’s time to admit things have gone too far.

I don’t know what the solution is. Cherish your dives, obviously. Go there, spend money, make sure they stay in business. But leases run out and landlords ran to the greedy and heedless of history. That leaves plan B: Turn these shiny new bars into proper old ones. I’m not suggesting you go in and break things. But when you’re at one of them, live in it.

Eighteen of our twenty-nine Best Bars this year are less than five years old. If there’s anything they have in common, it’s that we think they’re capable of long aging—that they’re already on the way to being, if not dives, then at least institutions.

The Woodsman Tavern

PORTLAND, OREGON

You're having: a pint of cask ale, a half dozen raw

The Woodsman Tavern is like

a rich man’s hunting lodge: rustic but not too rustic and conspicuously well stocked with the good things in life: numerous Belgian beers on tap, cask ales, wellmade cocktails, raw oysters and clams, a selection of country hams, carefully chosen wines and spirits. It would almost make you tired—if it weren’t all so damn good.

4537 Southeast Division Street; 971-373-8264 ►

Smuggler’s Cove

SAN FRANCISCO

You're having: an Expedition (in the take-home mug)

On the outside, there’s nothing—a bland, unmarked storefront on a quiet side street. Inside, there’s a wooden pirate ship contorted in such a way that it fits into a concrete cube, with a bar as cockpit, another belowdecks, and a little seating area aloft. The bartender is flailing about like a heavy-metal drummer, desperately beating eight, ten, fourteen ingredients into towering, elaborately garnished concoctions. Strange words fly about—hogo, agricole, solera, orgeat— and the heady perfume of distilled sugarcane fills the air. Tiki. But, of course, you can’t wander into Smuggler’s Cove by accident. As San Francisco’s and perhaps the nation’s reigning Tiki bar, it draws a crowd almost every night, and you’ve got to wait outside until there’s space. It’s worth the wait. (Tip: If the drinks are too sweet—even the best Tiki drinks, and these are the best, tend to lay on the sugar—it’s got one of the world’s great sipping-rum collections.) 650 Gough Street; 415-869-1900

Noble Experiment

SAN DIEGO

You're having: a Fashionably Late

Should you find yourself in San Diego, as one does from time to time, you could do far worse for dinner than the chefy comfort food at Neighborhood. As you’re working your way through your pasilla steak frites or smoked porterbraised short ribs, you might notice that small knots of people are going into a little hallway and not coming out. If you get curious and wander over, all you’ll find is a storage area with a wall of beer kegs and not much else. Yet somewhere in there lies the entrance to Noble Experiment. Sure, secret entrances are a bit

corny these days, but the bar itself is a square deal. You’ll no longer feel like you’re in San Diego, but it’ll be there when you come out. 777 G Street; 619-888-4713 (Textfor a reservation.)

Ship Tavern

DENVER

You're having: a Johnny Walker Black manhattan. (Order it thus.)

Ship Tavern, tucked away in the historic heap of bricks that is the Brown Palace Hotel, is at that peculiar stage in a fancy joint’s life when it wants to be a dive. It’s not decrepit per se, but you can feel the gravitational pull of decrepitude. Somehow that’s alluring.

Maybe it’s because that same black hole is pulling on us every single day. In any case, it is very pleasant to drink your (large) cocktails here (stick to the basics) amid the headscratching, comprehensive nautical decor (in Denver?), which dates back at least to the 1930s. 321 Seventeenth Street; 303-297-3111

Williams & Graham

DENVER

You're having: an Unrefined Ruffian

Sure, you enter through the bookcase in the little stageset bookstore out front. That’s bound to give the serious drinker pause. But nothing ►

PEOPL SEEM THEY'V DRIN 4 E WHO LIKE E BEEN KING

► else at this very dark, clubby bar is even remotely whimsical. Williams & Graham is a love letter to the old saloon, but one conceived by a third-generation bartender who knows the difference between playing bartender

and really tending bar. Once past the bookcase, there is no pretension here. Just serious cocktails and a way of making time slip away. In other words, a bar. 3160 Tejón Street; 303-997-8886 (Call for a reservation.)

