The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Raise the bar and feel the pulse of a place
Marcel Theroux muses on what makes a perfect bar, while our experts pick watering holes that ‘distil the essence of a city’
What’s not to love about a good bar? Everything about them suggests the possibility and danger of adult pleasures: hushed voices, the rattle of ice in a cocktail shaker, conspiratorial laughter, the mingled scents of aftershave, alcohol and perfume. There’s no better venue for a first date, but they’re also the perfect place for a long-married couple to flirt and gossip and recover the intimacy that brought them together all those years ago.
On Wednesday, the world’s finest drinking spots were crowned in the annual World’s 50 Best Bars selection, this year’s winner being Dandelyan in London (see panel). Rather than replicating this list, however, what appears over the following pages is a selection of bars that for Telegraph Travel writers worldwide – myself included – sum up the soul of a city.
The slight formality of a bar adds an important frisson. A pub is like a pair of elastic-waisted trousers, above all comfortable, but a bar should have a more tailored fit. It’s less casual, demands a little more care and attention and is therefore infinitely sexier. Think of Humphrey Bogart playing Rick Blaine in Casablanca, with his impeccably cut dinner jacket. He is the platonic ideal of all bar-goers: world-weary, wise and still, at heart, a romantic. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” he says. And yet, we know and he knows that his and Ilsa’s meeting was inevitable and that it could only have taken place in a bar.
It has to be the right bar. Some edge is fine but no one wants to risk their life. A lone drinker of either sex should feel comfortable being there with a book. And if they choose, they should be able to call upon the counsel of the bartender, the best of whom fulfils the varied functions of psychotherapist, confessor and expert pharmacist.
Like Rick’s in Casablanca, the greatest bars distil the essence of a city. They are a shortcut to its movers and shakers, somewhere to do business as well as to be entertained. I love the cavernous hotel bars in ex-Soviet cities, with their disreputable sense that someone might be trading arms or selling secrets. But I also love a stickily raucous place like the Maple Leaf on Oak Street in New Orleans.
There’s a reason that bars figure so prominently in novels and films. It’s because of their implied possibility that anything might happen. They are places where people from all walks of life can run into each other, fall in love, team up for a heist, or begin or end some extraordinary odyssey. Think of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars, or Peter O’Toole, in full desert garb, insisting on a glass of iced lemonade after a thirsty drive from Aqaba. It’s in a bar that Yul Brynner recruits Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven. And Raskolnikov goes to one to steady his nerve after staking out the pawnbroker’s apartment in Crime and Punishment.
In the wrong bar, it’s the clientele that you have to worry about, but the most terrifying bar in all fiction has no one in it. It’s the bar in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining where Jack Torrance gets drunk on whisky poured by a ghostly barman. The closest thing I’ve experienced to it was at the Ghostbar in The Whitney, formerly the Victorian home of one of the richest men in Detroit.
And what to drink in a bar? That’s a matter of personal preference, but to me, the beguiling, colourful, bittersweet grown-up flavour of a bar has one perfect counterpart in a cocktail. Mine’s a negroni. If the worn facade of the East Village’s Holiday Cocktail Lounge could talk, it would tell booze-fuelled tales of revolutionary fervour when Leon Trotsky was a regular. Since then, the bar has experienced a different kind of revolution: it went from dive bar to dimly-lit den of creative cocktails, run by the Neff brothers, marking the area’s transformation from a oncedodgy neighbourhood to a destination for discriminating food and drink lovers. I cosy up to the horseshoeshaped bar to sip on the Holiday Cocktail, a citrusy libation of vodka, amaro and sparkling wine.
75 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10003; 001 212 777 9637; holidaycocktaillounge.nyc
XCARIBBEAN CLUB
There are some bars that travel writers should keep to themselves (and this will lose me some friends) but the Caribbean Club, a tiny speakeasy behind a wooden door bearing nothing but a brass plaque, is too good not to share. Founded by an alumnus of Havana’s legendary El Floridita, it combines Cuban swagger and nautical
trappings with old-school Barcelona elegance, and has a rum collection that would sink Jack Sparrow. You won’t find a better prepared daiquiri in town. 5 Carrer de les Sitges, Barcelona; 0034 93 302 21 82
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