Formerly Piratz Tavern

Piratz Tavern, last seen getting some un-helpful aid from reality TV show Bar Rescue, is shutting down for good this weekend. Having eventually made good on my promise to give it another shot, I'm not too disappointed by that news, even if my second visit proved more pleasant that my first. The place was cleaner, service was quicker, the server remembered my orders (that seems like a low bar, but I was sitting at a table with fourteen other people, all working off separate checks), and the pirate-y banter was kept to a minimum. It may not have made for a great night out, but I didn't leave wondering what the hell I had just experienced, either.

The "if you don't like it, you can leave" arguments have persisted, among both staff and regular patrons. It's not a good look to cavil at this stage but self-restraint is not my strong suit and I'll never get this chance again: you shouldn't have to "just know" that most of the menu is best left ignored. And while a person may have a better time if they're willing to go with the flow until there's enough booze in their bloodstream that they can ignore the awkward interactions with the crew, it's not fair to expect anyone to know that going in. That is, you shouldn't have to show up tipsy in order to have a chance at a better time--it's not your cousin's dry wedding.

Lastly, the origin of "grog" is less appropriate than one might assume. It was named for a substance first brewed by the British Royal Navy (mortal enemies of pirates, basically) and introduced by Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed "Old Grog" for the grogam coat he wore. Vernon started cutting his men's rum rations with water and lime juice to prevent spoilage as well as ongoing discipline problems among the men (and it was later found to prevent scurvy). Men who remembered the older, purer (and no doubt more satisfying) ration took to calling it "grog" and the name stuck long after those men were replaced by younger sailors with no memory of how good things used to be (scurvy-resistant though those new men were). Grog, then, is a slur for watered-down rum introduced by a well-meaning British naval officer. Not something I'd be eager to drink, but to each their own.

All that said, Piratz has gotten enough crap for wanting nothing more than to be a fun place to gather, with Bar Rescue being just its most public chapter. Looking back on that episode, I'm still not sure whether Jon Taffer was trolling the Piratz crew or whether, in attempting to air out the piratey-ness that he never quite comprehended, he had concocted the worst possible idea to turn the bar around. It's especially confounding when you watch other episodes of the show and see Taffer competently (if loudly) remaking bars without lurching from one gimmick to another. Or maybe having personal experience allows me a level of insight that I'll never be able to have with the few dozen other establish Bar Rescue has profiled. Corporate Bar was a thoroughly terrible idea--at least a Pirate gimmick is vaguely appealing.

Taffer sees bars as a money-making venture, full stop. Tracy Rebelo and her staff--along with their most faithful patrons--saw it as a place for fun. No gimmick was going to make the two sides understand one another. Cue reality television.

For my part, I'll never understand why a bar needs a gimmick at all. Its neighbor across the street never did, unless "noisy but with a good beer list" counts as a gimmick. But even if Quarry House never opens its doors again (and you can support them here), downtown Silver Spring is not losing its status as a bar haven. Because it never was one. It's a late-to-bed suburb with aspirations toward to an upscale nighttime destination. When its residents want to drink out, we take the minutes-long trip into the District. The bars lucky enough to survive here make a lot of coin as twenty-somethings become thirty-somethings and want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Goodbye, Piratz Tavern. You were never for me, but you never tried to be. You knew what you were and what you wanted to be, save for one brief, strange experiment. There's something admirable in that. I'll have a glass of (undiluted) rum in memory of that. And try to not remember all the other stuff.

Heavy Seas Winter Storm

In a city that's also home to the likes of Brewer's Art and Union Craft, Heavy Seas could all too easily come off as the shallow yet popular kid among the more substantial Baltimore breweries. But as luck would have it, that title still belongs to Natty Boh,* allowing Heavy Seas to persist as the flashier brewery in town. Sadly, that flash obscures some decent brewing tradition. For all their overwrought pirate-imagery, much of Heavy Seas' output (their Rye Porter, their Small Craft Warning pils) is built for light palate-refreshers or, more likely, some early evening sessioning. Among the never-too-complex but perfectly-pleasant lineup, Winter Storm fits right in.

Winter Storm pours dark brown, a few shades shy of black, with a dense head (yes, ha ha, dense head).

It smells nutty, and a bit malty. Despite being labeled as an Imperial ESB, this one is introducing itself as a nut brown. Not that I'll ever complain about a brown ale.

