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On a balmy Monday night I found myself at 300 East, a restaurant-slash-bar located, sensibly enough, right where it ought to be: at 300 East Boulevard. (Before you roll your eyes, please consider that the Fairview Grill is not on Fairview Road—although I hear it used to be—and that Thomas Street Tavern is situated on Thomas Avenue; apparently there is no Thomas Street. You’ll agree that these bits of happy weirdness fit the haphazard street-naming scheme of Charlotte quite nicely.) I was meeting a friend, Michelle, for a late dinner.
In the heart of Dilworth, 300 East occupies an old mansion in the middle of a sprawling block of homes and small businesses. I parked my car on East Boulevard and crossed the street. The trees were livid with the mechanical-sounding buzz of cicadas. My friend’s schedule hadn’t meshed with mine and she was there before me, sitting at the bar, absentmindedly pushing salad greens around a plate with a fork. She was in a conversation with a man in a tight, red t-shirt whose arms were muscled like a circus strongman and whose scalp was as round and smooth as a barbell. He smiled continuously. As I spoke with him over a glass of Malbec (I asked for Guinness, but the bartender steered me toward wine); he told me he taught yoga, a particular form called “Jungian Yoga.” Obviously I misheard this detail, as to the best of my knowledge and as much as I struggled to grasp a possible connection between these two disparate entities, there is no “Jungian Yoga.” Carl Jung is, of course, the Swiss father of analytical psychology (1875-1961). Yoga is, of course, the exercise that many of your friends and coworkers love and continuously complain about being late for.
Michelle and I settled into conversation. On Monday nights wine is half price at 300 East. I worked at another glass of Malbec; she had Zinfandel. I thanked the bartender for the advice on the wine. Then I asked if he understood what the guy in the red shirt had said. “No idea, honey!” he responded, moving past my Michelle and me with a clunky grace as he restocked stemware, tended to the handful of drink orders coming his way from the emptying dining room, and commented randomly on various things he overheard us talking about. I mentioned having attended—briefly, very briefly—a fairly large and relatively unusual party the previous week, a hipster hootenanny with a white-trash theme the participants took as far as it let them. He grinned widely. “You were at the White Trash party?” he asked. I had been there, but only for a half hour, I told him. I was tired that night, and dressed inappropriately for a white-trash party—which is to say, I was dressed appropriately. “I was there, too!” the bartender confided. The three of us laughed about that, and then about Jungian Yoga, whatever that was, and then suddenly Monday evening had slid itself solidly into Monday night—it was ten o’clock, and 300 East was closing—and Michelle and I left. I’d go back every Monday if I could.
Two nights later, my friend Lucas and I decided to ignore the heat and sip some martinis, so we decided to take a shot at one of Charlotte’s popular Wednesday-night bar-going attractions, Therapy, on Tryon, a smallish nook that during warm weather sprawls out beneath a covered archway that is suddenly transformed into an outdoor café. Little metal tables seat groups of fours and sixes, and sometimes twos, but more likely a dozen. The place has feeling of pleasant sprawl to it. It’s usually loud. All spring and summer Therapy thrums with activity; many nights earlier this season I had arrived only to find that there were no available seats. On that particular Wednesday, the performance of Lion King had let out, and nicely dressed people were spilling onto the street, smiling and talking about the show. The moon was big. Again, the racket of the cicadas was as loud as traffic. Moving toward Therapy, Lucas and I strolled down Tryon with the gently moving crowds, past men carrying sleepy children, couples walking hand-in-hand. This late-summer Wednesday, the streets active and interesting, this was a version of Uptown Charlotte I found easy to admire.
The patio area beside the lounge at Therapy is typically packed with martini aficionados of every sort of enjoying a variety of martini-based drinks in a spectrum of colors. On that night, it was not as jam-packed as usual, but I saw everything from just-cloudy martinis to electric green martinis, from ones that glowed neon pink to those so beyond chocolaty chocolate, you could almost taste them from three tables away. There was a lot of laughing; people were having a good time. It’s an excellent place to sit, to watch who comes and goes, to meet new people. Lucas and I never got our martinis, though.
