My efforts to check out the New York bar scene have been contained to swanky places like Sway. Realizing this wasn’t hardcore enough, I decided to double my efforts, stepping way out of my comfort zone to check out a traditional Irish pub. This is how I ended up at Swift on East 4^th street between Bowery and Lafayette, known as one of the best places in the city to down a Guinness. Swift is just far away enough from the SoHo zone to attract a truly diverse crowd, without the tribal feel of the East Village places. The space is the definition of an old-time alehouse. You enter to see a long, winding bar, exposed brink, antique booths, beer on tap, comfort food on a black board and chalk menu, and most intriguing, an intricate wall mural of books and ghosts that looks like it could’ve been painted in the 1700s.

The pub’s named for Irish Jonathan Swift (you know, the guy who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, a book which gave my bizarre dreams about being in a world of tiny people from age six to eight). There’s the rowdy front room which the bar jaggedly sprawls through and a larger back room with picnic tables, ideal for parties of six or more. The bar’s renowned for its antique feel but not-antique sound system. Post-midnight, music was blasting at that perfect level – loud enough to dance wildly but not so loud that you couldn’t carry on complex conversations. In short, I discovered that bars were good places for meeting people. Shocker, I know. Here are some of the other bar etiquette ‘do and don’ts’ I picked up along the way:

DO order shots and beers at the same time while you have the bartender’s attention.

DON’T order tap beer in rowdy settings (higher chance of spillage than bottled beer).

DO offer to buy girls drinks at the bar or assist them in getting the bartender’s attention.

DON’T monopolize bar space if you’re not ordering. It’s not nice.

DON’T give up a bar chair/stool if you’ve managed to score one.

DO let it double as a storage facility for all your friends’ jackets.

DON’T dance on the bar, even if so inclined.

DO give feedback via tip.

DON’T eat the peanuts.

DO make a night of it and order bar food.

DO do shooters. Every bar has its own kind. Immerse yourself in the local culture.

DO buy your bartender shots. They appreciate the gesture.

DON’T hit on the bartender.

DO pay in cash to keep track of spending.

DON’T, if paying by card, forget to close your tab.

DO stake your claim on potential mates by making sure you’re the one to make out with them first.

DON’T do this in public.

The move my girlfriend pulled involved her and the cute guy we’d been talking to “going to the ATM to get cash.” I had no idea I’d just been ditched and kept pondering, “What’s taking them so long?”

Bar rules.

I’m still learning.

The good news: It’s a Holiday weekend coming up
The bad news: It’s forecast to rain every single day

The good news: It’s a Holiday weekend coming up
The bad news: Holidays make weird gray relationship even weirder (examples one and two)

The good news: You have extra time off
The bad news: You feel pressured to do something fabulous with it

The good news: You can leave the city for more than 48-hours
The bad news: So can everyone else and their cousin

The good news: Fourth of July fell on a Friday this year
The bad news: That means you need to be organized to leave Thursday, and Thursday’s, like, tomorrow

Panic ensues.

On a separate, slightly more serious note, an issue that’s been troubling my conscious has to do with charity as an excuse to party, and do these events actually raise any money?

This seemed the ultimate party question on everybody’s mind at Steve Nash’s charity event inside SoHo’s Replay store, which I attended exactly one week ago today. On the up side, snaps to Steve Nash for giving a hoot about charity. On the down side, it remained difficult to imagine the shindig would manage to break even since the event included:

2 stocked open bars

6 bartenders

15 attractive cocktail waitresses circling the crowd (my friend noted all the waitresses had legs and shins that looked like a female soccer player’s and asked if I thought they were selected for this exact purpose. I can picture the Craigslist open call ad now: ‘Seeking cocktail waitresses with soccer-esque shins for exclusive event.’)

Unlimited booze

Hamburgers

Mini hot dogs

Chips and guacamole

Vegetables

Quesadillas

Mini steaks

Vitamin water

Gourmet ice cream, and best of all,

Sushi in the shape of mini soccer balls.

