This piece might make me look like an old boozer, but what the hell. I appreciate a nice red wine and fine whisk(e)y, and enjoy good beer, preferably hoppy, but I like society while tippling and luckily have not descended into daily day drinking while being more or less stuck alone in my apartment for the past 18 pandemic months. That being said, I have been reminiscing about my liquor-fueled adventures over the years, which are modest by Hemingwayesque standards, but my own. I’ve been offered Spanish fly in a roadside dive outside Henderson, Kentucky, and have shared fermented mares’ milk in a ger in Mongolia. I’ve sampled local maotai in villages throughout Guizhou and Yunnan provinces in China (including that offered by the ladies of the matriarchal Mosuo society of Lugu Lake, bless them). I’ve enjoyed the closely-guarded-recipe family liqueur in a Cameroon restaurant in Paris, and have toasted the memory of my mother with my brother Terry’s lethal moonshine, which he cooks up in his shed in Pennsylvania. I’ve been chatted up, while ordering mojitos, by a Cuban local in Santa Clara who knew the name of every member of the 2012 San Francisco Giants team. I’ve stumbled thirstily into a pub while traveling with a friend in Mount Mary, Australia, to be greeted by a barman wearing a bra made of coconuts and a grass skirt who was presiding over a bachelor party (not stag), to which we were warmly invited. I’ve enjoyed local brandy from La Mancha, and have tasted kava kava, homemade absinthe (before it was again legalized), milk vodka, and poteen. There’s no end to the raw materials that humans can turn into inebriating beverages: so much more to try!
But I digress, as this essay is ostensibly about various places I’ve found convivial to enjoying a drink or two with a good friend, or a compatible work colleague, or even a stranger. So here we go.
When I was growing up in South Plainfield, New Jersey, Doc and Tim’s was a short hike through some woods and a storm sewer tunnel underneath Tompkins Avenue. It had been a tavern since the racetrack was operating nearby in the 1920s, and went through many name changes. We used to sled down the hill in the winter, and the adults in our world occasionally let us tag along when they dropped inside for a beer or a Manhattan. The other place I recall being admitted into as a kid was the Lakeside Tavern, where my father and his fellow Junior Baseball League coaches wound down after baseball games. (My brothers played, and I was one of the first batch of Small Fry cheerleaders as well as Miss Junior Baseball in 1961. Don’t ask.)
East Lansing was a dry town when I was in collage at Michigan State University. That did not stop us from drinking, but we had to do it in dorm rooms, frat houses, canoes (thanks, VP!), and the back seats of cars — or travel to Lansing, Haslett, Okemos, or other nearby towns with more reasonable laws. The Coral Gables, a venerable establishment just across the town border and hence in possession of a liquor license, was where most MSU students got their first legal drink after turning 21. Back in the day, the Gables sometimes had dancing and live music from bands that may have actually gotten famous, as did bars in Lansing such as Grandmother’s.
Rogues❜ Gallery of Watering Holes
After graduation I was sentenced to live in Evansville, Indiana, for reasons that are not worth taxing the reader. Here, our favorite drinking destination was the Dogtown Tavern, located in the Ohio River bottoms and sometimes accessible only by motorboat during the spring floods. We would lunch there on dry BBQ (the local style) and beer on Fridays, and then spend the rest of the day sobering up in the trailers with the lab rats (these are actual rats), as our boss was allergic and we knew he would not come and look for us. The only other cool place in Evansville was the House of Como. We did not frequent the bar, which according to rumor was mostly a pickup place for truckers doing the Chicago–Florida run on Highway 41. We came for the fresh flatbread and kibi nea, as House of Como was owned by a Lebanese couple who made fantastic food (eschewed by locals who blanched if you ordered a hamburger medium rare). Although a bit off the beaten path, the House of Como was easy to find as the Christmas decorations, with a huge Santa on the roof, were never removed and always lit up.
I escaped Indiana and went to grad school in Hawaii. There, courtesy of more-seasoned fellow Biology TAs like my friend John, I was introduced to the concept of pupu bars and the Kuhio Grill, close to campus and our house in Moilili and second home to University of Hawaii students. There was a procedure to follow. Your group would order a round of drinks (Primo was the only choice), pay with a large bill, and leave the change on the table. This would alert the waitress that you were planning to tip, and she would bring you plates of food. The more you drank — and if she approved of you — the better the pupu offerings brought to your booth. Drinks at the Kuhio Grill made many a dinner for us poor grad students. I heard the public health department closed the place down sometime after I left, sadly.
I lived on the Monterey peninsula for a few years but didn’t spend much time in bars. We did enjoy an occasional beer at Flora’s in Cannery Row when we hung out down there, catching movies at the Dream (where I saw Star Wars during its initial run) or the 812. Flora’s was named for Flora Wood, the brothel keeper immortalized in Steinbeck’s novels under several other names, and decorated in elaborate bordello style although it was not the actual location of the original establishment.
Boulder, Colorado, my next settled stop, was not the microbrew heaven it is now; Boulder Beer was the only local brewery and the spectre of Coors loomed over most of the state. A colleague in the Chem department lived next door to Tom’s Tavern on the downtown mall. Together with Gordon and his crew of TAs — all of whom were dangerously attractive — I spent many an evening at Tom’s, consuming burgers and beers between bouts of grading Chem 100 exams and going to parties or midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For great live music, there was the Blue Note, where my friend Mike introduced me to New Wave, an affliction from which I have never recovered. I have no regrets. A bit more whimsical, perhaps, is the Alferd G. Packer Grill, probably the only on-campus eatery named for a convicted cannibal and famous for the annual Packer Day festivities (which included lookalike, pie eating, and raw meat tossing contests). Tom’s and the Blue Note are no more; and although CU Boulder’s student center eatery has kept the name, the updated and upscaled restaurant means that Alferd G. Packer no longer glares at diners from a mural on the wall with the words of the ballad detailing his grisly history.
I then moved to San Francisco where I’ve been iiving for 35 years. SF is a great drinking town, and I’ve been to a lot of bars: historic drinking spots, tiki bars, Irish pubs, gay bars, swanky private clubs, hotel lobby bars, sports bars, sleazy music venues, Art Deco destinations, old man bars, trendy wine bars, brew pubs, neighborhood bars…. I doubt I have been to 10% of the drinking establishments in the City. I like my local dive bar, Hockey Haven, just a few blocks away and owned by a lesbian couple who are delightful. I miss the Tee Off, a few more blocks in the other direction that had a huge collection of tacky decorations but surprisingly excellent food. (It’s been replaced but it’s just not the same.) Here’s a local secret: you can get much better and cheaper beer at the Giants ballpark if you detour into the Public House just inside the Willie Mays Gate and buy your brews there. (Ask for a plastic cup, and say hello to Mary, who usually works the door that lets ticket holders back into the ballpark.)