Where it is: 268 West Broadway, Boston, Massachusetts The bar and restaurant at Turf Supper Club. Plus, there's great music and a well-stocked game room. At Meyer's Porchlight, that means personable, clever bartenders mixing balanced, straightforward drinks. Meyer's joints have always gone easy on the chefy shenanigans and hardcore on service and hospitality. Why you're here: Though top restaurateurs have opened bars before, none have succeeded quite as brilliantly as Danny Meyer of Union Square Cafe and, of course, Shake Shack fame. Where it is: 271 Eleventh Avenue, New York, New York From there, it looks like these bars are the anti-Internet, bringing (young) people together and rebuilding a society, one martini or beer back at a time, that has kind of come apart at the seams. But when you're seated on a barstool, whether it's in Seattle or Sarasota, Salem or San Ysidro, that's not what it looks like. All of this while the media and the political class are hyperventilating about the irreparable decline of America. (In my years of visiting these joints, I've rarely seen anybody visibly intoxicated-tipsy, sure drunk, uncool.) The bartenders, their mustachioed, inked hipsterdom aside, are generally studious and hardworking (if perhaps too devoted to making things by hand that really don't need to be). They're putting their phones away (well, mostly), forgetting about the game, doing their best to act sober. People are paying double to drink in them, and they're not outraged. Because there's something going on in these new bars, particularly in the best of them, that needs more attention.įor one thing, these places are full. But here's the thing: This may be a case of the blood of heroes watering the tree of revolution. In New York and San Francisco and other places where real estate is expensive, the venerable, homey, and very human old dives are closing and these are opening instead. Today, this kind of bar numbers in the thousands, and you can find them in just about every town in the country. There weren't many of these places, but there were just enough to satisfy the rare cocktail enthusiast. That ten dollars would not get you bar snacks, a well-stocked jukebox, TV, Big Buck Hunter, darts, a greasy egg sandwich, or a basket of fries. What I didn't know was that I'd be reporting from the front lines of a revolution in how and where Americans drink.īack then, if you knew where to go in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and a few other towns, you could find a place where the young man or woman behind the bar would carefully crack the ice for your manhattan or El Presidente, precisely measure the ingredients and give them an elegant stir, strain the cocktail into a beautiful glass, and then charge you ten dollars. As the magazine's Drinks Correspondent, I was to be the pointman on the project. In 2005, my editors at Esquire came up with the idea of putting together a list of America's best bars-not the best new cocktail bars or sports bars or brunch bars or whatever, but the best bars irrespective of type.
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