A doorman met us as we searched for a table. I wore a collared, button-down shirt and jeans—more or less the same getup, in fact, that had me looking like such a square at the white-trash party I had abandoned ten days before. Lucas, however, cultivates a look best described as “hipster casual” or maybe “snappy Bohemian.” Something like that. In short, he provided a welcome counterpoint to how I was decked out that night, in my usual staid khakis and ragged baby blue button-down. And while his t-shirt undoubtedly cost him more than what I’d spent at Old Navy for my fake oxford, and while it emitted a thoroughly positive, neither-my-mom-nor-my-girlfriend-picks-out-my-clothes-for-me-anymore vibe, and while that outrageously vogue, ridiculously expensive t-shirt still had more going for it overall, one aspect of Lucas’s t-shirt was undeniable: the thing lacked a collar. This concerned the doorman at Therapy a great deal.
He told us we could not stay. “You’re kidding,” I quipped, sure that he was. But he wasn’t being funny. I stepped back to survey the situation, looked around at the empty tables. With a wink I suggested that we were good guys and wouldn’t raise much of a ruckus or order any drinks the bartender couldn’t make, and that we were unlikely to pilfer the martini glasses. I pointed out the excess empty tables. I suggested that we were generous with tips. I pointed out that the t-shirt in question was small-batch, big-city chic. Perhaps the recipient of more than enough bullshit already that day (or maybe over the course of a lifetime), the doorman would have none of my logic, and we were turned away without ceremony.
Luckily, if Therapy doesn’t work out, it’s not a long walk to the friendliest confines in the city, and one of its best-kept secrets as well: Alexander Michael’s, in the Fourth Ward. Another restaurant and bar that has the welcome, lovingly battered feel of an old chair, Alexander Michael’s is the sort of place you duck into out of a pouring rain. (Or, as in our case, sartorial prejudice.) We strolled into the dim room. The bartender, Paul, a man who looks as though he’s just wandered in from Alaska—I mean that in a good way—gave us a glance and then, apparently at ease with the occasional collarless shirt, returned to pouring beer. We approached him, ordered two pints of Guinness, and commandeered one of the wooden tables.
Next to us was a guy scarfing down stroganoff as though he hadn’t seen food in months. His colleagues, a group of successful looking twenty-somethings, ate, too, although more reservedly, and with less mess. From time to time I caught them pausing to marvel at their colleague’s gustatory attack. Incidentally, they all wore shorts with collars, so they would have been fine at Therapy.
In a city where the neighborhood bars often provide your best bet, Alexander Michael’s does an even better job than most. And in a city where seeing and being seen often matters more than it should, it’s a relief to find a spot where you come as you are, eat how you eat, and whatever else, and it’s perfectly okay. This was the diametric opposite of Therapy.
Not only that: they serve the best pint of Guinness in the city, too: sturdy and thick enough that, if I wanted to, I could easily have stood a beer-coaster on end in the finger-width-deep, sand-colored foam at the top of the pint. And while the shamrock design added at the tail end of the pour had in the past felt superfluous, I welcomed the special flourish here. It was that good! I turned to thank the bartender, but he had moved on. My martini research would have to wait for another time, but the search for the Queen City’s finest pint of Guinness had ended. By the time the collared-shirt twenty-somethings rose from their chairs to leave (the stroganoff now no more than a hiccup) and us all talking about dress codes and collared-versus-collarless shirts and Jungian Yoga, I was well into my fifth pint for the night, and enjoying life immensely.
Once the weekend hits, everything changes. The weekday hotspots give way to the throngs of dressed-to-the-nines young professionals filling Uptown Charlotte and making it the most obvious destination for whatever the Queen City has to offer. With that in mind, by the end of the week I was ready to give the bars on Tryon another shot. I went alone, stopping in here for a drink, moving on, hoping to find something interesting happening over there. Beautiful girls swarmed everywhere, giddy and done up in tight jeans and impossible heels. Many of the guys had manipulated their hair in odd ways, so that it stuck straight up in the middle of their scalps, like the dorsal fin of a particularly prickly fish; they wore sullen expressions, mostly, as if bothered by it not being quite loud enough, and many of them walked as though moments away from tracking down an acquaintance who owed money.