Some surprisingly sweet malt is up first, followed by caramel, and then malt again. The taste is not so heavy on the alcohol.

Winter Storm rests medium-heavy. Somewhere between a fall and winter beer, making it about right for the weird November we're having.

My feelings on Christmas ales are pretty well-documented. The entire style could afford to turn the clock back a few weeks and take some notes from this ESB (maybe with a few more notes from the better porters, while being less... nutmegy). Malty with some satisfying heft, Winter Storm comes off like a sleepy pirate, wishing everybody happy holidays a few days too early. Fortunately, the beer is good enough that you don't really mind the seasonal creep.

Grade: B+

*Note to my fellow Marylanders: National Bohemian is now brewed in North Carolina and Georgia. So we can stop pretending that it possesses some kind of noble, local allure and accept that it is instead just a bland "eh, I'm already drunk" beer.

Bar Rescue, "Piratz"

Piratz was--and is again--a bar in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. It is pirate-themed. And it is not doing well. Owner Tracy Rebelo is, we are told, $900,000 in debt and living with her teenage daughter in her parents' basement. Hence the bar being featured in an episode of a reality TV show (if it had been thriving, Piratz could've gotten a nine-episode deal for its own show).

Spike TV's Bar Rescue pits bar expert and nightclub consultant Jon Taffer against bar-owners and their failing businesses. Taffer is a self-aggrandizing asshole, who yells far more than should be necessary for an adult. But nice, reasonable people don't usually get reality shows, so there you go. And we quickly see that, despite his flaws, Taffer generally knows what he's talking about and that he has the connections and resources to give struggling bars anything they might dream of.

As soon as the episode begins, Taffer is hung up on the idea that a pirate bar is an innately awful idea--especially in Silver Spring. I think he's half-right. A pirate bar could feasibly do well in places like St. Petersburg, Florida, or Nassau, Bahamas, where people might reasonably be looking for piratey kitsch. Keeping it in DC, a friend remarked to me that a place like Piratz--albeit toned down--might perform well in an area like H Street, where quirkiness is rather more likely to be embraced. But what Rebelo has is a building in downtown Silver Spring, where office workers dominate the lunch and happy hours, and the nighttime crowd isn't so gung-ho about donning their pirate gear, either.

Taffer rightly decides to target the office workers. He less rightly decides on an office-themed establishment, complete with motivational posters and While You Were Out notepads. Because everyone wants to go drink and have lunch in the same atmosphere in which they were just working. He also renames the bar: "Corporate Bar and Grill" (for all that Taffer is good at, he has trouble with names. In another episode, he re-christens a California dive-bar "Racks." Did I mention that this was in an attempt to differentiate the bar from the strip club next door?). Before the makeover, Rebelo pleas to Taffer that she doesn't want her bar to become just another soulless enterprise. Taffer replies that businesses don't have souls. And that's true. But in the bar business, it seems to me--and I have no claim to the knowledge or experience that Taffer has--the successful businesses are the ones that can project the veneer of a soul. Ostentatiously removing any trace of that seems to invite only the ironic visitors, looking for a quick larf at the idea that they're sipping PBR's at a board room table. 

But any of these solutions (moving the bar, changing the bar) assumes good management to see them through. Piratz real problem is that neither Rebelo nor her staff know what they're doing. Worse still, they don't seem to know that they don't know what they're doing. I visited Piratz with some friends a few years back and it wasn't until watching Bar Rescue that I was able to identify exactly what was wrong. I owe Taffer that much credit.

When a couple of Taffer's acquaintances sit down to do some reconnaissance (while wearing pirate gear because--and this is true--such attire the only hope for quick attention from the servers at Piratz), they are greeted by would-be episode stealer One-Eyed Mike, who slurs "just gonna seat yerselves wherever the fuck ye like, are ye?". This is roughly the level of awkward that I recall. And we haven't even gotten into the more important aspects of bar hospitality. Taffer soon sees that the menu is too long, that the atmosphere is more distracting than it is enchanting, and that the staff manages to be both inattentive and intrusive. I can confirm all of these from experience. It's little surprise that the food and drinks are lousy; what kind of quality comes to mind when you think of the authentic pirate diet?

