I rarely write a straight up bad review of a bar. Drinking at a bar should be an active process, not a passive one. This isn’t a play or a movie, where you’re supposed to sit quietly in your seat. If you’re having a bad time at a bar, it’s probably at least partially your fault.
But some bars really are terrible. And some bars are terrible and morally offensive. It happens.
They have it coming, and God do I enjoy giving it to them. Vicious reviews, written well, make for the best reading.
Here are a few bars that had it coming, and got it with a chaser:
- Novela: Only branding consultants to marketing executives could come up with the idea of a “book themed bar” designed to appeal to tech executives who read listicles on buzzfeed. It takes a ton of money to make a bar this shitty.
- Local Edition: This “newspaper” themed bar is too dark to read in, too noisy to talk in, and too full of itself for any real journalist to drink there without laughing. The service is terrible, the drinks mediocre, and the antique typewriters used for decorations on the wall are not actually as breathtaking as very expensive design consultant thought.
- The Social Study: I don’t hate The Social Study: I pity it. Its heart’s in the right place, but it loves neither wisely nor well. It’s like a high school sophomore who hates going to the shopping mall because it’s so shallow, but who thinks that the solution is to build a better mall that attracts prettier people.