The Esquire Tavern

SAN ANTONIO

You're having: a tequila old-fashioned

It’s the same sad old story:

An ancient local dive goes along for decades, a place for us drinking, talking, eating, dancing, cursing, hooking, brawling, spitting, kicking, and suffering humans to forget our old troubles and sometimes get into new ones. It ain’t fancy—it ain’t even clean. But it’s cheap, and it’s always, always there. Then some sharpshooter comes along, buys the building, scrubs the place within an inch of its life—“restoring” it—and puts in a chef and a squad of sleeve-gartered mixologists in place of the tamale lady and the crusty old shot-pourers and beer-slingers, and then everything costs double what it did before and the place is full of douchebags. Well, not quite. When Chris Hill, the sharpshooter in question, bought the Esquire Tavern in 2008, it had been shuttered for two years, dragged down by time. Rather than gut it, he restored it, giving it a second shot. There’s still the little terrace out on the River Walk, the funky wallpaper (it had to be re-created), the dark wooden booths (mostly rebuilt), and the 100-foot standup bar. You can still get a bottle of beer for four dollars, a pint for five, and an impeccably made classic cocktail for nine: more than anything cost at the old Esquire but hardly extortionate. What’s more, despite the scrubbing and the painting and the modernization, the Esquire still feels old—still feels like a place where life has been lived. And while I’ll concede that everyone’s perception of douchebaggery is different, I didn’t find many examples at the Esquire. 155 East Commerce Street; 210-222-2521 ►

► The Cloak Room

AUSTIN

You're having: a dry martini

In politics, the cloakroom is the back room congressmen retire to when they want to pick their teeth, put their feet up, check their e-mail, occasionally cut a deal, and sometimes take the edge off. Austin’s Cloak Room, a dark, determinedly unfancy cellar full of booze across the street from the Texas Capitol, is mostly about the last one. 1300 Colorado Street; 512-472-9808

Windmill

Lounge

DALLAS

You're having: a cheap Cuba Libre or three

Punk on the jukebox. All-day three-dollar highball specials. Crusty regulars. A “patio” that’s basically some picnic tables in a parking lot. Bar snacks. But those snacks— try the chili—are way better than they have to be, as are the drinks. And if a comfortable, friendly dive with a jukebox

and serious cocktails doesn’t appeal to you, then you have our profoundest sympathies. 5320 Maple Avenue; 214-443-7818

Harry’s Country Club

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

You're having: a Thomas H. Handy rye on the rocks

It’s a busy place, unpretentious but not divey (for that, tell your cabdriver to take you to Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club at 3402 Main Street), with good food (the usual stuff, with a Mexican bent), hand-burned country CDs on the jukebox, an ungodly number of whiskeys, and bartenders who can explain what’s in every bottle. They will make you cocktails. They won’t, however, make you cocktails with house-infused apple gin, carrot bitters, and mulch. Manhattans and martinis, sure. Probably even a margarita if you ask nice. We talked one of them into making a round of emeralds (an Irish-

whiskey manhattan; try it with Paddy’s). But that’s only because he, like the rest of the bartenders there, is goodhumored, game, and patient. Who needs carrot bitters, anyway? 112 East Missouri Avenue; 816-421-3505

Manifesto

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

You're having: a Jackson Co. Democratic Club Cocktail

For a place with all the modern cocktail-bar trappings— back-alley entrance, basement digs, posted rules of deportment, drinks with abundant

house-made trimmings, and lots of sherry, mezcal, and obscure Italian amari—Manifesto isn’t a place that makes drinkers feel trapped by its trappings. It’s lively. Jolly, even. (The entrance is around back in the alley; reservations are recommended.) 1924 Main Street; 816-536-1325

Bellocq

NEW ORLEANS

You're having: a sherry cobbler

If you go by the bar that bears his name, E. J. Bellocq, the turn-of-the-last-century New Orleans whorehouse photographer, spent his days as a gentleman of elegant lei►

sure, sipping well-iced sherry cobblers while focusing his camera on lithe, dark-eyed young beauties posed in surroundings as tasteful as they were luxurious. The reality of Mr. Bellocq’s existencewell, let’s stick with the fantasy. Bellocq the bar makes it all too easy. 936 St. Charles Avenue; 504-962-0911

The Aviary

You're having: an In the Rocks

First of all, the Aviary—the bar attached to Next, one of the restaurants of superchef Grant Achatz—isn’t a bar per se. There’s a bar here of sorts, but a steel cage falls between you and it, and the people working behind the bar have other things to do besides talk to you. Like inject bourbon, sugar, and bitters inside hollow balls of ice or percolate gin through various fresh-picked botanicals. Of course, many of the joys of a normal bar are the lunch-counter pleasures of camaraderie, repartee, and familiarity; for some people, Achatz’s bar will have sacrificed too much. But if you’re willing to put aside your “This ain’t a bar” instincts, an evening at the Aviary can be ablast. The drinks are fascinating and delicious. At the end of the evening, you feel as if you’ve had a fun night at a top restaurant, only to get this buzzed at one of them would cost you ten times more. 955 West Fulton Market; 312-226-0868

