5 Brooklyn Bars To Have An Existential Crisis In
By Jake Flores
There are roughly 1700 bars open in New York at any given time (this is an ever shifting and impossible to pin down number). Some of them are world famous stalwarts of the beverage industry and some of them are flighty projects that fail after 6 months. The rest of them form this middle class of restaurants and neighborhood joints that attempt to sell the easiest product in the world in some new and daring location with the lights set to a certain level of previously unexplored ambiance and a slightly original take on what music is acceptable to drink vodka sodas to. Most of these bars have an original cocktail menu that involves some slight variation on a few classic drinks. These are usually an Old Fashioned with some revolutionary new take on what kind of bitters are acceptable to drink with sugar and rye whiskey, and a margarita with jalapeno in it (because both of those things are from Mexico).
‘The Zen of Drinking Alone’. 8tracks.com
Without exception, everyone who runs one of these places assumes that these factors will be the defining characteristics of what makes their business successful. Without exception, these people are wrong because they neglect to understand the very specific function that a bar serves. A bar is a dark rectangle where you go to purposely buy alcohol for twice as much as it would cost at a liquor store so that you can be alone and in public at the same time while you quietly lose your shit about whatever unique way the modern world has just eaten you alive.
I’ve done this hundreds, probably thousands of times. I don’t go to church and I don’t watch Gilmore girls but I do this. Everyone needs a ritual. I wrote part of this article while staring at dimly lit liquor bottles and drinking a beer for twice as much as it would cost from a bodega. Here are some of the best places in New York City to meet with your Maker’s Mark.
Hank’s Saloon (46 3rd Ave)
When I first moved to the city I worked in a really broken restaurant in downtown Brooklyn because it afforded me a lot of time of flexible time off and everyone except for this one really obnoxious waiter more or less left me alone while I whaled on mojitos and grenadine cocktails for hours on end. By the time I was done, I would have actual steam coming off of my body and I would walk my jelly legs down Atlantic avenue to this honkey tonk I found called Hank’s Saloon. It has big flames painted on the side of it. They are not painted well. They look like what a child would paint on their soap box racer. I love them. Inside there is generally some ok band playing and a bunch of people drinking that look like they crawled out of Tom Waits’ hat. Once I was hit on here by a woman who I can only describe as having a voice like a roast beef sandwich. There are fringe level famous people there sometimes as well. One time I was reading a David Wondrich book about cocktails here and someone went “hey that’ David Wondrich at the other end of the bar.”
Another time someone told me that one of the members of Swans tends bar there sometimes for some reason. I have no idea if that’s true. If you come here to drink during the day it’s even weirder. The day bartenders are all old women who say really classic zingers to you while serving you liquor in a plastic cup. This is a good place to just sit down and turn off. Probably the most telling thing that ever happened to me in Hank’s Saloon is that I went in once and everyone was watching Jeopardy, but with no sound. The jukebox was still blaring and the result was a bunch of bar flies with their eyes glued to a game show that provided only questions and no answers, or more accurately, only answers and no questions. If you’re in a place in your life where you like Wild Horses more than knowing who invented the cotton gin, pull up a chair at Hank’s, a dark dive where you can sit and wonder for hours, no questions asked.
Boat Bar (175 Smith St.)
I don’t know why this place is called Boat Bar. It has absolutely no nautical theme. It doesn’t really have any theme. I used to come here after work when i didn’t feel like making the hike to Hank’s. I discovered it by walking down Smith St. until I found a neon sign. It’s one of the darkest bars I’ve ever been in. It’s so dark that your eyes have to adjust to the darkness. The bathroom is even darker, it’s just lit by a dim red light like you’re in a photography dark room or a horror film about toilets. If you try to run straight in from the outside and then into the bathroom, your pupils don’t have time to adjust and you can’t see anything and you run into the sink or the wall or whatever. The bartenders here are great at their jobs. When you’re tending bar in a neighborhood haunt, part of your job is to be friendly to people you would normally avoid on the subway. I understand this and so I’m usually immune to bartenders who lay it on too thick. For the same reason, I’ve never been a big strip club guy. I can’t suspend my disbelief for long enough to enjoy the fantasy of a random woman wanting to give me a lap dance without feeling too much empathy for the fact that she’s at work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I just can’t do it. I can’t even go to haunted houses on Halloween because the entire time I’m thinking “you’re not really a werewolf, someone is paying you to be a werewolf and you’re doing it because you need to pay rent. This is an unauthentic werewolf experience.”
