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Barred: Bar 360
When: Friday, 4:22pm
What did I drink? Tanqueray & tonic in a plastic cup ($8).
World Resort Casino at the Aquaduct didn’t live up to my not-that-high standards because it lacked three very important casino staples: Keno, free drinks and indoor smoking. I rarely visit casinos because I’m not a gambler, but when I do go I’m not looking out for my health.
I had to sneak out the propped open doors (no reentry, my ass) along with all the Chinese men to have a cigarette, and was forced to pay my own money for a cocktail. I also lost $24.84 playing slots, which are not my game.
There were only 12 patrons indoors drinking in Ozone Queens on their Friday off, but three were women clearly over 40. Baseball caps, moustaches and gold chains belonged to the men. One gentleman was using a Kindle with a reading lamp attached, no matter that the bar was lit bright as day from the towering video screens advertising upcoming shows, including a disco event hosted by Deney Terrio (?!)
Was I carded? No, but there were prominently displayed “We ID” signs.
Age appropriate? Nearly everyone was old enough to have seen Dance Fever on broadcast TV. -
Barred: Mission Dolores
When: Saturday, 12:33am
What did I drink? Nothing.A friend and I were projectile vomited on by a bro before we even made it to the bar to buy a drink.
Age appropriate? Uh, no?
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Barred: Nitehawk Cinema
When: Friday, 11:10pm
What did I drink? Redrum (Goslings rum, hibiscus, lime, rosehip syrup, Peychaud’s bitters), $12.
I’m not used to drinking with moms, so it really threw me for a loop when the 39-year-old at the table, a high school friend of a friend, mentioned a realization about her 20-year-old son who lives in Williamsburg and is a DJ. “He’s a grown man.”
The rest of us childless middle-agers had a hard time wrapping our heads around being the mother of a grown man, and one you might run into on the street and at parties (this has happened).
Time for a stiff drink.
Age appropriate? More or less. The bartender was wise enough to call me miss, not ma’am.
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Barred: Trash Bar
When: Saturday, midnight on the dot
What did I drink? Maker’s Mark on the rocks ($8), Rolling Rock ($4) Rolling Rock (free).
A friend of a friend bartending: What are you doing tomorrow?
Us: Watching Ghost Dad.
Bartender: Oh, I’ve been watching a lot of Jarmusch lately.
Pause
Me: Dad, not Dog!
Age appropriate? Not naturally. The secret to drinking in Williamsburg is to have your own pack to travel with in order to skew the ratio slightly.
Pic via We Are the LAW
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Barred: Ruby
When: Thursday, 11:09pm
What did I drink? Ruby daiquiri (rhubarb jam, vanilla syrup, lime juice, Angostura bitters, 5-year rum), Meadow Mist (Zubrowka bisongrass vodka, elderflower, sorrel, dandelion, burdock bitters, Agrapart), Manhattan. 100-120 dkk, roughly, $20 apiece.
It’s surprisingly easy to spend $60 on cocktails in Copenhagen, especially if you tire of pints and aquavit. Ruby is sort of a Danish speakeasy, no sign, just inside the entrance to the Georgian embassy, and done up in a cross between gentleman’s study and Victorian parlor. In theory, the leather wingback chairs, gilded mirrors, oriental rugs, frilly lampshades, and pricing structure would attract a mature crowd (or young, flashy Europeans). And it did, for the men at least.
Upscale foreign bars always seem to be the setting for at least one large multinational work outing where everyone speaks English with different accents. The bigwigs are always middle-aged-plus men who leave early and are often American and wear khakis, polos and wire-rim glasses. Females are in the minority, if present at all, and are always in their 20s. Most of the women at Ruby were also in their 20s.
Upon leaving and approaching the bus stop on the other side of the little river in front of the bar, we nearly got into a physical altercation with a taxi driver parked across the street, an incident locals I recounted this to later found hard to believe, considering how polite everyone seems in Copenhagen.
Taxi driver: Screaming unintelligibly, possibly in Danish, something, something, assholes!
Me to James: Did he just call us assholes?
Me screaming back to driver: Are you talking to us?
Taxi driver: Motherfuckers, you don’t call a cab and take the bus!
Us: We didn’t call a cab. (I don’t even know how to call a cab in Copenhagen.)
