HOTEL BARS ARE TRASH
You’re imbibing with fellow travellers instead of exploring the city you are in
Drinking at a hotel bar is a lot like playing Monopoly: it sounds like a fun time when the idea is first proposed, but approximately 15 minutes into the experience and you’d rather be doing just about anything else.
I get the theoretical appeal. The very fact that you’re considering drinking at a hotel bar suggests you’re travelling, and being in a place other than the one you inhabit for the majority of your time is truly a wonderful position in which to be. It’s freeing. All of the expectations, restrictions and responsibilities that govern your day- to- day can be abandoned. You can be whomever you want to be when you travel.
That you’d choose to be the person who goes no further than the first available place to consume alcohol, though, might not be the best reflection of your joie de vivre. Perhaps I’m being high- minded, but I’ve always considered the unfamiliar to be an invitation to exploration. The fact that your expedition discontinues an elevator ride away from your hotel room suggests a curiosity so lacking that if you were feline, you’d have eternal life.
Instead of seeing the actual city you’re visiting, you’d instead choose to imbibe amongst fellow travellers, presumably due to not getting your fair share of transient drinking in the airport lounge before your departure and arrival. In this sense, the hotel bar boasts all of the sophistication inherent to happy hour at an all- inclusive resort. At least those who partake in such travel atrocities are getting a good bargain while they ignore the culture that surrounds them; whereas you, dear hotel bar sipper, are still paying top dollar for pathetic pours of mid- shelf liquor and mournful glasses of suburban dinner-party wine.
But I suspect even the most ardent defender of the hotel bar to be aware of all this, and likely, deep down, in agreement with me. Whether to fool the company one keeps or oneself, the false attributes that are ascribed to the hotel bar are camouflage for the true appeal of such an establishment: its propinquity to our more base and carnal urges.
I will not deny that there exists a seductive quality to the hotel bar. This is the result of its proximity to private sleeping quarters, its prime objective to further inebriate its clientele and the aforementioned anonymity that goes hand in hand with travel. However, this whispered tenet of the hotel bar has far more to do with theory than practice.
While our fantasies might propagate illusions of an attractive salesman celebrating the close of a big deal with a nightcap or a successful business woman escaping her team of corporate stooges to tie knots in cherry stems, the reality is quite different. The visitor to a hotel bar is far more likely to find obnoxious FaceTime conversations and complaints over the range of the WiFi than anything resembling sexual temptation. Indeed, the salesman you imagined has actually been rendered flammable by his Dylan Thomasesque approach to whiskey drinking; and a conversation with the business woman at the bar is far more likely to end in your hearing the same work anecdote three times through gin-soaked breath than an illicit invitation upstairs.
Ever y t hi ng good t hat ’ s claimed about the hotel bar either comes with a caveat — if it’s a boutique hotel, if you’re meeting someone, if it’s in your own city — or is an exception to the standards of such an establishment — the martini here, the house band there, the decor at this one in particular. The typical hotel bar is a ramshackle collection of unfamiliar souls sipping spirits to pass time, too afraid to venture into the unfamiliar while hoping for something to happen to them instead of making a time of things themselves.