Turn Down the Music, Keep the Lights Low…but Leave the Bottle

I can’t speak for every single cook out there, but I know I can speak for a lot of them when I say that after a busy dinner service the last place we want to end up is in bed. You can’t pull the emergency brake in your car after you’ve been doing 80 and just like a car, we need to shut down the machine slowly. We’ve been running around, on our feet all day and now that we’re finished we need a drink; but we’re not heading to a club, we want to end up somewhere dark and dank, and preferably in a state of disrepair.
I have a friend who, and god love her (and I do, she’s great…except when she’s inviting me to Chelsea), continually invites me to Pasha and Home/Guest House and Bungalow 8 and Cain and a whole slew of other West Side/Chelsea super-clubs packed with wanna-be Mafioso’s from Jersey, fake-titted 19-year olds from Long Island and enough man-tanned-tip-frosted men to make Boy George blush. Call me crazy, but when I finish a particularly busy dinner service and I’ve been on my feet for eleven hours and I stink like Kevin Smith after a spin class; the last place I want to end up is inside some airplane hangar, munching four tabs of X, trancing out in a tank top and two glow sticks, holding a $22 drink and yelling in the ear of the person next to me because the music is too loud.
Instead, I like to spend my nights at the dark end of a dark bar. Where the bartenders all know me, usually there’s no bouncer to squeeze past and no jerk-off with a clipboard and an undeserved sense of entitlement. I can walk in the door of my old haunt, take a seat and either have my usual (Maker’s Mark on the rocks) placed in front of me, or have the bartender ask me if I want something different…to which the answer is almost always, no.
Why spend money and deal with hassle, when you can end up in a place where the booze is cheap, the conversation is (when it’s not nonsensical and rambling) usually equal parts snarky and intelligent, and the doors don’t close until the bartender says so. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where the real fun is anyway. Because in an environment like that, you truly never know what’s going to happen. I know I’m walking out of Cain with at least $140 fewer dollars in my pocket than when I walked in there, I know that! But I have no idea what’s going to happen when I walk in the door to one of my favorite haunts. I have on many a night, walked into my 5th Street bar, intending on, “only staying for one or two drinks,” only to peel myself off a friends’ couch the next morning…or worse. But in the hours I should’ve been sleeping, I probably met: a movie star, an author, a bona fide drunk, a circus midget, college kids, a chef, a stripper, a line cook, a business man and a gentleman who has a “cash business.” And I probably also learned a few things I didn’t know before. Things I wouldn’t have learned standing packed like a sardine, drinking a cranberry with a splash of vodka and listening to the thumping sounds of DJ Suchandsuch.
I’m sure I sound a little like a cranky old man…“just nod your head and give him his can of Metamucil”…but a cooks work is hard work. We age ourselves enough without having to deal with the added pressures of Clipboard Nazi’s, snooty bartenders and nosy bathroom attendants. Yes, thank you for turning the water on for me and squeezing soap into my hand and handing me a towel…perhaps when I have to go again you can unbutton for me! I deal with enough crap that makes me a little nuts during my day, so I’m not putting up with much of anything when I leave the restaurant and sit at a bar.
So if you’re looking for me, or my buddy Dopp (you’ll be hearing about him, I promise), you can skip the West Side clubs and seek out some place small and dark. We’ll be the guys sitting under the flickering light bulb; hunched over a glass of bourbon and vodka, respectively; while we argue the merits of braising over baking and ranting about a “screwed up” ticket that came out of the machine seven hours ago…eager to do it all over again tomorrow.