Our journey from Boston to San Francisco for the third leg of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl was the most eventful travel day of the trip. I won’t go into it here because I don’t have the time. I’ll simply say it involved broken landing gear and a near fist-fight in a jetway between little old me and a body builder who had at least a hundred pounds of muscle on me and the steroid-driven anger of the Hulk. What possessed me to get into it with such a monster, you ask? I just couldn’t stand by while he repeatedly f-bombed a sixteen year old girl who was just trying to help. In any event, we got to San Francisco, uncrashed and unpunched.

It won’t shock you to know there were lots of non-cocktail-related things to do in the Bay Area. We enjoyed a trip up to Sonoma to visit my brother and his family, where we mixed in a sparkling wine tasting at Domaine Carneros.

My brother’s house in Sonoma… wait, that’s Domaine Carneros.
It’s nice too.

It was instructive to compare in one trip the pinnacle of distillery public faces (Maker’s Mark, as well as Four Roses) with those routinely presented by the wineries, big and small, you see across Sonoma and Napa Counties. A lot of the money you pay for your bottle of wine goes into lush, inviting landscaping and huge, magnificent buildings with tangential relation to production. A lot of the money you pay for your bottle of Maker’s Mark goes into huge, ugly buildings scattered around a cornfield, filled with barrels and growing black fungus on the neighbors, whilst they turn base liquor into gold.

We also finally got to the activities on the Barcrawl that the PeguWife was plotting from the start, the textile arts. We a great afternoon touring the Balenciaga exhibit at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. It was gorgeous. We also visited her favorite fabric store on Earth, Britex Fabrics just off Union Square.

The PeguWife appreciates this dress in sort of the same way I smile at a professionally crafted and garnished Scorpion Bowl.
Source: Robin Chapman News

Finally, we had the most touristy day possible in San Francisco. We ate at Fisherman’s Wharf at one of the grand dames of waterfront restaurants: Alioto’s. When we sat down, I told our waiter, “If you have fresh lime juice, I’ll have a Gin Rickey. Otherwise I’ll just go with a Budweiser.”
“Budweiser it is,” he replied briskly.
The food was pretty good and the view wonderful.

After that, we took a cruise on the Red and White Fleet, going under both the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, and circling Alcatraz. It was a lovely, brisk day, with the Oracle America’s Cup racing boats whipping by us in all directions at amazing speed. None of them capsized for our entertainment, that happened the day before. This is a gorgeous cruise and I can highly recommend it.

And even if your heart is made of stone and you can’t enjoy the magnificent natural and architectural wonders you see, the audio narration of the cruise is worth it. The information presented is interesting, of course, but that is not the comedy gold contained therein.
This being San Francisco, the narration is simply the most over-the-top, politically correct piece of work ever composed by man. No vista of natural beauty can be examined without musing on how much more attractive it would be if humanity, er, wasn’t around to appreciate it. No work of man can be observed without some digression on the darker nature of the society that birthed it.
And nothing of any sort can be mentioned without a reminder that the American Indians who lived hereabouts, or anywhere else for that matter, led far more magnificent, moral lives than we do, dedicated solely and actively to the preservation of their environment. There is no element of the tour that is presented free of a jarring contextualization from the PC library. And this omnipresence is what makes it so entertaining. By the time we reached Alcatraz, I’d stopped listening for the occasional outright inaccuracy and instead was enjoying immensely the sheer ingenuity of how they managed to find the evil of Western Civ in everything you see.
I don’t care what your political inclinations are, if any, you’ll enjoy this cruise for the view, the nice ride, and especially for the audio tour.

And now, back to the drink posts. Here is the into for my Washington breakdown, as well as the Boston stop. And below are my San Francisco reviews:

• Smuggler’s Cove (Forthcoming)
• Hobson’s Choice Bar (Forthcoming)
• The Alembic (Forthcoming)
• Heaven’s Dog (Forthcoming)
• Harry’s Starlight Room and the Hotel Bars of San Francisco (Forthcoming)
• Burritt Room (Forthcoming)

Source: Oyster

For the last three stops of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl, Maggi and I stayed at Kimpton Hotels, a new chain for us. (The one we liked in DC was full.) In Boston, we stayed at the Hotel Marlowe, on the river in Cambridge. I want to do a quick post at this point about the Marlowe’s restaurant and bar: Bambara.

