BlackBook Magazine

A sable, a mink, and a chinchilla walk into a bar. Bemelmans Bar, at the Carlyle Hotel. Sable says to the mink, “Should we have another?” And the mink says, “No, I really should be going.” The chinchilla orders a gin and tonic. We don’t get it, but then we’re unused to the altitude, high up on 76th street. Our brandy arrives, neat, in a prime tumbler, somehow accent-lit, and there are cashews and, looking around, everything is right in the world–this one, anyway.

There is canned jazz music tonight, where Woody Allen has been known to blow unsociably into a clarinet, as opposed to the room-lighting late Bobby Short’s “million dollar smile” at the baby grand. Bemelmans is old but attracts all generations of New York’s Social Register, shadowed by Ludwig Bemelmans’s mural, “Central Park.” On the way out we overhear, “Who knew an anesthesiologist would be such a pain in the ass,” not surprising from a red fox.

Not far away, really, the King Cole Bar, past the piano player at the St. Regis, is one of the best places in the city to spend $23 on a drink. The mural here, Maxfield Parrish’s “Old King Cole” (more the one from Essex, rather than the Northern Welshman, if there was such a man) reminds us that “merry” means “drunk” and that his shifty-looking jesters probably weren’t that funny otherwise. We feed copiously on wasabi snacks, but not the pretzel bits. Around the lobby, we peek in on Alain Ducasse’s new Ardour. Asked if we have reservations, we say, “No, it seems perfectly nice, but we’re pressed for time. Rain check.”

Outside, the snow so enthusiastically greeted by the citizenry, has turned to rain, and everything has gone to shit. We walk.

Two things, mainly, draw us always to the hotel bar. One, the transience. Two, the bartenders, who tend to be well invested in their position–often enough with 30, 40 years of service. Furthermore, hotels have “Beverage Managers,” meaning competent mixology abounds.

The Intercontinental (also The Barclay, and New York’s oldest operating premises) confuses desirable transience with interminable “tourism,” with CNN blaring all over the place. Gone are the nights of the Round Table at The Algonquin, but it still has drinks, and that cat that stares at you. It’s decent with the peanuts and so forth, and there’s the Oak Room Cabaret, if you go in for that sort of thing.

At first, the Royalton’s bar seems situated uncomfortably close to its entrance, but that can be good for the odd emergency cocktail. We’re over missing the old place–the staff here deserves high marks, as far as we’re concerned.

The bar at the B & B-style Roger Smith Hotel, Lily’s, intrigues us in spite of being a bit heavily brothel-red, as does the bar at The Library Hotel–its rooms organized by subject, and the Dewey Decimal System–but a patron was “espousing” in there on a subject that tends to make us Irish-up.

The W’s bar at its Union Square locale has the most vital thing going for it. It is two blocks from our office. 

The gentrification of the Lower East Side turned a corner a few years back, from incongruity into relative absurdity, with the appearance of the Rivington Hotel, but its “biomorphic egg” entryway is inviting. The first floor bar doesn’t do much for us, but upstairs the much smaller Marcel Wanders-designed bar, we like fine. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the tenements-turned-condos and a billowy chandelier over the pool table replaces the usual Miller High Life bug-light. “We get all kinds in here,” says bartender Stephan, with a sarcastic Dutch-South African edge. “Everyone from snobs to Euro-trash,” on whom he happily unloads $5,000 bottles of Krug. The more fiscally-conscious types drink Bee Stings, Steeplechases, and Dark and Stormys.

Really, though, all we want to do is head back to the splendors of the big game antlers and too-low leather chairs by the fireplace at the Bowery Hotel, or as we call it, “home.”