Were there ever a lot of drinking-only bars that weren’t clubs? Maybe it’s a function of my age and where I live, but ever since I was a kid, it seems that most bars (as opposed to clubs) were “Archie Bunker” type bar-and-grills rather than drinking only. Not a big enough menu to be called a restaurant, but sandwiches and burgers.
OP, try going to ChillAppleFridays later than 5:30 sometime. Like after the game ( whichever game ) has started. In my experience, there will be plenty of people at the bar drinking and watching the game.
[Vincent Vega:]
All right. Well, you can walk into a movie theater in Amsterdam and buy a beer. And I don’t mean just like in no paper cup, I’m talking about a glass of beer. And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s.[/Vincent Vega].
That isn’t just some bullshit movie quote either. I have ordered beer at McDonalds in Europe a bunch of times. I hear they sell it in vending machines in Japan. Americans are weird about drinking in certain contexts but not others. There are all these invisible lines that don’t make much sense if you think about it.
The op is odd. But does boil down to “is this really a thing”
I also don’t drink booze at dinner. I just don’t (except for once at our anniversary dinner when we were at a pretty fancy place) but I know people who won’t go to a restaurant if it doesn’t have a full bar.
A friend wanted to do know about an upscale burger place I had been raving about because her husband wanted a really good burger. She asked if the place had a bar and after I said “Just beer and wine” she was completely uninterested.
There are probably 50 restaurants within a mile or two of my house where I can have dinner for 2 for under $25 if I try even a little bit. Some of them are even BYOB. Am I going to have delicious ethnic homestyle food for not very much money, or am I going to travel further to have mediocre chain burgers for more money? No contest, really. (Of course there are probably another 50 places within a mile or two of home where I could blow $100 on a dinner for two, and some overlap between the two categories depending on what you order.)
This is a really competitive town for restaurants. I love it!
I don’t order cocktails (martinis, daiquiris) very often in family-oriented chain restaurants, because I’m not in that frame of mind, but I wouldn’t hesitate to order one if I was in the mood. More often, I’ll order water, soda, or a glass of wine.
Blame Don Drapper if you want to, but cocktails are very much in and the trend is increasing. Everything is cyclical of course, but a well made cocktail is a thing of beauty and is trending heavily now… Chains are a tad behind of course, but top restaurants are featuring their bartenders now for exactly this reason…
I have had the exact opposite experience, sit down chain restaurants are usually overpriced especially the bar. Hole in the wall ethnic places are usually cheap as dirt!
My favorite place for fajitas in Houston was an unmarked bar in the back of a carniceria in a run down shopping center, it was like a dollar a piece!
By BYOB, you mean Bring Your Own Beer/Booze, right? That’s really strange for them to do if they don’t already serve it. Even if customers just bring it in themselves, they’d still have to car a liquor license and follow all the same rules as a regular bar (at least in my jurisdiction). And liquor licenses can be very expensive. In my city, a Class B license (what a bar has) is, I think, $600 a year, in some cities near me there’s a one time fee of $10,000 to get the license on top of the yearly fee, which may be lower or higher depending on what that city chooses.
Be it $10,000 + $600 a year or just the yearly fee, you have to pour a lot of free wine to make up for that.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’ve just never heard it. Also, like I said, you’re still responsible for what happens on your premises. So if someone gets drunk and does something stupid, you’re going to get the charged as if you served them the alcohol.
I guess, now that I think about it, I’ve heard of people bringing their own wine to a nice restaurant (which usually charges a corking fee and already has alcohol to begin with). I’m just imagining a cheap restaurant that doesn’t serve alcohol and people bringing in their own six packs of Coors Light.
Makes sense. Although the price part is also why I rarely order appetizers. (That plus the large portion sizes…can barely finish a regular meal!) I just can’t bring myself to spend as much on apps or drinks as I did on the meal itself.
Glass is a little effete, though, isn’t it? I find it’s much more authentic to grind my own vessels from obsidian, and so much better for the planet. Icelandic obsidian, of course, not that cut-price Mexican stuff.
Where I am, they have a set number of liquor licenses that can be bought and sold in each town. That means that getting the license is a pretty big one-time expenditure (like closing in on 7 figures for a full hard liquor license some places, although it’s also a bit of an investment in and of itself since you can always sell it on later) and so a lot of especially newer restaurants will do the BYOB thing for a while to feel out whether they want to try to buy a license or not. I can think of a couple that have been that way seemingly forever, though. I think they do require them to do the alcohol training for their servers, but that’s pretty cheap.
In Chicago and the area, it is not uncommon for a small family restaurant to not serve alcohol and be BYOB (and quite often, without any corkage fee.) A good number of ethnic restaurants in my area are this way.
Chains are usually very consistent. If you went to Chile’s in New York, you pretty much know exactly what you’re going to get at a Chile’s in San Fransisco. Non-chain restaurants are highly variable, both in price and quality. Which means, among other things, that there are very expensive places with crap food, but also plenty of really cheap, really amazing places (along with cheap, crap places and expensive, amazing places).
If you’re local, you know which ones to go to. If you’re a stranger in town, it’s basically a crap shoot. Still, I can go to Applebee’s anywhere. If I’m in a new town, I’m going to sample its local offerings.
True, but only for relatively popular joints. I’ve been to some hole in the wall restaurants (not fine dining, of course) with excellent food, where the only Yelp review was some asshole who gave it one star because they didn’t like the dining room music or the waiter’s mustache or something equally irrelevant.
I haven’t had a problem finding good reviews on even the smallest hole-in-the-wall joints over the past 5 or 6 years, but your experiences are obviously different than mine.