Taxi driver: The bartender said you did! Motherfuckers!
Us: Um, no we didn’t. Call the bar back if you have a problem. (Would anyone actually get into a vehicle with someone who is yelling at them?)
Taxi driver: Motherfuckers!
Us: Hey asshole, come say that to our face. (I don’t think he was used to back-talking New Yorkers and this enraged him further.)
Taxi driver getting out of car: I’ll kick your ass. I’m going to kill you.
A fuck you, no fuck you shouting match ensued until he finally gave up and drove off.
It’s worth noting that absolutely no one is on the streets of Copenhagen at 1am–despite what anyone will tell you, it’s not a late-night city–and I never once saw a police officer in my whole week there. This was the first time it ever occurred to me that it’s worth knowing the 911 equivalent when in another country.
Was I carded? No, I’m not sure if they even do that in Denmark.
Age appropriate: Yes, though you may be the only woman over 35 in the place. -
Barred: Air Bar
When: Friday, 6:07pm
What did I drink? Bottle of Stella (?), gin and tonic ($8).
I came close to heaven once. In fact, it was around this time last year when I was inexplicably upgraded to business class on Emirates, on an Airbus A380, the double-decker with a real standalone bar (flat beds, showers, whatever) an amenity that seared itself into my brain the first time I saw the ad filled with multi-culti jetsetters. Alas, close doesn’t cut it. Being a flight between Dubai and Hong Kong, apparently not long-haul enough, the bar stood empty, unmanned, no sky party for the attractive and ethnically ambiguous.
The closest I’ve come since is the Air Bar in the Sutphin Blvd. AirTrain station/transit hub. There are a lot of wheeled carry-ons propped at tables, there are JFK workers drinking beer and shots while flirting with the bartender in Spanish as she periodically sings Shakira songs along with her iPod, and there are people like me who journeyed to the ends of Queens just for something different to do post-Independence Day, a staycation, if you will.
Tim Hortons occupies the adjoining space, so you can snack on Timbits while nursing a happy hour (5pm-8pm) Killian’s (which was sold out) or Coors (which no one wanted) and watching The Manhattan Project (teenage Cynthia Nixon) on the TV behind the bar.
Age appropriate? Sure, there was a cuspy woman sitting at the bar and another, clearly over 60, sitting nearby with a homemade sandwich and a bottle of V8.
Was I carded? No, but a young man who appeared to be barely out of his teens was, and then proceeded to hit on my 41-year-old friend. -
Barred: Pearl’s Social & Billy Club
When: Wednesday, 9:30pm
What did I drink? Gin and tonic, Maker’s Mark on the rocks (prices unknown, but not expensive)Do you ever feel possessive of something that matters to nearly no one? Neighborhood borders are the smallest stakes. I still have a sense of ownership for Ridgewood, Queens, my first NYC neighborhood, circa 1998-2000. (I even wrote a Village Voice snapshot a million years ago.) When people tell me (and they do) about how kids are now doing cool things there fifteen years later, I don’t think that they mean there are music venues and galleries in the Archie Bunker/Italian/Polish/Bosnian/Romany heart of Ridgewood, but closer to the Bushwick border, if not actually Bushwick, a strange reversal where claiming Queens grants cachet.
A friend and former coworker from my Ridgewood days, now also somewhere in her 40s, recently moved to “Ridgewood” and had mentioned Pearl’s as a local bar of sorts (three L stops away in Bushwick proper, this leads me to believe that Ridgewood still lacks a substantial hipster element, despite reports to the contrary). A seed was planted.
And then I really had to see for myself after reading a Yelp review (sure, I’ll consult the site for questions of atmosphere and tone–never food) containing this troubling bit: “Plenty of dirty hipsters – old ones! Like, peeps in their mid thirties. Mmmmm, come ‘ere gramps." No grammas?
No. There were tattoos, cocktails in mason jars, muscle shirts, beer-and-shot drinkers, mostly men (and to be fair, a solo young lady ordering Fernet) and an androgynous butt rocker that excited me more when I thought it was a woman emulating ’70s-era Jodie Foster.
It was certainly not "Berry Hill;” bros and tourists aren’t treating Flushing Avenue like Bedford quite yet, and the rash of recent muggings targeting oblivious bar patrons only emphasizes how in flux the neighborhood is.
