The bar, in north Denver’s historic Cole neighborhood, channels Margaritaville chill and has a divey lack of pretension, even with owners Mary Allison Wright and McLain Hedges’s serious cocktail programming and tight and right natty-wine list. Marion Barry was the mayor of Washington, D. C., and Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, and with that a table of two became the big winner on trivia night at the Yacht Club. The elegant Mars For the Rich cocktail at the Yacht Club: Madeira, bianco vermouth, and raspberry eau de vie. What you're having: On Tuesdays make it a full on dinner with the guest chef. Recent somms include natural wine guru Alice Feiring, Darwin Acosta of Co-Fermented, an organization that supports LGBTIA community in winemaking, and Roxy Eve Narvaez, a Bushwick native, now living in New Orleans, who traced the history of immigration Brooklyn through seven glasses. OStudio is a natural wine bar, sure, but more like a waystation for forward-thinking often restaurant-less sommeliers-all welcomed by magnificently mustaschio’ed James Sligh-who pop in for short mind-blowing stints. But it’s at the bar where his powers of convocation shine. The organic vessels he fires in the back-sconces, pots, vases-line the wall of the bar, tilting wildly, capacious nonetheless. Evidence of that is all around at OStudio, his combined workshop and wine bar in the Bed Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. Shae Salisbury Brooklyn OStudio at Nightįernando Aciar, the puckish Argentinian ceramicist, knows how to make a good container. It’s all handmade ceramic and natural wine vibes at OStudio. What you’re having: If they’ve got it, an aged Yuho sake that might change your mind about having sake with bigger bolder foods. When I left, the rain had stopped, and for a moment, I did feel like I had just stepped out of a bar in Tokyo. There was only one other person there that evening, but within minutes we all started to feel like friends deep into a sake journey that brought us through junmai made using the yeast from flowers style to even a bottle made in Massachusetts. And it’s tiny: no more than 16 seats in the place, and the bar itself has about seven stools. It specializes in sake, a first of its kind in these parts. Perhaps it was the time and the weather when I arrived, but it felt like a world away here more Tokyo than Beantown. It was dark, late, and raining when I got to Koji Club, located in the Charles River Speedway, a little collection of bars and restaurants and shops that’s about a 20 minute car ride away from Downtown Boston. Then get out there, find your niche, and embrace the weird and wonderful. There are familiar spaces, too, some of which have been reinvented. This is our eighteenth edition of the list, and in all my years of bar crawls, I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much spirited originality-as many bars that make you say, “So strange, yet so awesome.” The pages that follow reflect that, with a slew of new bars to know. Over the past year, we criss-crossed the country to report on America’s finest drinking establishments. I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen a line to get into a bar at noon. From the drinks to the bathroom to the music, Mothership commits hard to the idea that you’re in a spaceship that made an emergency landing on a tropical planet. That same spirit of custom creativity is what drinkers sought out in an even bigger way at Mothership in San Diego. “We felt that people deserved novelty.” He knows his customers: Every seat at the bar was full by 6:30. What, I asked Vucekovich, had sparked the idea to try something so delightfully trippy? And why were we seeing such a right turn away from cocktail classicism here and in so many other bars we’ve been visiting lately? “People were ready for something more fun after the pandemic,” he explained simply. This joyfully odd drink menu was the brainchild of Abe Vucekovich, Meadowlark’s beverage director, who used to work in one of the country’s most serious temples to the cocktail, just a few L stops away, the Violet Hour. You looked at the glass in front of you, sipped, looked at the bird picture again-and all of a sudden, it clicked. Each drink was meant to resemble a specific feathered friend. I was perusing the avian-themed cocktail menu at Meadowlark, an old library-like spot in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.
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