I won't even get into the push-back from the Piratz staff. Their attitude is that this is a pirate bar and that anyone who doesn't like it should leave. It's a twist on the "haters gonna hate" logic that's so insidious because it's simultaneously wrong and irrefutable.

When Rebelo asks her staff at the new Corporate Bar, "How bad do we just want a vat of grog right now?" it's genuinely depressing. She never wanted a bar. She wanted a place to dress up with simpatico Renn Faire dorks whose passion would be perfectly acceptable (healthy, even), if they could put it aside long enough to acknowledge the damage it was doing. What Rebelo has is an insanely expensive hobby. She knew enough to call Bar Rescue and set up the potential turnaround, but couldn't be bothered to look at all the problems Taffer loudly pointed out to her. She didn't need a streetwise consultant; she needed an intervention.

According to the episode's postscript, the pirates reclaimed Corporate Bar within days of Taffer's exit. I considered paying them a second visit, just to bookend this post. And I may yet do that, just for the curiosity of what Yelp tells me is now a disconcerting hybrid of the old Piratz and the former Corporate Bar. But curiosity is what led me to Piratz the first time. And if Bar Rescue has taught me anything, it's that you need to learn from your mistakes. Otherwise, Jon Taffer will yell at you a lot.

Going out for cigarettes, kids.

Alright, guys, I'm out of here for a couple of weeks.  Gettin' hitched and then away on honeymoon.

While I'm gone, make sure to check out my brief write-ups for Nos Populus, and all the excerpts, too.  If you like those, you may also enjoy the story of my self-publishing experience.  And, if you still want more for whatever reason, well, you might as well go order your copy of Nos Populus. 

I know I've been heavy on sports lately.  That's mostly because I find sports relatively easy to cover at a time when I've had too much on my plate as is.  Plus, the campaigns have (probably deliberately) been keeping quiet during this pre-convention phase and there'll be plenty of time to cover the election over the next 22 weeks or so (yes, really).  And as the summer rolls along, there'll be more book and movie reviews, as well (eight weeks until The Dark Knight Rises!).  And plenty more besides; inspiration is never a problem--time is. 

So until next month: take it easy.  Don't do anything I wouldn't do.  Or, you know, do.  I'm not your boss.

In Brief: The Sea is Full of Horror

Eons ago, the greatest horrors of our world returned to the sea from whence all life originated.  Some say that said horrors were banished there, as though such things could be banished, or would accept banishment.  Others say they took to the deep because the land had no challenges for them.  The truth lies somewhere in between, if much closer to the later.  Beneath the surface of gentle ocean waves, they look and act as beings of purest grade nightmare fuel.  On our surface world, they'd be reduced to hunting (or, for them, playing).  But in the vast darkness, these things of seemingly eternal lifespans (we don't actually know how long many sharks, for instance, live.  But does this look like a thing that can die?  Case rested) need not sink to something so base and can be patient, waiting for us to make the mistake of coming to them.  And we will.  Oh, we will. 

The brief glimpses we get of their tricks--that octopus above, for example--are but parlor tricks for simple amusement.  Their simple amusement.  Their true games are played much deeper, down where the light refuses to stretch.  It is no coincidence that H.P. Lovecraft identified the ocean floor as the location of R'lyeh, resting place of Great Cthulu.  From where else could an incomprehensible horror from beyond the stars rule without prematurely annihilating the planet through terror-driven insanity? 

Most people think that burying Osama bin Laden at sea almost a year ago was a geopolitical maneuver; no one really wanted the bastard, plus it denies his adherents a grave site for pilgrimages.  But those are mere fringe benefits, logical explanations for a world that does occasionally demand logic, if only because it has trouble contemplating the non-Euclidean horrors that lie beneath.  The truth is far more ghoulish than we mere land-dwelling mortals dare attempt to absorb.  In the place where the monster bin Laden now rests, he is not worthy of the title "monster."  Or even "terrorist."  Down there, he'd hardly rank as an amateur.  Nothing we could have done to him would have been fitting enough.  But we could feed him to the seeping moist, to be forever surrounded by those malevolent, invisible, slithering, toothsome creatures, with escape an impossibility. 

They will terrify him and then kill him.  Again and again and again.  Because fear is the most delicious condiment of all.  

*Credit to my wonderful fiancee on the title.