Pearl’s is probably the closest bar if you decide to hit up alcohol-free Bun-Ker or Western Beef, so it does have that going for it.
Age appropriate? For Bushwick, perhaps, where an older crowd means 31.
Was I carded? Yes, indeed. And the man sitting outside on a stool should’ve been a giveaway; grown-up bars do not need to ward off underage drinkers.Photo at Pearl’s: Lauren Carol Smith via Bedford + Bowery
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Barred: Spuyten Duyvil
When: 10:47pm, Saturday
What did I drink? Dieu du Ciel Revenante Smoked Porter, $9; Single Cut 18 Watt IPA, $6Nilsson. Destroyer. Man music for a beer bar that’s not really all that beer geeky. People, i.e. couples and groups, just go for the backyard seating.
I had written off the entire place when an hour or so in, a friend (a previously unmentioned 40-year-old–apparently, I know more neighborhood old-timers than I thought) clearly on a date, passed by my stool. She was with a visiting Italian gentleman in his early 30s, it turned out.
Apropos of nothing: If I ran a bar, I would put on Duran Duran’s Tiger Tiger as the let’s close this place down music. It would work as a dog whistle to the aged and a repellent to the cool. In other words, there would be no stragglers at 4am.
Age Appropriate? There’s nothing overtly inappropriate about Spuyten Duyvil…apart from the ages of 98% of the clientele. You could sip a beer unnoticed, no problem, unless you wanted to be noticed. Bringing a younger foreigner might be the only remedy.
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Barred: Roebling Tea Room
When: Tuesday, 9:29pm
What did I drink? One Manhattan (unsure of price)Despite the name (it put me off for quite some time) Roebling Tea Room is more restaurant than café. It’s not really a drinking establishment either, but there are a sufficient number of eaters and drinkers sitting on stools that the bar area is more than a holding pen.
There was a finance dude in a pristine ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots who insulted the bartender’s intelligence while thinking he was complimenting her beauty, then later slipped her his number (I think—hope—she wasn’t having any of it) which seems exactly what a 30-ish bro dressed like J.R. Ewing in Williamsburg would do.
The bar clientele was more motley than I’ve come to expect for the area, as if partially made up of lost walk-ins. Steely Dan, a persistent aural neighborhood presence, would seem to indicate a certain level of comfort for the older set, but the adult male in his 50s with thinning hair seemed out of place (he may have been a P.O.M., a.k.a. parent of a millennial). So too, the mid-30s gent with a leather jacket and dangly earring. That was more a matter of wrong decade than physical place, though.
Age appropriate? I really don’t know. My first instinct is a yes, though the masculine vibe, maybe not typical, further clouded the lack of grown women issue.
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Barred: Iona
When? Friday, 4:05pm
What did I drink? Mother’s Milk stout, $6; an indeterminate IPA bought for me (no, not by a stranger).I have discovered the secret to Williamsburg drinking for oldsters and it is as dependent on having nothing going on in the late afternoon as a poor unemployed millennial (or a twentysomething trust-funder, depending on your level of crotchety-ness). Ok, no secret, just start drinking earlier. Many neighborhood bars don’t open until 5pm while Iona, god bless them, starts serving at 1pm.
I may have been the first to set foot in the inviting backyard on a Friday, but the neighboring table was quickly filled by a Caitlin Moran-esque woman, but blonde and definitely over 40. She gave me the side-eye, surveying the early Friday scene, lamenting to her seltzer-drinking gray-templed male companion about the area “tourists, hipsters and college kids” who pay rent who knows how. One sounds like less of a crank with a British accent, it turns out.
That’s another truth: where there is a high foreign factor (as is the case at Iona) age is often less of a constraint. Also, smoking is de rigueur.
By the way, shit can go down at Iona. Just the year before last, a normally mellow mid-40s friend (he’s in a twee band, for crying out loud) got into a fist fight there. I did not witness this first-hand, but it sticks with me.
Age appropriate? Two beers later, still light out, and three-fourths of the bar, outside and in, were over 40. Sure, some were men with white pageboys, but a high ratio, nonetheless. Does everyone go home by 8pm? Do they disco nap and go back out later as I unwisely did? If you start at 4pm, don’t restart at 8:30pm.