In my Internet ramblings through downtown L.A., I came across this place: The fabulous Golden Gopher bar! They deserve a lot of kudos just for the clever name, if nothing else.
If you browse through their site, you’ll see (a) that it’s situated on the ground floor of an utterly horrible looking grungy hotel, yet (b) it claims to be a new trendy bar, and certainly does look like one from the pictures. Finally (c) they say that have one of the oldest liquor licenses in L.A., so they’re allowed to do what I’ve never seen in any other bar: sell liquor by the bottle on a take-away basis as well as by the glass for onsite consumption.
This makes me wonder about liquor licenses generally. I know that liquor licenses may last for decades or even generations, getting passed from one proprietor to another along the way. But how does the time in which a liquor license was first granted affect the legal privileges appertaining to it? And how old is the oldest license? Are there pre-Prohibition licenses that went dormant during the Prohibition era, and then were reinstated? Or are all existing liquor licenses from no earlier than 1933?
As a related question, you know how in old movies, or period movies --Westerns especially–a man walks into the saloon and orders whiskey. The bartender puts a shot glass and a bottle in front of the customer, who pours his own drinks from the bottle. Presumably the bartender calculates the bill based on the declining level of whiskey in the bottle.
When did this practice stop? Was it something from the time before Prohibition that was never allowed again? Or is it still legal in some locales?
No answer here, just another person wondering about this practice. It was mentioned in a recent episode of Bones, and I got to thinking, does anybody actually do this? I can appreciate being depressed and wanting to get plastered, but I’d be way more depressed after getting the $70 bar tab for drinking $10 worth of whisky.
Don’t know about California, but in Wisconsin that would simply require a Class A (sales of intoxicating beverages to be consumed off premis) and Class B (to be consumed on premis) licensce. As well as the appropriate permits to sell both wine and liquor.
I’ve done this at a couple of local haunts, but only during a slow time and only with a bartender who a) trusts me to own up to how many drinks I’ve had, b) knows that I can pull a standard pour, and c) was female. (Not sure how much the latter point counts for but I’ll through it in there in the interests of completeness.) Most bars keep a detailed accounting of drinks sold versus liquor inventory and can tell (without measuring) whether liquor is disappearing faster than it ought, either by too many free drinks or overpouring. (Of course, if you walk into town and promise to protect the townspeople from three gunslingers who are about to be released from prison and come back for vengence, you can have the whole damn bar, the hotel, and all. You can even have the people hold a picnic and paint the town red.)
I’ve been to the Golden Gopher a few times–ain’t I hep?–and I’ve never seen anyone walk out with a bottle of booze, but then, I don’t spend all night there. It’s a little too crowded, and way too hipster for my taste. I recommend The Good Luck Bar instead. If I want to stay downtown, I prefer Bar 107. The Gopher is for rubes.
Cheesesteak, I appreciate your point, but then from a purely financial perspective it’s equally depressing to drink $1 worth or booze for $7. WRT those old movie scenes, I always imagined that customer usually didn’t drink the whole bottle alone, but either drank it with friends, or else didn’t finish the bottle. The bartender presumably either kept tabs on how many shots he poured out, or estimated it from the level in the bottle, I presume.
One certainly wouln’t go to a bar to get plastered if cheapness were the only consideration.