The bartenders at Boat, though, always strike me as people that I’m genuinely hanging out with and having a good time while they listen to me complain about Long Island Iced Teas or what have you. This either means that they’re just really cool or that they’re expertly talented at playing the part of a sympathetic ear. I’m certain it’s the latter. I used to tend bar during the day and have pathetic happy hour drunks feed on my attention like vampires until I wanted to go to sleep. Afterward, I’d go to Boat and do the exact same thing to the bartenders there. I never understood the irony. This is 99 percent of how capitalism functions. Vampires.
Pit Stop Bar (152 Meserole Ave)
Deep in Greenpoint there is a bar called The Pit Stop that doesn’t even look like a bar from the outside, it looks like a place where you buy oil and headlights for your Toyota. The Pit Stop is not a chic culinary affair or a hip meat market where you will meet another twenty-something “creative” type. It is a bar for old Polish people to eat chips in and get away from their problems. I don’t feel great even telling people about this bar, because the last thing a place like this needs is tourists coming into fetishize the fact that this place is supremely unironic and just weird. They seem somewhat used to it though, being that they are in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There is usually one table of young hip neighborhood kids in this place respectfully minding their own business and enjoying cheap beer.
If you are reading this online, it is a statistical certainty that you are closer to this group than to the patrons or employees of Pit Stop Bar. As long as you’re cool and respectful, you will be welcome to be this group of people. Pit Stop is sort of uncomfortably well lit. Its center area is home to some flimsy tables and either a projector or TV, I can’t remember. What I do remember is that the last time I went in they only played DVDs of old rock concerts from the 50s and old men danced unironically while I nursed a beer and watched Little Richard without talking to a single other human.
Duff’s (168 Marcy Ave)
Duff’s is on this list for one reason and one reason only. Duff’s is a great bar and every time I’ve been there I’ve had a wonderful time. It’s a sunken underground metal bar named after the beer from The Simpsons and it has a killer jukebox. That’s all fine and well but I’m writing an article about bars to work out your life in. So why is Duff’s good for this? The defining characteristic of Duff’s is that it’s home to a large wheel that you can pay money to spin. Most of the prizes on the wheel amount to a bad mixed shot that costs the bar nothing and makes you almost puke in front of your friends. Other than that there are a few novelty spots on the wheel and maybe a “spin again” or something. There’s one that just says “ten minutes in the cage” and if you land on it, the bartender will politely show you the human-sized cage in the corner of the room and explain that it’s no longer legal for anyone to actually get inside the cage.
Here’s what I’m saying: you know how some people buy lottery tickets when they’re at the end of their rope? Everyone enjoys the short injection of hope you get from randomness. It’s why “Chance Card” is the best spot to land on in Monopoly. Spin the wheel of fortune and your life will brighten up for a few clicking moments before you end up getting thrown in a cage or something.
George and Jack’s (103 Berry St, Brooklyn)
This one I’m a little biased about because a friend of mine works here. He’s a stout bearded man that looks like a biker and never wears sleeves. He used to sing in a grindcore band. We used to sit around and play cards and listen to music and eventually he started playing 80s pop and yacht rock and I thought he was crazy until through pure saturation I began to understand that Hall & Oates and Michael McDonald were actually the best music to drink to and not the worst. When he first started working at this place I think they wanted him to play typical bar music which generally ranges from The Rolling Stones to The Black Keys and then back to The Rolling Stones.
Instead, this guy turned this bar into a thing of beauty, where people are generally on their feet dancing to Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark rather than silently sipping gin to Van Morrison. I listed this bar last because it’s kind of a coin flip for me. Sometimes if I’m in a bad mood I actually end up having a great time here, but the other half of the time, when it still sucks, it sucks in a beautiful way. Trying to have a moment to yourself while people around you are screaming the lyrics to Arthur’s Theme by Christopher Cross puts you in this weird slow motion isolation that feels like a scene directed by Louis CK or Stanley Kubrick. There’s no better time to scream in pain than when everyone around you is screaming Total Eclipse of the Heart.
