So my big hurrah bachelor party is on Saturday, and the Best (wo)Man and I are realizing that neither she nor I know what to do for a crazy fun time in the city. She’s Baltimore based, and I’m just usually a homebody.
So we’re stuck for ideas.
We’re looking for a basic pubcrawl. Lack of cover charges a plus. And no strip joints (are they even allowed in city limits?) or gay bars (so help me, do not say “Firehouse.”)
I have a general bias against Georgetown, but combining the facts that school is out for the summer, and I want to hit Brickskeller (for obvious reasons), it’s definitely not ruled out.
Adams Morgan seems decent enough for a good time, but I just don’t know it at all.
I know there’s a bit of a scene around Capitol Hill, but exactly where to hit is a mystery to me.
And of course, we don’t HAVE to go into the city itself. Good suggestions generally within the beltway are happily appreciated. I know there’s a few good clusters of bars around Bethesda and Alexandria, among others.
They are indeed allowed inside city limits; in fact there are two near my old office on M and, uh, 19th maybe.
I’m not much of a bar fiend either, other than the Brickskeller, which is kinda off by itself (except for a couple of gay bars) at one end of the DuPont Circle neighborhood. I’m told Sign of the Whale isn’t bad, and it’s not terribly far from there (it’s on the same block as the two strip clubs). Also The Big Hunt is kind of a dive, but upstairs you can find a table or two and hang out relatively unmolested. (A group of friends and I had the whole place to ourselves once, but it was like 2:00 AM on a Tuesday.)
Other than that the only bars I have much experience with are way down on the Hill, The Dubliner and The Irish Times. Both are great places to have a pint and a bit of a chat; they can get somewhat crowded with law students on Thursday and Friday nights (that’s how I know them; Georgetown Law is a block away from there), but they’re still nice hangouts. The food is good too if you’re of a mind. One note – if you or anyone in your group is an asshole drunk, stay away 'cuz there are usually a handful of cops in there.
The Brickskeller is the place to end up – if you haven’t been there, it’s the kind of bar you can sit in for six hours just shootin’ the shit. And in fact if the thing you really want to do is catch up with pals and hang out, you could do worse than to spend your whole evening there.
About, oh say, fifteen years ago or more, I was chosen to be the designated driver for a groom and several others as we jumped from one stripclub to another. Sure enough, the gentleman’s(?) club near 19th and M was our final stop and on the way back out to the van, the groom got into fisticuffs with a stranger.
The other guy busted the groom’s lip WIDE open and left him bleeding in the middle of Connecticut Ave at 230am.
Oh yeah… I was a REALLY popular guy the next day at the wedding.
'Cuz the gorrm needed seven stitches to close the wound and it looked like he was trying to smuggle a golf ball inside his lower lip.
I went to the Brickskeller for my party and my brother-in-laws parties. Both times everyone seemed to think this was the best place to go. You can sit around for hours and they don’t bug you, they have all sorts of beer from everywhere and it’s pretty cheap. We went to a strip club for mine as well and it wasn’t all that exciting, and the beers were crap and expensive. Have a nice dinner and then head over to the Brickskeller.
For mine, we did a bar crawl in Adams Morgan. We decided to skip the strip clubs since I’ve never really seen the point of paying money to get a case of the blue balls.
We started off a place called the Common Share. Its pretty cheap for drinks, at the time we paid $2.00 a shot. We stayed there for a while and then hit some other places whose names I can never recall. There are a bunch of places on 18th Street near Columbia Rd so you don’t have to go far from one place to another and if you get bored at a place you can go a few doors down.
I don’t know about Bethesda but I would skip Old Town Alexandria. There are a few bars but they really are places to get just a drink. Coupled with the fact that there isn’t much in the way of public transportation and the high prices I would stick with the District.
Just out of curiousity, are you in DC or the suburbs.
What kind of bars would you like to hit? Are you planning on drinking a lot or a little?