The modern speakeasy is a paradoxical response to two needs: to feel one is doing something bad in a historically permissive society, and to pretend one is in the know when knowledge of everything is available to everyone. The Ranstead Room in Philadelphia, tucked away in an alley behind Market Street, remains for me the archetype of how a bar should look: with its velvety wallpaper, puffy seats, and racy pictures on the wall, you could imagine John Shaft settling into a booth to wind down. On a hot day, if I have a free hour or two, I still like to stop in at Raines Law Room in Chelsea, identifiable by a battered screen door and a porch light, where it’s cool, dark, and cozy, and their signature Whiskey Business cocktail is a beautiful blend of brooding booziness and heat. Mark’s Place in New York, where we had warm company and great drinks made by Alex Valencia, who has since gone on to become a renowned bartender and cocktail consultant. On one of our first dates, when we were still living on separate continents, my wife and I went to Please Don’t Tell, accessible through a hot dog shop on St. The modern speakeasy is a paradoxical response to two needs: to feel you’re doing something bad in a historically permissive society, and to pretend you’re in the know when knowledge of everything is available to everyone. It was a front for a so-called speakeasy called Paradiso. She consulted her phone: we should have known. My wife says that when the chalkboards appear, you know a city is over: they’ve figured out that catering to local tastes is less profitable than shilling cronuts, baos, ramen, and whatever else foodies in trendsetting cities thought was cool ten years ago. Yet the international design idiom of subway tile, black chalkboard, and white marble told us there was money behind it. We found a place called Pastrami Bar on Google, but when we went there, something didn’t add up: four or five seats at a short counter, an odd lack of ingredients on display. Everything was open Spain’s willful transformation into a glorified lemonade stand for anyone who can afford a Ryanair ticket meant it had become far too dependent on hospitality money to shut restaurants down, so if you didn’t mind a bit of hygiene theater-wiping your feet on a disinfectant mat, showing your vaccination record, scanning a QR code menu-you could go out without much worry of getting turned away without a reservation. The pandemic was a good time to be in Barcelona, perverse as it is to say it had been decades since the city felt normal, a place belonging to and defined by its residents as opposed to the hordes of tourists who make it almost uninhabitable. We were emerging from lockdown, and while my American passport had allowed me to travel back to the United States a few times for family reasons, everywhere in New York seemed closed, and I only passed through for a day or two anyhow on my way down South, where you could go out to eat, but, again, there was no decent pastrami. It started innocently enough, as a search for decent pastrami, an item not easily found in Western Europe.
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