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By Tadhg Ferry
Every time I tell a customer about the Happy Hour at Williams & Bailey ($3 for all drafts and wells, 5 – 8pm, Mon-Fri) they have the same reaction: delight, surprise, visible arousal. I’ve now seen this happen 40-50 times. I know also from personal experience that I rarely if ever encounter better happy hour deals.
All this got me wondering: Is our happy hour actually the best in the neighborhood?
I set on a quest to find out.
Ali and Ari Zablozki, owners of Zablozki’s Bar, and their dog Millie. Photo by Ashley Corbin-Teich
Zablozki’s has been a neighborhood fixture since 2004, before the Williamsburg gold rush, back when its neighbor, Sweetwater Restaurant, was still the punk dive Sweetwater Tavern.
Before the flood, Williamsburg had a small town feel, and only a few bars provided for the locals: Sweetwater, Rosemary’s, Union Pool, Teddy’s, Brooklyn Ale House… just a smattering of watering holes compared to the swampland we know today.
I realized in a recent moment of adult-onset anxiety just how many of the bars I’ve gone to in Williamsburg over the past couple months look like upscale hunting lodges. We’re in the midst of an explosion of places with communal tables built of great, rustic pine slabs or steampunk light fixtures fitted with antique, Edison-esque bulbs. Everywhere, it seems, someone is handing me some kind of grapefruit-y Bavarian Weissbier in an elegant, footed glass specific to its brand. Bar menus with warm goat cheese salads are rampant.
In some ways, that’s to be expected. We are the tamed frontier of condo country, after all. But for all the fancypants joints that are popping up all over, Williamsburg and Greenpoint still have their fair share of the kinds of places where you can put a dollar in a jukebox, get a PBR and a shot for $4, play Big Buck Hunter, and never have to worry about mispronouncing “Weihenstephaner.”
Manhattan Ave by day is a busy hustle bustle of business activity. But by dark, watch out, this road hands itself over to the Brooklyn vibe I have grown to love. Scattered along its streets are restaurants and bars that come to life.
Along the road you will find Blackout. The exterior predicts a speak-easy, but upon entering you discover a decadently decorated bar, (think Marie-Antoinette goes to Brooklyn, circa now) with cheap drinks and even better music from the in-house DJ. Wednesday is Weds-Gay at Blackout. As well as always out-going, bubbly characters behind the bar, on Weds-Gay there is a go-go dancer on the bar! A projector which sometimes displays gay porn on the wall, and the bar has a soundtrack that you will only find on a fag-hag’s iTunes: Gaga, Kelis and Madonna oh my! As the night progressed so do the attendees: the outfits are fabulous and the drinks fabulous-er. Try the Manhattan Ave Cocktail, a naughty concoction made with Rye, Lillet, Lustau Sherry and Bitters.
If Pride Month exhausted your desire to watch gym bunnies dress like pirates in their underwear, you may have ended up at the Milksop party at Union Pool in Williamsburg. Despite the name, there are both muscled dudes, and waifish dudes, jumping to campy Pointer Sisters anthems and then eating tacos out in the Union Pool courtyard. At this Pride event, I counted zero fellas in SKYY Vodka man-kinis, and theGaydar.net float was absent. Politicians known for promoting Pride, like David Paterson or Marty Markowitz, were not in attendance, and American’s newest gay celeb, Constance McMillen, the Mississippi teen lesbian bowdlerized by the prom wasn’t there either. Instead, the only politician there was Queen of Disco Donna Summer, in spirit, and the only platforms came from Saks Fifth Avenue.
Milksop occurs roughly tri-monthly and folks of all orientations show up to shake it. The crowd is a peculiar mix of “Williamburg now” with Annie Hall hats and homemade tanktops to Manhattan bears who have come out of their caves to see what Brooklyn has to offer. On top of it all, Union Pool is separated into three distinct spaces, and one only wonders if the bro dudes imbibing hard whiskey in the front know that it’s Brooklyn’s biggest gay dance party in the back room.
I caught up with the party promoters subjected them to intense questioning: