NYC on the ROCKS
The surge in boozy brunches can be traced to an underlying problem: too many unhappy singles in the city
M ANHATTAN lawyer Robert Halpern, alongtime East Village resident, is suing the State Liquor Authority for allowing too many booze-serving restaurants in his neighborhood. He’s seething over “bottomless” brunches where customers can drink as muchastheywant for one low price — causing “noise,” “crowds” and“uncivil behavior.”
I don’t know if it’s true that there are 454 such restaurants in his neck of the woods, as Halpern claims. But he’s 100 percent correct that today’s brunch parties are all about getting blitzed.
Our drinking scourge is not limited to Halpern’s First Avenue and St. Marks Place. I live on First Avenue — miles uptown at East 76th Street — and ,ost every night, noisy young drunks spill from the aptly named Stumble Inn nearby. They hog the sidewalks with revelers from Iggy’s, Seamstress, Pony Bar, American Trash among other sloshing stations in the blocks near my building.
Liquor’s fine by me. I’ve loved the stuff since I was 16 and flashed a fake ID to get into Dean’s Happy Landing on Deer Park Avenue in North Babylon (the legal drinking age then was 18).
I’ve known and enjoyed every taste of the city’s drinking culture since 1972 — the “swinging singles” Upper East Side scene, Maxwell’s Plum, Studio 54, wine bars and in modernday restaurants where I spend perhaps too much of my life.
But take it fromme: There’s never been as much binge boozing as there is today. It stretches far beyond the Lower East Side’ s in famous “Hell Zone” toWy the Avenue in Williamsburg and Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. In the Meatpacking District, vomit on the pavement makes mecringe more than smelly carcasses once did. Even hotel rooftops and high-end restaurants are affected: Top chef Michael White actually employs a bouncer to stand onLafayette Street to protect his Italian trattoria Osteria Morini from “young, affluent, intoxicated people stumbling from one place to the next,” a manager explained to me.
Sometimes it makes me dread going out. I was among a throng of customers who endured a stressful wait for the bathroom one recent night at Megu, a Japanese eatery where miso-glazed black cod is $45. An overindulging young woman had tossed her sake onto a guy at the next table. Her girlfriends were helping her recover in one of the individual toilets, which they hogged for 15 minutes.
In Chelsea and the High Line areas, partying mobs swarm in and out of the bar- rich Standard, Dream and Maritime hotels. Even Chinatown’s once-somnolent Doyers Street now has three adjacent booze-friendly places that make the narrow, curving block near-impassable when revelers spill off the sidewalk. A few causes of this drunken oblivion are obvious. Affluent youths cluster in neighborhoods oversaturated with saloons. Restaurants promote “beverage programs” more than food. Someme-diaoutlets seem bent ondriving half the youthful population into AA. Time Out NewYork’s September issue feature on the craft-beer scene is blurbed on the magazine’s cover as “67% information, 33% inebriation.” But there might be a deeper reason for the trend beyond profit-mad restaurateurs or hedge-fund millennials with too much time on their hands. I’m no psychiatrist or sociologist, but overdrinking strikes me mainly as a condition of the single. Available women have long outnumbered available men in the city but the imbalance has grown worse. Manhattan is home to 38 percent more women than men among recent college graduates, according to a book by researcher Jon Birger, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.” The percentages of New Yorkers in the prime bar-going ages of 20-34 were about the same in 2015 as they were in 2000 — around 25 percent according to the US census — but because the city’s population increased by more than a half-million during that period, they represent many more people. Surveys claim Americans are marrying at slower rates than in the past, but chatting to young urbanites reveals a more nuanced story: Millennial New York women very much want to wed, but there aren’t enough guys to go around. Men, meanwhile, want to hold out for as long as they can get away with it, thanks to a supposed glut of lust-crazed young females with whom they can frolic. Media hype for Tinder-driven hook-ups — a risky and ruinous lifestyle that most unmarried people swiftly tire of if they indulge at all — gives men the idea that every woman at the bar is fair game for a quick sex romp. What’s that got to do with binge drinking? When gender expectations are wildly out of sync, anxiety is soothed with alcohol’s fast-acting flood of relief. The house is full of hot-looking prospects, but a lot of people aren’t getting what they want. So, as Peggy Lee sang in “Is That All There Is,” let’s break out the booze and have a ball — even at brunch.