With the exception of Ritz-Carltons (and San Francisco hotels, as I shall discuss soon), I usually only enter hotel bars when exhausted and intending only to self-medicate. “Double vodka martini, lots of vermouth, hold the fruit,” is my usual, let’s-get-this-over-with order. I was very pleasantly surprised with what the Marlowe had in store for us.

We needed a convenient place to eat before heading out to Drink for the evening. To our surprise, our own hotel’s restaurant was the highest rated place on OpenTable in the immediate vicinity. With a shrug, we went on down. Bambara is a smallish place with a very open floor-plan and lots of windows. The menu is light but inspired by New England traditions and ingredients. You’ll be shocked, shocked to note all the lobster on it…. We mostly stuck with appetizers so we could try more things, and found everything to be generally quite good.

As is our practice, we had a seat at the bar for a drink before getting our table. That is when I looked down at the fairly extensive cocktail menu and saw the following, for the first time ever, in any hotel bar: A Pegu.

He swooned.
You just don’t see men execute a good swoon much any more…

I did not swoon. I may have giggled a bit giddily, but that is it.
Anyway, said Pegu was delicious, but I do question where they got the making instructions for it. It looked like this:

Orange wedge, and served on the rocks? Really?

I had to tease there, but Pegus on the menu (+1000), executed weirdly but still deliciously (-250), aside, it’s not a bad cocktail menu at all. Damned impressive, in fact, for a hotel bar.
There are more vodka drinks than I’d want, but fewer than I’d expect. They sport a good selection of classics (including one I won’t name because they don’t deserve a visit form the Trademark Cops) and a number of originals. Whoever is responsible for the menu likes blueberries (again with the local influences) and really likes spicy drinks. It’s a nice selection, and those we tried we all well-balanced and tasty.

Bambara is a nice restaurant, considered by itself. If you are looking for a hotel in Boston (or Cambridge to be exact), a place of this quality in which to have a cocktail should be a huge checkmark in favor of the Marlowe.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Boston stop, with links to all reviews for the city.

Our last stop in the Boston round of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl was Clio. Located in the Eliot Hotel on Commonweatlh, Clio and the Bar @ Clio (which also serves Uni Sashimi Bar) are an intimate, upscale, fabulous dining and drinking experience. Clio was actually the only place we went on the entire coast-to-coast extravaganza where I did not enter the bar. But Maggi deserved a dinner free of the constant cocktail chatter we engaged in to this point on the trip. So of course I spent the dinner with nose buried in the fabulous cocktail menu and pestering our waiter instead of the bartender….

The dining room is a small affair, with elegant table settings and soft, contemporary decor. The atmosphere is quiet and graceful, but not stuffy. Our waiter was friendly, knowledgeable, and eager to serve, but exuded none of that obnoxious, extravagant grovelling that mars many a truly upscale room. More on him later.

The menu is very interesting and changes daily. It is a bit nouvelle cuisine, with some molecular gastronmic elements thrown in. I get my guard up a bit when I first visit a restaurant with a menu like this. But since Chef Ken Oringer demonstrates through the results that his aim is pleasing your palate rather than demonstrating his magnificence, the food was delicious and approachable.
We went with the smaller of the two tasting menus offered each evening. May I suggest that you definitely go that way yourself if you visit. The offerings were delicious and made a very cogent progression through the whole meal.

The really surprising dish that stood out in both our minds was the tomato water martini. There was no alcohol in it, and it served as a soup course. It consisted of the most amazingly clear, but rich tomato water with a bit of basil oil drizzled on the surface. Instead of an olive, there was a nearly identical-looking caperberry and a sprinkling of chopped jicama for garnish. To the side was a tiny lollypop of frozen tomato pulp, from that left over making the water I guess.

I have no idea how they made tomato water this clear, but it has definitely rekindled my interest in perfecting the Plasma Mary.

The cocktail menu at Clio is 32 pages long. Several are lists of the extensive spirit selection they offer, but most are collections of cocktails. There is a huge Tiki section, including a whole page of Dr. Funk variations. There is a page of molecular mixology experiments. The largest section is gin drinks, with most of the greats contained therein, with a notable omission…. Get with the program, Todd. There’s even a nice glossary in the back, and the phrase, “Yeah, we’re fired up about booze.”