Renting out SoHo’s Replay store and hiring a 20+ person wait staff must already have a hefty price tag, not to mention alcohol and food for two hundred people. Less than a dozen jerseys were auctioned off for around a $1,000.


Clearly, I’m missing something because in my mind the numbers don’t seem to add up. Yet I was always a dunce at math, so what do I know? If there is a way humanity can enjoy lux events inside SoHo designer stores while simultaneously helping kids in Africa, I’m all for it.

An additional plus about the fair weather aside from the obvious sun, spring hook-ups and sudden bouts of personal optimism, is the emergence of a new kind of party – the daytime party, which I’ve written about briefly here. Somehow, once a bathing suit is considered appropriate 24-hour clothing, it also becomes acceptable to start drinking all. day. long.

Let’s think about this.

In December, if a group of friends sat indoors around a television consuming alcohol from 12pm onward in a weekend long frenzy, moving from innocuous beer to wine to mojitos to deadly vodka shots all before dark, they’d be labeled as reclusive, depressed alcoholics. Yet switch December for June, put everyone around a swimming pool instead of a TV, throw some beef patties on a nearby griddle, and suddenly this kind of behavior is not only acceptable but encouraged. The scene no longer resembles a crybaby musical, but rather healthy, stylish adults making the most of the nice weather.

These bacchanalian events are usually enabled by the seemingly-innocent concept of a barbeque. Note that no one ever says, “Why don’t you come over and get sloshed with me tomorrow afternoon?” They say, “Why don’t you come over to my barbeque tomorrow afternoon?” which essentially means the same thing. Observe that daytime summer drinkers avoid the word “party,” lest it make them sound like the addict they truly are. Admitting you’re “partying” during the day is deemed immature and over-the-top. Yet there’s nothing wrong with friends getting together to eat. The fact that your friends group is in the hundreds and crates of alcohol have been purchased in bulk for the occasion is incidental. People need a beverage with their burger, right?

Hence why even hardcore winter drinkers will feel their liver convulse through the crash course that is the sunny barbeque months. And by barbeque I do mean party. If we define a party as a social gathering for pleasure or amusement, usually with music and drinking, what goes on summer afternoons poolside fits this description to a tee. And if you’re in a place like the Hamptons for example, the festivities continue into the clubs all night long. Instead of arriving at a club with three or four drinks in your system like you might in the city, you arrive with twenty-three drinks in your system with the insane expectation to consume the same amount of club alcohol. This helps explain why I’ve seen the most wasted partiers of my life in the Hamptons.

How to survive this seductive summer debauchery?

I’d say hold off on drinking until you’ve eaten at least something from the grill. Stick with light beer or sparkling wine for as long as possible. I’d also recommend not mixing your poisons, so going from champagne to wine to tequila-infused mojitos to beer to rum-infused mojitos to vodka, as I did Sunday afternoon, probably isn’t the best idea if you want to be functional at any point in the next 48-hours. Most importantly, hide your car keys in a flower bush and don’t try anything too crazy off the diving board. By August our communal tolerance will have gone up and the sinful summer barbeque won’t cause such wreckage…hopefully.

I recently found myself at One, the restaurant aside Gansevoort in Meatpacking which is the promoter pre-party dinner hub of the city. To explain what that means, you’ve gotta know that promoters often cut deals with New York City restaurants, bringing their hot entourage to eat for free before attending whatever club they’re herding people to that evening.

