"Bar Tab" 's Last Call?

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

Looks like “Bar Tab” is kaput. The last one was Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: The Uncommons,” in the November 19 New Yorker. Since then, there’ve been five straight issues sans “Bar Tab.” I miss it. I miss the fabulous cocktails: Diamond Reef’s The Penichillin, Et Al’s The Fuck You Steve, The Penrose’s Baby Zombie, Camp’s The Dirty Girl Scout, Rose Bar’s Notorious Nude, Existing Condition’s popcorn-infused rum-and-Cokes, Primo’s signature vodka Martini, “served with an anchovy skewered under an olive” (Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: Primo’s”), on and on. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about them. 

I miss the vivid bar descriptions: “Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool.” Remember that? It’s from McKenna Stayner’s wonderful “Bar Tab: Super Power.” Earlier this year, a “Bar Tab” appeared that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writings: Elizabeth Barber’s “Bar Tab: Ophelia.” Here’s a taste: 

At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want. 

I miss “Bar Tab” ’s sensuous details. For example:

Lattes are served with delicate feathers etched in foam; the music is unobtrusive; and the soft glow from teardrop-shaped fixtures stipples drinkers’ faces with chiaroscuro.  [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Cocoa Bar”]

With eyes closed, one might mistake a flute of the honey-hued jasmine variety for a very dry prosecco, save for the intense floral perfume that lingers after each sip. [Wei Tchou, "Bar Tab: 29B Teahouse"]

Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly. [Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab: Wassail”]

I miss all that great stuff. Please, New Yorker, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me “Bar Tab” will soon be back, intoxicating as ever.     

Top Ten "Bar Tab" Drinks of 2017

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

If you relish “Bar Tab” drink names, as I do, you’ll likely appreciate the Baby Zombie and the Fuck You Steve, among other alcoholic highlights of 2017. These eminently drinkable concoctions, plus eight others, make up my Top Ten “Bar Tab” Drinks of 2017. Enjoy!

1. The Ancient Mariner (“Rum, grapefruit liqueur, lime”: Wei Tchou, “Cape House,” July 10 & 17, 2017).

2. The John Campbell’s Martini [“And a John Campbell’s Martini (twenty-five dollars) was smooth, with sumptuous olives”: Colin Stokes, “The Campbell,” June 19, 2017].

3. The Royal Mile (“Vodka, a grapefruity rhubarb purée”: Talia Lavin, “Highlands,” July 24, 2017).

4. The Starring Angelo (“In which oodles of Campari are mixed with bourbon and Italian vermouth”: Nicolas Niarchos, “Et Al.,” August 28, 2017).

5. The Penichillin [“Diamond Reef’s signature cocktail harks back to a darling of New York mixology: the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), invented by the co-owner Sam Ross when he worked at Sasha Petraske’s Milk & Honey, and now a classic worldwide. Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine”: Wei Tchou, “Diamond Reef,” May 1, 2017].

6. Willie’s Frozen Coffee (“A decadent caffeine and whiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson”: David Kortava, “Skinny Dennis,” April 17, 2017).

7. The Moga (“The drink is very spirituous, comprising Japanese whiskey, rum, and aged plum liquor”: Wei Tchou, “Bar Moga,” May 22, 2017).

8. The Fuck You Steve (“Radiates with mezcal, pineapple, and Campari”: Nicolas Niarchos, “Et Al.,” August 28, 2017).

9. The Three Hour Kyoto Negroni (“Sitting permanently atop the counter is a tall and intricate Japanese cold-brew apparatus, in which the makings of a Negroni drip slowly through freshly ground coffee”: David Kortava, “Kobrick Coffee Co.,” September 4, 2017).

10. The Baby Zombie (“Applejack, pineapple rum, absinthe, served in a mug with the likeness of a glaring bird”: Talia Lavin, “The Penrose,” November 27, 2017).

May 1, 2017, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoy Mark Ulriksen’s vivid baseball covers immensely. This week’s issue features a dandy. Titled “Strike Zone,” it’s a close-up of a scene at home plate: a wide-open-mouthed umpire is calling a strike; a wide-open-mouthed Red Sox batter is expressing dismay; and a wide-open-mouthed Yankee catcher, holding the ball in his mitt, looks ecstatic.

2. “Goings On About Town: Art” says of Maureen Gallace’s paintings, “Like the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, her work generates power from reticence.” It’s an interesting observation. But Bishop also had a keen eye for detail. As Bonnie Costello says in Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), “Her eye delights in the particular.” The same can’t be said for Gallace’s paintings. They efface detail. In this regard, the analogy with Bishop’s poems seems tenuous.

Maureen Gallace, "Summer House / Dunes" (2009)

3. “Goings On About Town: Night Life” says of Alan Broadbent,

He’s played the role of the best man for years now, both as the pianist for Quartet West—the celebrated ensemble led by the late, great bassist Charlie Haden—and as an A-list studio arranger and conductor. But Broadbent also deserves considerable attention for his work as a probing stylist who deftly balances the rhapsodic and the propulsive.

