Boozehound - Jason Wilson [15]
Ask guests to dress in 1930s attire.
Make sure your guests “speak easy” in order to gain admittance to the event. Suggest a password for admittance to the event.
Hire a band or singer that specializes in music from the “Roaring 20s” or download period-specific jazz.
Provide a Great Gatsby dining experience by recreating specialized dishes from archived menus of the Waldorf-Astoria and the 21 Club in New York City.
Offer cocktails of the era.
Was it any surprise that the speakeasy trend quickly became so overdone that journalists and bloggers started referring to any new “top-secret” bar that evoked the Prohibition era as a “speakcheesy”?
Right around the time the term speakcheesy was coined, Washington, D.C., got its first faux speakeasy project, called Hummingbird to Mars. The name comes from a statement by Senator Morris Sheppard, an infamous Dry from Texas whose proudest accomplishment was that he helped write the Eighteenth Amendment, which ushered in Prohibition. Sheppard famously boasted, “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”
Hummingbird to Mars operated “clandestinely” on Sunday and Monday nights above a popular bar called Bourbon in the popular Adams Morgan nightlife district. As with any super-hush-hush speakeasy, media were tipped off to its opening well in advance. I arrived at Bourbon, rang a bell, and was let upstairs to a smaller private room. After the doorman dutifully made certain I was on the list, I received a delicious glass of classic Fisherman’s Punch (rum, cognac, lemon and lime juices, honey syrup, and grated nutmeg). The bartenders were gussied up in vests and sleeve garters, mixing superb classics such as the Corpse Reviver #2 (gin, Cointreau, Lillet Blanc, and absinthe) and the Blood and Sand (blended Scotch, Cherry Heering, orange juice, and sweet vermouth), and variations on the classic Sling (applejack, sloe gin, lemon juice, bitters, and simple syrup).
And then I was given this note, in an envelope:
Welcome to Hummingbird to Mars and thank you for finding us. By accepting a reservation you must agree to certain terms and any infraction will cause you to be unwelcome at our establishment.
If you are a member of the press/blogger/other media type person you are not permitted to write about our location or our operation in any way, shape, or form.
You are not allowed to disclose our address to anyone.
You may not take any photographs of the inside or outside of our bars.
Cell phone use will not be permitted within the establishment.
I sipped my drink for a moment. It was very tasty. But then I thought about this note, these rules. I looked around the bar, which was about half full with twenty or so people—all of whom obviously knew someone who knew someone. It was great that the bartenders wanted to expose people to new spirits and cocktails they’d never find in typical bars, but this whole faux speakeasy thing began to feel way too exclusionary to me. This suddenly felt like the wrong way to reclaim some golden pre-Prohibition era of drinking. And so I just stopped wanting to play along. Here’s what I did: I sent a text message to a friend (along with a photo of the bar) that read, “You should come over to [Popular Bar Named After a Whiskey Made in Kentucky], in Adams Morgan. We’re upstairs.” Then, the following week, I published this episode in my column in the Washington Post, essentially “outing” Hummingbird to Mars.
Had it been 1928, of course, I might have been shot by Al Capone’s henchmen with tommy guns. But since it was 2008, I was