Why This Works: A Flow Chart (keep in mind I haven’t made a flow chart since eighth grade):

Generally speaking, it’s a promoter’s job to have hot chicks and guys who’ll buy tables at their beck and call –> For the most part, guys who buy bottle service work all the time (allowing them to afford bottle service) and being hard workers, don’t have a time to socially micromanage a glamorous entourage. –> Since partying at a table alone without a glamorous entourage is considered faux-pas and a major waste of alcohol, the hard workers decide to team up with a promoter who is, for all practical purposes, a species of middleman. –> On the opposite end of the spectrum, those who make up the glamorous entourage most likely can’t afford a table of their own, hence their decision to work with a promoter. –> To further entice the glamorous entourage to come out with them, promoters will offer perks like limo rides or free dinner at a trendy NYC restaurant pre-clubbing. –> Trendy NYC restaurants need good-looking patrons into order to retain their aforementioned status as trendy. –> Since a promoter already has a glamorous entourage that can’t afford trendy dinners at their disposal, the promoter offers their encourage to eat and drink for free beforehand at [insert trendy restaurant here] –> The restaurant gives away free food to the promoter and their group in exchange for what is essentially, product placement PR with humans. –> Theoretically, everybody wins.

I’m sure many variations of this formula exist, but this is its core function as I understand it. Many restaurants (more than I can list) work with promoters in this capacity, but I don’t think any participate as much as Gansevoort’s next door neighbor, One.

One has really uncomfortable seats and tables, insanely loud music, and mediocre food. At some promotional restaurant gigs, you actually see a menu and order whatever you choose. At most however, menus are a never presented and the server just brings out select appetizers and main courses for everyone to share family-style while boozing people up on a lot of champagne. A sample promotional dinner at One consists of:

-Unlimited wine and champagne (dangerous)

-A shared Caeser-like salad (pretty good)

-A shared quesadilla (pretty gross)

-A shared appetizer pizza (pretty satisfying)

-An odd chicken tapas thing (which I think I don’t like) and

-Shared steak with French fries and ravioli for the main course.

Not too shabby.

My qualm with One has nothing to do with the food, but rather the music level, which is so absurdly high you’d think you were eating in the middle of a concert or club, which essentially, you are. Promoter dinners take place at 10 or 10:30 since everyone has to be in the club around midnight. One, which doubles as a bar (hence the importance they be perceived as ‘trendy’) starts cranking up the volume to make the place feel like a discotheque at around the same time the promoter tables are sitting down to eat. You therefore often find yourself in the completely surreal experience of eating in silence with thirteen other people, listening to deafeningly loud party music. Carrying on a conversation is an impossibility and on my last visit, the unthinkable happened.

At 11:30 One went black. Black as in they turned all the lighting off, even in the dining area. The restaurant was darker than the inside of your average club, because at least your average club has fancy strobe machines and an expensive lighting system. Literally, none of us could see. Not each other. Not our food. It was like some creepy horror movie in which you suddenly find yourself at a vampires banquet in a dungeon.

I thought the whole thing was a joke and waited for them to play ‘Thriller’ and then turn the ambiance lighting back up – but no. It was a big finger in the face to anyone who was still eating, and even the non-promoter diners seemed pretty weirded out. I mean, this is New York. A lot of people sit down to dinner at 11:30pm. And I understand that One likes to think of itself as a lounge and therefore wants to create a party atmosphere to sell drinks to wasted people in ASAP, but why then bother having a restaurant?

More nightlife mysteries, unsolved.

part 1 here

About the chef: Our house had a sour-puss chef called M who hated the cruel circumstances he was forced to cook in. M was previously our host’s mother’s cook, before that, he cooked for two presidents. He now found himself in a houseful of forty drunk twenty-year-old and immature thirty-year-olds who’d happily eat Doritos indefinitely and didn’t know the difference between fennel and watercress. Most of the heated arguments centered around the fact that he’d prepare dinner to be served at 9 PM and no one would sit down until 11 PM. If cooking is your life’s passion and food needs to be served hot, I understand how this could be frustrating. M was also fielding questions 24-7 like:

Will you teach my how to make soufflé?

Have you seen my baggie of weed? Oh, are you making brownies? Because if you’re using it for that, that’s cool.

M will you make us Margaritas? I’ll get the blender. (Question asked at 10 AM)

That quiche you made for breakfast was better than the orgasm I had last night. I loved the bacon bits.

Can I lick the bowl?

(Drunk girl) Thank you SOOOOOO much. Can I give you a hug?

(Me watching oven timer) Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, cookies!