I agree. Listen to him play George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” on his 2005 album ’Round Midnight. It’s the most intense, swinging, gorgeous rendition of that great song you’ll ever hear.

4. Wei Tchow’s piece on Diamond Reef is classic “Bar Tab,” right up there with Nicolas Niarchos’s “Dutch Kills.” Both pieces mention the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), my favorite cocktail. Tchow refers to a witty Diamond Reef variation – the Penichillin: “Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine.”

March 27, 2017, Issue

I have to say I’m not crazy about any of the pieces in this week’s issue. But there are at least three sentences in which genuine inspiration appears to be present:

Strobe lights flashed on the placid face of the patron pink-bowed cat, which beamed down from the ceiling. [Wei Tchou, “Bar Tab: 100 Fun”]

Politics percolate in evocations of social class and function, with verisimilitude tipping toward the surreal in, for example, a set that suggests at once a beauty parlor, a medical facility, and a prison. [Peter Schjeldahl, “What’s New?”]

“Beauty and the Beast” is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue. [Anthony Lane, “Pretty and Gritty”]

April 18, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I relished this "Goings On About Town" detail plucked from National Museum of the American Indian’s “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains”: “Plains artists, short on paper, used to draw on discarded ledger books. So does Dwayne Wilcox: in one drawing, a woman, resplendent in a Lakota robe, holds a smartphone that reads ‘r u at da pow wow.’ ”

2. And I enjoyed this line from “Goings On About Town” ’s note on Haris Epaminonda: “Think of her wooden fish regarding itself in the mirror as one of our primordial ancestors, contemplating evolution in our era of selfie-drenched narcissism.” (This is the newyorker.com version; the magazine version erroneously refers to “his rubber” fish.)

3. And I loved this “Goings On About Town” comment on photographer Scott Alario: “Alario reveals marvels in life’s minutiae, whether it’s steam curling up from a forkful of pasta or coolant streaming into a car’s radiator.”

4. Perhaps the most sheerly pleasurable sentence in this week’s issue is found in Wei Tchou’s "Bar Tab: Tomi Jazz": “On a recent Saturday night, as oil lamps flickered throughout a full house, a woman in a light-blue kimono nodded her head to the Standard Procedures, featuring the L.A.-based saxophonist Ray Zepeda, which was closing its set with a lively rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ ”

5. My takeaway from Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing "Unnatural Selection" is the notion of “assisted evolution” – human intervention in natural processes with the aim of improving corals’ and trees’ chances of survival. Kolbert’s description of donning a wetsuit made me smile: “The only suit in my size was an extra-thick one; getting into it made me empathize with any animal that’s ever been eaten alive by a boa.”

6. I was pleased to see Wayne Koestenbaum quoted in Hilton Als’s "Immediate Family." Koestenbaum is one of my favorite writers. I’m looking forward to his new book Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations.

7. Ariel Levy’s "Beautiful Monsters," an account of artist Niki de Saint Phalle's wild life, contains this gorgeous surreal line: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.”

8. I’m allergic to TV, but I read Clive James’s "Thrones of Blood" anyway because … well, because it’s by Clive James, one of the great essayists of our time. “Thrones of Blood” is terrific! Here’s a sample:

From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of “The Wire” all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the imagined world being revealed to us for our delight really is an astounding achievement, even though we will always feel that we need an excuse for doing nothing else except watch it.

I could quote this piece endlessly. Savor this strange beauty: “John Hurt as Caligula in ‘I, Claudius’ ate the baby from his sister’s womb, whereas all Joffrey does is shoot a prostitute with his crossbow.”

9. I’m a fan of Dan Chiasson’s criticism. His "Mind the Gap," a review of Rosemarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening, in this week’s issue, is excellent. In one of its best passages, Chiasson quotes a section of Waldrop’s “Hölderlin Hybrids” and beautifully analyzes it:

Waldrop’s poems aren’t “visual” in the sense that paintings are visual, but they feel as though they had been applied to paper, not simply written down, and they reward the kind of scrutiny we give to discrete visual surfaces. In a section from “Hölderlin Hybrids”:

Monet writes a friend he’s painting “the instant.” Succession stopped at success. A light his palette gives off. And color subdivided into into. On the retinal surface. Ground so fine. In each ray of light. Move motes of dust.

The passage is slyly mimetic of the painter’s process, his “succession” of brushstrokes suspended, like the word “succession,” when he reaches “success.” The halting sentence fragments are like synaptic flashes as the image passes from “palette” to “color,” from color transformed (“into” this or “into” that) to the eye and then to the gallery, where, aeons later, dust motes intervene.

That last sentence is inspired!