The last words in the cocktail menu are, “If you find this menu… keep it.” While admitting nothing, I may have found a copy in my jacket pocket after we left the restaurant. For the cocktail aficionado, perusing this menu is almost as much fun as I imagine it was to write it.

As a last note, several of the offerings on the cocktail menu are usually available only Monday-Thursday, such as the Ramos Gin Fizz. We visited on a Saturday, and I ordered one before I read the restriction. But our waiter insisted on doing the leg, er, armwork himself, and I got the best RGF I had on the entire barcrawl. I’m really hoping I left a big enough tip.

Clio is a wonderful, though not cheap, dining and drinking experience. I can heartily recommend it.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Boston stop, with links to all reviews for the city.

The second city we visited on the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl was Boston. Too few hours after stumbling back to the hotel from Passenger, we trundled over to Union Station in Washington to board the Acela north. Amtrak and Sheriff Joe want you to believe that the Acela is “High-Speed Rail”. I’ve ridden real high-speed rail, and the Acela ain’t it. It took six hours to get from Washington to Boston.
In fairness, the ride was smooth and pleasant. The seats were very comfortable. And the Union Station boarding experience beats the Reagan National boarding experience with a stick… takes it’s lunch money… and sleeps with its sister. And the tickets were downright cheap for business class. If you have the majority of a day to waste, or are traveling a shorter distance, it’s a worthwhile ride.

While we enjoyed our two evenings in Boston, our reason for including it on the itinerary was powerfully sad. We spent our day in Massachusetts out in the country with family to remember my late Uncle Duncan.

Commander Duncan P. Stevens, USN (Ret) served America as a Naval Aviator, piloting A-4 attack jets in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He once told me, “Dougal, flying those jets was the most fun I ever had… right up until people started shooting at us.” Upon finally retiring, he went into property management, managing commercial developments from skyscrapers in San Francisco to shopping malls in Des Moines. He passed away in Maine this last Winter, after a long life well-lived with his one true love.

My life has been influenced by a variety of uncles (all now sadly passed), but Duncan was always my favorite. He was an example for me in many ways, good and bad.
First, he had the gift of always making things look easy. Of course, they seldom were, but that is the trick now, isn’t it? He was responsible when needed and irresponsible when he could get away with it, and occasionally when he couldn’t….

He was outraged when he saw Animal House back when it came out, claiming that they stole something he did at Stanford for the film. (For the record, the horse was already dead when they delivered it. This is less funny, but a whole lot more impressive logistically.)

My uncle liked to call friends and family at the end of a long night of “conviviality”. My mother, his sister, was his favorite person to reach out to in later years, which wasn’t ideal for my Dad, since we lived on the east coast, and Duncan the west…. I never really got the big deal during the last election about 3AM phone calls. In our house they were considered kinda charming.

My mom wasn’t the only person Duncan drunk-dialed out of bed. Back when he was on active duty and Franco-American relations were in one of their periodic rougher spots, my uncle and a friend drunk-dialed Charles De Gaulle. At 4AM Paris time.
They got through.

“I don’t know who he was,
but certainly, he had the strong opinions!”

As you may have guessed, my uncle was also a drinker. And I learned a lot from him in the booze world as well. Much of it in the what not to do category. Between wars, while he was back at Stanford to finish his degree, he lost his license for DUI. He had to bicycle to the base to fly his jet….

Duncan P. Stevens lived eight rich decades, and given the way he lived them (DUIs, liver abuse, two wars, carrier night landings) I suspect he must have had compromising pictures of Death himself hidden away in a lawyer’s office somewhere. After a heart attack a few years ago, he woke up in Intensive Care, where his surgeon told him, “I don’t know how the hell you are still alive. I’m just not that good.”

He will be missed. So, do me a favor: Next time you are out somewhere, raise a glass and offer a toast “to Commander Stevens”. He deserves it. And it’ll confuse the hell out of everyone around you… which he’ll enjoy famously.