Can you call the liquor store and order fifteen more crates of Rose? Just tell them we’re averaging 23 bottles of champagne a night.

Your egg salad is seriously kicks ass, man.

Are you married?

Do shots with us! M, you have to do shots with us!

So upon further analysis, it didn’t surprise me at all that the chef was one of the crabbiest humans I’d ever met who scowled at our compliments as if we’d tossed dog poo at him. On the contrary, this guy deserves some sort of culinary award for cooking in extremely immature circumstances.

About Dune: Night number two we traveled to Dune, the nightclub I wrote about in disdain last year. Nothing’s changed.

Unlike Pink, Dune doesn’t boast an outdoor space. And while at Pink tables are a foot and a half apart, at Dune, they’re six inches apart. I’ve started calling Dune the sweat shop, because in essence, that’s all it is: A sauna in which you can never get comfortable and you’re constantly battling the person next to you for elbow space. The music brings a whole new meaning to the word cheesy.

The basic ambiance – the ropes, shells, tacky ceiling – all looks like a pirate theme in a dive bar. And I know we’ve gone beyond hoping for elegance in Hamptons clubs, but couldn’t we at least hope for something more than creaky, saw dusty, wood floors?

From my limited experience, Dune also seems to have the sloppiest partiers. Maybe patrons let themselves get too drunk to walk because they know at Dune falling down is an impossibility: The tightly packed crowd will hold you upright. One girl in the very center of the club swayed and spun around on top of a banquet like an unbalanced swivel chair, a dangerous accident waiting to happen.

Later, she poured an entire flute of champagne onto a boy (ex-boyfriend’s?) head below. He proceeded to wail and shake the champagne out of his long hair much like a wet dog shakes himself off after a swim.

So if you get off on that kind of thing at $5,000 a table with an extreme crowd and rowdy fun, Dune might be the place for you. Personally, I prefer to be somewhere a lot less sweaty.

We stayed a good forty-five minutes before piling back into our black vans and heading toward the house. There was a lot to prepare for since on Sunday we’d be hosting the house’s very first BBQ / house party of the summer.

To be continued…

Miss Model Behavior’s the nightlife writer for theBlaqlist.com. Feel free to post any nightlife comments or questions on our forum or contact her at MissModelBehavior@theBlaqlist.com

Saturday night I dressed up as if I were going to the Oscars since a friend of mine was having a black tie themed birthday party. I’ve written before about my strong dislike of costume requirements when going out. Isn’t being a girl with a thimble size closet, pathetic salary, trying to look modelesque in one of the most fashion forward cities in the world hard enough without additional complications?!

So usually I pooh-pooh events that require I waste extra brain cells figuring out how to not look not like a moron while also incorporating a theme like 80s, Egyptian or toga. Yet when the invitation for a black tie birthday party rolled around, I squealed in delight like an over-sugared child. Practically all women have a collection of prom / bridesmaids / wedding / opera gowns which we’ve only got to cavalier around in once. Any opportunity to debut them once again should be taken advantage of.

This story would have ended swimmingly if New York nights weren’t so utterly unpredictable. My initial plans for the evening ended up being hijacked and I found myself on a completely different social trajectory than a priorly anticipated.

Translation: I never made it to my themed birthday party uptown and was dressed in black tie all night for no reason.

This fashion mistake however, has a happy ending. While I remained bitter about detouring from my initial plan, the group of friends who kidnapped me insisted we go eat dinner at La Esquina. I’d munched on late-night tacos at this joint many times, but never gotten there early enough to consume an official meal at their secret, underground, overhyped restaurant.

All the fabulous rumors about the place proved true.

Once the restaurant’s makeshift bouncer radios down and gives you the go-ahead, you snake down a dark staircase and long corridor, until walking through the kitchen. The light is blinding and pots and pans clatter. Then you enter an underground space that clearly got an M.B.A. in ambience. It’s dim, candles glow, a fireplace crackles, the walls are gray and stone but unlike many restaurants that go for this theme, La Esquina didn’t feel like a Medieval dungeon.

