There is an abundance of Bars and Cafes in New York, within 200 metres of our apartment there’d be around 20-30 small bars or cafes. There’s not much difference between them with a bar having an actual bar where people sit along and a café not having one. They both sell alcohol and coffee and serve food. In fact food seems to be the main focus as you often have to tell them you’ve only come for a drink before you are landed with menus, cutlery, ketchup and mustard in front of you.
Drinks here aren’t cheap by Aussie comparison. It’s around $7-$8 for a schooner and around the same for a spirit, add $1 per drink tip (customary) and it gets expensive. Most bars/cafes don’t use nip pourers so if you want a weak spirit drink asking for a half nip of vodka with orange and cranberry is likely to be misinterpreted as half a glass of vodka. Buying spirits here by the bottle is very cheap. We bought 2 x 1 litre bottles of Bacardi Gold, duty free, after the Caribbean Cruise for a total of $19 (not each, total, less than $10 a bottle) so you get your money’s worth in alcohol content if that’s what you are after.
America is not the culinary capital of the world. Cheese and Chips (fries actually) seem to dominate, broccoli seems to be the only green they serve and if they do serve green beans or asparagus they come deep fried, yes they turned them into fries. The meal serves are particularly large so we find ourselves ordering one dish and sharing and that’s usually enough most times. I must say I particularly like their slow roasted, smoked, fall off the bone ribs.
While these small bars/cafes may seat up to 30 people they often only have one unisex toilet so you see people standing in line waiting to go to the loo in the café. They would not get a liquor license in Australia with this arrangement.
Finding a good beer is also a challenge as they seem to have a different understanding as to what is a pale ale and a lager. Even the beer will be called a ‘Pale Ale’ but when you see it there is nothing pale about it. It looks and tastes like a lager so for most bars I have tended to stay with the known brands like Stella and Guinness as it is also common to have beer served with no froth and to all effects flat. Some of these little Bars also don’t have temprites with beer coming straight from the keg in the coolroom to the glass with no refrigeration. This is OK as long as the line is not too long or you can end up with warm beer with what is in the line outside the coolroom.
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Overall they’re nice places as you almost always strike up a conversation with a New Yorker and swap stories. They have a word here that is pronounced differently depending on the context. The word is Houston. So Houston, Texas is pronounced as we do ‘Hyu-ston. But there is a major street here called Houston Street and it is pronounced ‘house-ton’. We tried to tell a taxi driver where we were going with reference to this street and he had no idea until we showed it to him in writing and he quickly corrected our poor English (he was Indian and pronounced it Austin) Oh well!
One of the interesting bars was O’Hara’s Irush Pub which we found after we left the 911 Memorial.
One of the barmen, a guy about 60 was working and we asked if he had worked on the day of 911. He said he was due to start at 11am that morning but nobody could get near the place, 911 happened around 9am. He said a lot of the pubs customers came there for lunch, dinner or just drinks after work. He said he had lost around 40 good friends and colleagues. Very sad. He sold the T shirts for $10 (almost cost as he did not want to make any money from 911).