And now, back to the frivolity. Here is the into for my Washington breakdown. And below are my Boston Reviews:

• Drink
• Eastern Standard
• Clio’s
• Bambara in the Hotel Marlowe

This is going to be the shortest of my Washington reviews, in large part because it was nearly 11:30 before I finally bellied up here, after great times at PS7 and the speakeasy inside The Passenger: Columbia Room. Maggi and I had wandered by the entrance to The Passenger earlier in the day, to make sure of our bearings, and we had raised an eyebrow upon seeing it. Despite being about two blocks from what I just described as the glittering power neighborhood surrounding PS7, the block the Passenger is on seems a bit… disreputable. This is due in no small part to the entrance to The Passenger itself. You see, when I finally got back there after walking my flagging wife back to our hotel, it dawned on me that, “Hey! This is a dive bar!”

I am not a fan of dive bars.
But that is because most dive bars aren’t anything like The Passenger. Sure, the place is raucous, ratty, and a bit run down (artfully so). But the drinks were awesome.

The Passenger taught me something about myself: Why I don’t like dive bars. I always thought I was just too effete for that scene. When your nose is as big as mine, you notice it when you find it shoved up in the air. But no. The reason I don’t like dive bars is because I can’t get a decent cocktail in one. In the Passenger you can’t get a decent cocktail either. You get a fabulous one. With that fixed, I loved the atmosphere.

So whether you are a real dive bar lover, or a total cocktail geek, you need to drop in for at least one drink at The Passenger if you visit Washington. And for those of you who live close enough, why isn’t this your hangout already?

Apparently, I’m not quite the snob I thought I was!

Nah.
You’re pretty much a snob.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.

This review is going to be tricky. Our visit to Columbia Room in Washington, DC was my most anticipated stop for the first half of our whole Cross-Country Barcrawl journey. It was the first full-on craft bar we visited. And it was the truest speakeasy of all. So, I let my expectations get awfully high. I also was having a great time getting to meet the other half of Scofflaw’s Den, Marshall Fawley, and spent so much time talking to him and SeanMike that I didn’t give myself the time to engage our bartender or really bask in the experience. And I want to make all those disclaimers clear up front, because this is a hell of a bar, and a wonderful experience. If this review seems full of quibbles and complaints, it’s because if you point to the outfield a la Babe Ruth, I want your home run to shatter the light standard, not just drop into the tenth row….

It is important to explain upfront just what Columbia Room is. It is a small speakeasy bar inside the larger, totally different bar called Passenger (next post). You must make reservations in advance. They take reservations in groups of (AFAICT) 4 or 6 only. The basic experience is a prix fixe tasting menu, with an opening drink, a seasonal cocktail and a light dish, followed by a cocktail creation just for you. Your visit is designed to last just under two hours.

They tell you at the time you make your reservations that they will call you in advance to discuss your visit, and they do. First quibble: If you are going to do this, you ought to do more than just check for food allergies and reconfirm the number. I expected some discussion of our tastes, and didn’t get it. Note that they don’t promise any such thing, I just projected it. I still think they miss an opportunity with this.

When you arrive, you identify yourself and are escorted back through Passenger and through a dark, unmarked door into the Columbia Room. The noise drops to near zero and you find yourself in a beautiful, intimate space. The lush soapstone(?) bar runs the whole length of the left side of the room, and boasts only ten, very comfortable, bar chairs. Behind these, along the right wall, are eight upholstered and elevated seats which overlook the bar. The group before us was understandably lingering over their drinks, and I don’t blame them, so we were seated on the high seats to wait our turn. We were brought cool towels to refresh ourselves as we waited, and were served our opening round, a delicious punch. This is a highly intelligent setup which keeps a slow moving first group of the night from making everyone late for the rest of the evening, as happens all too often in less thoughtfully run places. I do wish they had the room to turn these seats sideways, because I felt a bit guilty that I was looming over these nice people’s shoulders like a vulture, waiting for them to vacate our seats.

“You know,
Harry Craddock says you need to drink your cocktails swiftly….”

The air-conditioning was over-taxed a bit due to the heat wave, but the funky 1930s table fans kept the air pleasantly moving. The lighting is elegant but dim (which I will seize on as an excuse for my crummy photographs). I took lots of fascinated notes, then accidentally deleted half of them from my iPhone before I could sync it, so I am missing a few important details, such as the name of our bartender. She was not the owner, Derek Brown, but was as a smooth, attentive, and elegant a drink maker as you could ask for in a craft bar.
Our main seasonal cocktail she brought us (also lost with the notes) was this smooth little concoction:

We were also brought our “amuse bouche”, this delicious bowl of soup. I put “amuse bouche” in quotes because this was a pretty big bowl to hang with that term. It was also delicious. I had eaten well to ensure I didn’t suffer another epic hangover, so I wasn’t really hungry. But delicious packs its own trunk full of hungry….