If you’re a connoisseur of even a few of Uptown’s many nightspots, you’ll sneer when I admit that I find them often interchangeable. I grabbed a Guinness at Connolly’s, near the corner of Fifth and Tryon, the interior of which was a haze of cigarette smoke and languid bodies. I turned the corner and climbed the stairs to the Attic where, after a negotiation with the plastic-cup man, I peered down like a vulture from its second-story perch on the corner—an often mysteriously underutilized place to ogle the weekend extravagance seething on the streets and sidewalks below. (No glass on the balcony.) I watched what happened below as if I’d never seen anything like it before; such is the curious effect of booze and voyeuristic height. In the street there were the usual lines of slow-moving cars, some souped up and circling, some just trying to get through town. I watched the bicycle taxis—pedaled rickshaws, really—huffing to the corner of Trade and Tryon and emptying out, ready for new fares. I saw the ubiquitous bachelorette parties, girls gone decidedly wild for the night. Parades of bodies on display. Groups of guys dressed in the darkest jeans you’ve ever seen. Lemon-yellow popped collars. Cowboy hats. Lime green popped collars. A chick in a feather boa. Policemen leaning on bicycles. A man with no money who’d like somebody to give him some. Pink and orange popped collars. A guy dressed entirely in white. Another in a navy blue suit who seems, despite the party going hoi polloi surrounding him, to be late for work, his shoes clicking on the concrete, his briefcase swinging. Women in special dresses. Women in painfully high heels. Women with fake tans. Women with fake---
I left the balcony and stepped through the portal from the Attic into another second-story bar called Madison’s, where I drank a gin and tonic (which was perfect!), and a while later disappeared down the steps and out onto the street. Walking it is different than looking at it from above. Unlike Wednesday, which was gentle, on Fridays the main thoroughfare percolates with activity. At street level you become part of a moving mass, powerful in its flow. Every so often someone was stopped right in the middle of things, and, as with a stick in a stream, the crowd of pedestrians opens to make way and then closes up once the disturbance had passed. These stopped people were invariably checking their cell phones, arms akimbo, a tiny light reflecting off their eyes. The effect is strange, as if they suddenly had blocked out the world, demanded their square yard of space to focus on what is apparently The Most Important Text Message Ever Written. I wondered what banal, curiously abbreviated missive one might be inclined to send, all at once, from the sidewalk. I continued on. As revelers approached I listened to the snippets of their various conversations, which arose, then, as they passed me, were lost.
I sped up, crossed Tryon, and opened the door to Zink. Zink was noisy but not busy. This was odd, considering how busy the evening was outside. The bartender, a friend of mine, prowled the bar from one end to the other, like a cartoon of a tiger in a zoo. For the most part, his job was well in hand. A cadre of women in their thirties were propped against the bar, hiding behind their cigarettes, but they didn’t seem to need anything. The man who stood next to me, dressed in two t-shirts, one over the other, had convinced himself that this was “his place,” a point he was intent to impress upon the two fellows to his left. He also castigated them for never having lived on Long Island. “I’ll take you guys out in the city,” he continued, meaning New York City. He continued, his monologue a-flower with F-bombs like a field in springtime: “The [expletive deleted] Irish [expletive deleted] heritage is [expletive deleted] unbelievable!” I considered asking what he thought of the local Guinness, but decided against it.
Down the bar, the bartender delivered the wince-inducing punch line to a joke. And that’s the way it is there: the bar at Zink is a friendly room, a place where even the guys bragging incessantly about the imagined superiority of Long Island begin to feel like family, and where two cute girls having a crappy year might explain their troubles to a bozo with a notepad and a pen. As I recall, none of these people wore shirts with collars.
~ Andy Graves |