The Barrelhouse Flat

CHICAGO

You're having: a Boothby Cocktail

Tucked into the no-man’s-land between Lincoln Park and ►

Lake View in the vast brick prairie of Chicago’s North Side, the Barrelhouse Flat is a new bar that tries very hard to look old, or at least like what a new bar would have looked like in the old days. In that, the bar’s not unique, although it does it quite well. Unlike most such places, however, this one specializes not in new drinks with a farm-to-table ethos or in updates on the classics wherein the update consists mostly of replacing tried-andtrue ingredients with hit-ormiss ones made in the basement, but in simply making the many classic drinks on its enticing list as good as possible, with minimal ego. As you sip your Holland’s Pride (William Schmidt, New York, 1891), Hotel Nacional (Wil P. Taylor, Havana, 1933), or pisco sour (Victor Morris, Lima, 1915), you will thank them for that. 2624 North Lincoln Avenue;

773-857-0421

You're having: an Odd Deuteronomy, trotter cakes

Downtown Indianapolis is a strange place: It’s clean and safe, and it’s got all the

things that draw people into a city: stadia, monuments, parks, convention centers, river walks, museums. What it doesn’t have is much of anything dark. Or weird. Or offputting. For that, there’s the Libertine, a cocktail bar/restaurant. Whiskey, amari, oysters, rabbit, bone marrow— the bitter, the dark, the strong, the funky. 38 East Washington Street; 317-631-3333

Arnold’s

CINCINNATI

You're having: a pint of Arnold's 1861 Porter

If Arnold’s were in New York, San Francisco, Chicago,

or Boston—somewhere, in short, that people actually visit—it would be world famous. Founded, as it claims, by Simon Arnold in 1861, it’s one of the flat-out oldest bars in America (even if, as a session with old Cincinnati city directories suggests, that story might not be 100 percent accurate, the bar is still more than 130 years old). It’s also beautiful, with unique woodwork and lots of historical stuff on the walls. But it’s in Cincinnati, which means that despite its history and tradition of intelligent, respectful ownership, Arnold’s is still primarily a no-bullshit local bar. It’s got regulars, tra-

ditions, and customs, but at the same time the bartenders are friendly and the regulars are—well, they’re not hostile. In other words, thank God it’s in Cincinnati. 210 East Eighth Street; 513-421-6234

Drinking

Fountain

BOSTON

You're having: some kind of highball. Rum and Coke? Whatever.

Occasionally you’ll find yourself tuning out the conversation. Your legs will start to twitch. For whatever reason, you need to get up, walk out of the perfectly pleasant bar you’re in, and go to ►

► some other bar.

Should this strike you when you’re drinking at Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain, as one does when one is in Boston (we named Doyle’s one of our Best Bars back in 2006, an opinion we continue to hold), there is fortunately a safe haven at hand. Exit Doyle’s, as painful as that might be, make a left on Washington, and walk one block to Drinking Fountain. Besides ahall-of-fame divebar name, this classic New England corner tap boasts a raffish, mixed—by any definition of the term—and very gregarious crowd (so perhaps not a place to drag your more delicate friends); strong-ass, cheap-ass drinks; and a jukebox, pool tables, and an aquarium. When you’re feeling antsy, head back to Doyle’s. 3520 Washington Street; 617-522-7335

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS You're having: an In Vida Veritas

I suppose Brick & Mortar could be classified as a speakeasy in the modern sense: There’s no name on the door, and you can’t see in. And yes, there are cocktails with mezcal and sherry and something called Nux Alpina. But you can’t see in only because it’s on the second floor. (Go through the door to the left of the one for Central Kitchen.) The cocktails are straightforward and tasty, and I don’t know a lot of speakeasies that have a menu of amusingly named sixdollar shots—and by shots I mean, like, shooters. Moreover, it doesn’t have the hushed-tothe-point-of-enervation atmosphere typical of such establishments. 567Massachusetts Avenue; 617-491-0016

Brick & Mortar

HOW TO BE ALONE AT A BAR

1. Keep your phone in your pocket. 2. Equip yourself with a pretty good answer to the question "What are you shaking your head for?" 3. Shake your head for longer than is normal. 4. When someone asks why, have a conversation.

HOW TO ORDER YOUR SECOND-TOLAST DRINK 1. "Water, please." 2. Drink water. 3. "Another bourbon." 4. Drink water. 5. Sip bourbon. 6. Drink water.

HOW TO BRUSH UP ON YOUR COCKTAIL HISTORY, LESSON 1

The Baroque Age (1800-1885) 1. Order an old-fashioned (c. 1800). 2. Order a whiskey sour (c. 1850).

3. Order a brandy crusta (c. 1855). 4. Order a Tom Collins (c. 1875). 5. Order a manhattan (c. 1880). This concludes your lesson.