Now, here is my one (legitimate) beef with our Columbia House experience: For the most part, I didn’t see my drinks being made. This bar is only ten seats long, and more than half the time, our bartender was down a ways from us, far enough where I couldn’t follow what she was doing. Now, it is possible that she didn’t get quite so in our face as usual since we were so busy at times with that phenomenon of the Internet Age: Meeting Old Friends for the First Time. But it didn’t feel like that, and we couldn’t have more clearly been serious cocktail geeks if we’d stood up every fifteen minutes to offer a loud toast to Dale DeGroff…. Again—expectations: In this bar above all others, I wanted sole title to that bartender when our drinks were being made, and I didn’t get that.

Regardless, when I did see her working, she displayed that easy grace and skill you only see from a real pro. And what she made us was great. The mint julep with which I finished off the visit was completely different form the one I had the night before at Jack Rose, just as good, and even prettier.
And yes, I was drinking a lot of mint juleps… have I mentioned it was stupid hot in Washington while we were there?

As I said at the start, this has been a tricky review. Half of what I said has been beefs, fair and not. Yet I’m still going to heartily recommend that you visit Columbia Room should you get the chance. In fact, don’t miss it if you do get the chance. It is a wonderful atmosphere and a unique take on the speakeasy experience. Everything placed before you is great. If you have a client or two (cocktailian, or especially if not) that you want to impress, Columbia Room will deliver. And when you are done, you can experience cocktailian whiplash when you go back out and sample the utterly different, yet just as good experience that is Passenger….

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.

To kick off our second night of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl (still in Washington, DC) Maggi and I met up with SeanMike Whipkey for dinner and drinks at what might be my favorite of all the places we visited in our nation’s capitol, PS7. It’s just a couple of blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue, between Capitol Hill and the White House. The neighborhood practically throbs with the dark majesty of the Federal Government. With the Convention Center to the North, this is a heavy-hitter business, government, and tourist area.

Source: StarChefs

The Head Bartender at PS7 is Gina Chersevani. SeanMike, who apparently knows every bartender who works near the Potomac River, told me she is the best “original modern drink” mixologist in town. Who am I to argue? The drinks were very good, though we didn’t have that many rounds, for two reasons. One was that we had a long night ahead of us. In addition to being skilled, Gina is also immensely charming… an attribute that I’m led to believe doesn’t hurt in the bar game. We sat at a table, so I didn’t get to see her work, but the sunlight was still flowing into the beautiful modern lounge and I could see all her products being delivered to tables around us. The drinks were gorgeous and the faces of the customers appreciative.

SeanMike had apparently told her in advance of our coming. When he introduced us, she told me she had something in mind for me. A few minutes after we sat down, she came over to our table with that monster you see below. (The drink, not SeanMike!) If you had told me that I was going to really enjoy a Strawberry Sage Frozen Pegu, in a snifter the size of a basketball, I might have scoffed…. But nay, nay! That was delicious. It wasn’t terribly Pegu-like, but it was good. The other reason we each only had one other round was the size of this thing!

PS7 is a fine dining restaurant first, with a fine drinking lounge attached. But that lounge is not what you’d expect from a restaurant bar. The prices are not inflated over bar prices as is the inexcusable case with most fine dining restaurant bars. The cocktails on the menu are all originals, but aren’t the typical homogenous group of offerings that limit so many such menus. A few are riffs on classics, updated with a new or oddball ingredient. Others are completely novel creations. Gina employs some combination of fresh fruits, herbs, spices and/or peppers in most drinks. She even uses beets in two on the current menu. I have a policy against beets, but that’s just me. The names are also clever, which I really appreciate. Some are evocative of classic cocktail predecessors, while others are meant to appeal to the clientele of Washington, DC, like the press and military.

I’d like to eat in the main dining room at PS7 next time we visit DC. The food in the lounge, where the offerings are mainly small plates, was simply delicious. Again, the offerings start as bar food, with burgers, sandwiches and flatbread pizzas. And like lots of great places, they tweak it for more modern tastes. But Chef Peter Smith takes that transformation further than most, with great results. The most outstanding and unique dish we had was a plate of thick slices of pork belly, rolled up in small hot dog buns and covered in a gently spicy relish. I think they are called Banh Mini, and I could eat them about every day. The rest of the world needs pork belly hot dogs, stat.

