Boozehound - Jason Wilson [14]
The classic cocktail trend led to the rise of faux speakeasy bars, which began in places like New York and San Francisco but soon enough trickled down to most other cities. Certain conventions of the faux speakeasy quickly became universal (and soon thereafter risked cliché). There’s usually no sign, and often some kind of “secret” entrance: through a phone booth in a hot dog shop (PDT, aka Please Don’t Tell, in New York); through a side entrance of an Irish fish-and-chips shop marked by a blue light (PX in Alexandria, Virginia); below street level through a black unmarked door under a sign that reads “Liquids” (Franklin Mortgage & Investment Co. in Philadelphia). The speakeasy bartender’s uniform is an old-timey vest and tie and maybe sleeve garters; beards and tattoos and maybe a man-bun; and possibly a waxed mustache, depending on how much pre-Prohibition role-playing is going on. Some ironically retro rules (“Gentlemen must remove their hats”; “No roughhousing, horseplay, tomfoolery, or high jinks”) will usually be listed on the menu. Other, nonironic rules, like “You can’t stand at the bar” or “You need to be on the list” will be enforced by a hipster in skinny jeans at the door. Most importantly, at the faux speakeasy you will find almost no cocktails with vodka. Your cocktails will be handcrafted and wonderful, but they will also sport double-digit price tags.
Now, I love many of the bartenders who work in faux speakeasies across the country. Many are my friends, and speakeasy bartenders such as Jim Meehan at PDT, Todd Thrasher at PX, Derek Brown at the Columbia Room in D.C., and the guys at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco make some of the best cocktails you can find. Their obsession with the pre-Prohibition era is genuine and logical. The cocktails of that era are revered for a reason. Prohibition basically destroyed the craft of bartending, making the profession illegal and forcing bartenders into other lines of work. And make no mistake: bartenders prior to Prohibition were viewed as craftsmen, akin to pastry chefs or cheese makers or chocolatiers. Whether the puritans among us like it or not, cocktails are traditional American foodways. But Prohibition irrevocably broke the cultural chain of bartending knowledge. Everything horrible about contemporary drinking could reasonably, if indirectly, be blamed on that broken chain. Day-Glo premade mixes: Blame it on Prohibition. Bartenders forgetting bitters in your Manhattan: Prohibition. The rise of those flavored vodkas: Yes, blame that on Prohibition, too.
Still, at a certain point, I have to roll my eyes. Faux speakeasies can very much resemble real, historic speakeasies, except for one thing: real speakeasies, operating from 1919 to 1933, were totally illegal and run by gangsters like Al Capone. That disreputable nature—the inherent seediness—of the operation was part of its allure. With the faux speakeasy, no one is worried about the Feds busting up the place; they’re merely concerned with keeping out the, you know, riffraff—that “uncool” crowd who might order Coors Light. The faux speakeasy clearly grows out of a nostalgia for the glamorous seediness of Prohibition. “Seediness has a very deep appeal,” Graham Greene famously wrote. “It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.” So if seediness itself is a form of nostalgia, then is the faux speakeasy an example of nostalgia for … nostalgia? This is the kind of thinking that leads one to drink way too many cocktails.
I believe something snapped for me during the run-up