I know technically this place is considered “over,” but to me, the guests looked swankier than most of the people I see on your average night out. Going to a place like this isn’t really about the food, but what I consumed was delicious anyway and the service was above average. Best of all, with the seductive lighting and underground yet elegant feel, La Esquina is one of the few places we could’ve gone where despite the fact that I was dressed to sing a solo at Lincoln Center, I fit in quite perfectly. This joint seem to encapsulate what’s great about New York. While everything’s superficial, nothing is as it truly appears. The outside of La Esquina looks like a dumpy diner.

The inside is mysteriously unexpected: A place where you could see anyone, anything could happen and you feel trendy in both a ball down and ripped jeans.

Rumors are out that Serge Becker is opening La Esquina in Miami at the Mondrian Hotel and Residences on a sunny, seaside, modern terrace - a venture that could not be more different from his current restaurant. How can both these institutions even share the name La Esquina? I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, I’m grateful places like this exist in Manhattan so that even a foolish girl accidentally wearing an evening gown doesn’t have to stick out like a sore thumb.

Upstairs on Broadway and Spring a.k.a. that secret clubhouse above Café Bari in SoHo, gave wasted downtowners, celebrities, and underage models a private space in which to party till dawn. Known as a ‘late night venue,’ they ran a super selective yet hassle free door (no lines!), and provide needed relief from Meatpacking and the 27th street strip. I’ve been an Upstairs frequenter and fan since its inception, and the fact that it’s become inevitably more commercial, especially on weekends, doesn’t detract from the fun.

There’s no snobby décor, so you actually can chill out. There are no cracked out cocktail waitresses teetering around in heels. The place just feels like someone’s ratty living room that you have the privilege of shaking your booty in all night long. It’s comfortable. And there are no door people screaming for you to “clear the sidewalk” or coat check girls abducting your jacket behind your back. And, the best part, as I wrote months ago in an article entitled Ode to Clubs With Food:

At around 3:30 A.M. Upstairs serves snacks. Mini hamburgers, pizzas, and the best freakin’ French fries with sauces that put McDonalds to shame. These snacks unquestionably save my life. Not only do they start soaking up the excess alcohol in my stomach making me feel more like a human being and less like a swirling ballerina in a perverse city version of the Nutcracker, but they’re delicious and Tapas-size so you never end up overeating … So this entry is my love ode, in incorrect poetic structure, to clubs with food. Because I don’t feel I ever fully appreciated this phenomenon.

My evil genius was onto something. Mere months later, Upstairs launched ‘Downstairs’ - not a bar or extension of the club, but a classic diner. In the ‘late night’ tradition of the venue, the diner’s open from 11 PM to 7 AM, so people who like to eat post-party will have someplace to go other than French Roast and L’Express. The quirk? Danny A., Matthew Isaacs and Jordan Harris decided to pay homage to New York nightlife by naming everything on the menu after Manhattan clubs and promoters, past and present.

The Marquee Mac “N” Cheese

Matt Assantwich (after promoter Matthew Assante): His food form translates into a chicken and mozzarella white wrap with a touch of chipotle mayo toasted to perfection

The Beatrice Pancakes: With poached pears marinated in red wine sauce with mascarpone cheese

Is anyone drooling yet?

I almost wish they didn’t keep vampire hours so I could enjoy the food sober. Almost everything comes with fries and the crowd favorite (which the doorman was eating in the middle of the street on my way out last night) seems to be the Mike St Pierre Steak Sandwich, which comes with sautéed onions and avocado.

Finally! A light at the end of the hangover tunnel!

Naturally, I remain insulted that I didn’t get a Model Behavior dipping sauce or onion ring named after me, but that’s okay. Despite my love of mini burgers, I guess it’s just not my time to be immortalized through diner food. Check it out and enjoy.

Miss Model Behavior’s the new nightlife writer for theBlaqlist.com. Feel free to post any nightlife comments or questions on our forum or contact her at MissModelBehavior@theBlaqlist.com