As I noted before, the decor in the PS7 lounge is very modern and airy. It isn’t much like what you see in most “craft” cocktail bars, with their dark woods and cozy environs. There is nothing of the speakeasy here. The walls are white, the windows, huge, and the light, bright. The bar itself is smaller than in most watering holes of this quality, but there is a plethora of low, plush seating spread throughout the rest of the large room. The music was there, but ambient. This is a bar for conversation, where they assume you are interesting enough to hold the attention of your fellows when you can actually hear each other….

The reason I said that PS7 may well be my favorite from our Washington stop is that it does so many things well. The service and hospitality are wonderful. The food is top notch, especially those pork belly things. The location is convenient and safe-feeling. And the drinks are top-notch and not over-priced. As an overall package, the lounge at PS7 would be great for a lot more occasions than just a night of cocktailan adventure. It wold be a great pre-show stop, happy hour haunt, or business entertainment venue as well. Here’s hoping I can get back and review the restaurant itself soon.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.

Source: DC Beer

The first place we visited in Washington was Bourbon. We went to the Adams Morgan location (there are two). Adams Morgan is a youthful upscale neighborhood in the northern part of the District. It is rife with interesting restaurants, shops, apartments, and people. Bourbon is right in the heart of the neighborhood, so you could comfortably make it a part of a larger evening’s perambulations.

Bourbon does not have the feel of a “Craft Cocktail Bar”. With exposed, rough brick walls, battered dark wooden tables and bar, and fairly dark lighting, you’d think it was just a nice neighborhood tavern. You could, and I bet a lot of patrons do, enjoy a nice meal without ever realizing quite what is going on here. I found that to be very pleasant, both in concept and execution. This is a place where the cocktailian can bring his buddies who think the whole “drinky thing” is silly, and everybody will still be happy. The food (which to our sorrow the next morning, we did not eat enough of, early enough) is very well executed tavern fare, tweaked to the upscale. What little we did eat was excellent, in particular the sweet potato chips. It is damn hard to make sweet potato chips with the same consistency and texture as those from regular potatoes, and they succeeded about as well as I’ve ever seen. The sliders were also delicious and symbolized the same balance as Bourbon’s decor: They were superficially ordinary enough to make the conventional diner happy, with just enough subtle twist to give the more adventurous something to hang his hat on.

Once you start delving into the drinks menu, the place becomes really interesting for folks like me. While the cocktail list is all interesting-looking originals, the real strength here is the spirits selection, especially the bourbons (duh). There are four pages of bourbons, ryes, scotches, and other whisk(e)ys. All are offered as two ounce pours, and most can also be tried in half ounce tots as well. If you want to expand your whiskey experience, you could not choose a better, more practical environment to try what the world has to offer. (Actually, you can, but that’s the next post.) If you want a little help with you whiskey adventures, they offer a variety of pre-selected flights as well. There are flights to explore different schools of bourbon and rye, as well as between entire different spirits. There’s also a fight of reserves for $40 bucks that I wish I’d felt flush enough to try.

Bourbon was a great environment to meet up with friends, with its manageable light and noise levels, and that is what we did. We had planned to meet Chris Hwalek and Matt Hamlin here, and SeanMike Whipkey also managed to make it moments after we arrived. As an added bonus, through the magic of a Twitter mention of our destination, Jake Parrott joined us as well. Both the booths and the bar are conducive to amorphous groups, so it was a good choice for our launching point upon a nation’s worth of bar hopping.

SeanMike, the PeguWife, Chris, and Matt

In conclusion, Bourbon is a great place for a light meal, and certain kinds of serious drinking. The whiskey selection is slightly over the top, and the rest of the inventory is extensive as well. There is a good selection of beer and wine too, for the amateurs. It is not a destination for an evening of mixology, however. Their cocktails are interesting and very well-made, but they are not the focus of the operation. For a Washington-area resident, Bourbon should definitely be part of your bag of tricks when planning your night life. For visitors, I’d recommend it highly if you are a whiskey aficionado, but there are places I’d send you to first for more adventurous food and especially cocktails.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.