I purposely avoided MacGregor’s city location (the one on Gregory Street in the South Wedge) for about a month this spring, suspecting the staff there’d been stricken with SARS: Server Apathetic Response Syndrome. This strain of SARS was first identified in China, in a Beijing bar called MacMao’s, where a group of American businessmen […]
Barfly on the wall
Posted inCulture
Fins
Imagine being an American serviceman on leave in, say, Kuwait. You wander into a local watering hole (bar, that is), that you assume is friendly toward Americans (it’s openly serving alcohol, after all). The locals are respectful, if largely indifferent, to your presence, and you soon settle in, standing at the bar, drinking weak Kuwaiti […]
Posted inCulture
Carol, you fool
Someone contacted the office a few months ago to tell us that Carroll’s, an Irish bar and restaurant on East Main Street across from East High, has the only jukebox in town stocked with Shane MacGowan CDs. This sounded like a dubious claim, but one worth looking into. Had MacGowan, a notorious sot, […]
Posted inCulture
Danger zone
Like its neighbor a block or so down the street (Snuffy MaGee’s — sorry I forgot about your big “G” last column), Elixer is a potentially fatal place to drink. Located at the corner of South Goodman and South Clinton, Elixer occupies a sharply angled space that fills one of five wedges around the […]
Posted inCulture
Whatever happened to Pong?
Beer pong — the sport that melds
the heart-pounding thrill of Ping-Pong with the gut-wrenching taste of warm
beer chugged from a plastic cup — has arrived.
Posted inCulture
The analog kid
It was a simple mechanical failure that made me late for Digital Rochester’s monthly meet, mingle, and monopolize event at Tonic on East Avenue. I’d gone there to research this week’s cover story, “Twenty-somethings to the rescue” (see page 6). Both the Rochester-Area 20-Somethings (R.A.T.S.) and Rochester Young Professionals, a splinter group, were encouraging their […]
Posted inCulture
My name is…
Shortly after Thanksgiving, a new bar opened on St. Paul Street, a few doors north of Tapas 177. A week before Christmas, it still had no name. It’s about time we stepped in. The owner, John Rebis, clearly needs help, and not just because his other bar is Paradise Alley. Rebis is trying […]
Posted inCulture
Here comes a regular
“You say tomato, I say f*** you.” [Asterisks added.] Welcome to the Park Bench. I read that little (micro, really) witticism on a bumper sticker stuck beneath one of the TVs above the bar of “The Bench,” as the regulars refer to it. I reprint it here, concerned reader/advertiser/Wegman, because it’s an enlightening example […]
Posted inCulture
Houses in motion
Eight years ago, at the age of 18, Richie Salvaggio, a.k.a. DJ Richie Salvaggio, brought a brand new sound to Rochester: funky house. It happened in a building on Main Street his friends intended to turn into a record store (they never did). Salvaggio says it was his friend BK of the Brain Fruit […]
Posted inCulture
Wormhole
Walking into Dicky’s for the first time in five years, I thought I stepped into a wormhole. Nothing had changed since that night in ’97 I’d last left there after losing at darts, drunk. I wandered from the bar to the tables in the back, searching for some sign of time’s passage. There was […]
Posted inCulture
Like flies on sherbet
I first heard the buzz about Barfly from a bartender at Lola, the bistro on Monroe Avenue. It had opened the night before, he said, and a swarm had formed for the occasion. That’ll happen when a hip hangout drops on the scene, especially at East and Alexander. Lola and Barfly are both owned […]
Posted inCulture
Rock of ages
Author’s forward and disclaimer: Welcome to the first installment of our new, bi-weekly nightlife column, “Barfly on the wall.” As the name attempts to imply, I’ll be exploring bars and other gathering places (mostly bars) incognito. My intention isn’t to spy on people and expose their embarrassing nocturnal exploits to the public. That is, […]
