Hotel Bars

a love letter

Illustration by Sam Graap.

In garden parlance, weeds can be classified in any number of ways — invasive, exotic, biennial, the list goes on. But for all the poetry that comes with labeling an uninvited thing “exotic,” the simple fact remains: weeds. 

In a hotel lobby, you’ll find all manner of weed among the clientele: tourist seeds on unsuspecting plots, steadfast regulars and repeat patrons — all bumping elbows with more venomous, intrusive types, unwelcome in the landscape of New York’s nightlife. This is precisely what I like about drinking in hotel bars: For all the ways we red-line tourists, visitors, general outsiders — differentiate them and the locales they inhabit from the campus of Real New York — we’re willing to cross-contaminate, so long as we’re confined to, say, the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. These are spaces created, for all intents and purposes, to serve the nomads; to house them — and yet they’re populated, in equal measure, by patrons who live mere blocks away. 

In some cases, the allure is historic. There’s that New York-of-40-years-ago gloss. It’s institutional: Patti Smith ate here, maybe Robert Moses did too. Surely you saw the cast of Gossip Girl filming an episode outside in 2010. All the same, enter any one of these lobby bars — a souvenir of the old world, or some new-age boutique spot — and the game is the same. Who’s exotic? Biennial? Invasive? Morning glory? 

In the epilogue phase of the pandemic — when working in public spaces was once again deemed permissible — I took to working in hotel bars: The Marleton, the Brooklyn Ace, the Bowery Hotel. In part, the inclination was a product of my desperation to plant myself anywhere at all beyond the four walls of my Brooklyn apartment. But more pointedly, the appeal arose from the venues themselves —  the fact that off-kilter celebrities like BJ Novack, or that one guy with the buzz cut from Girls, might make casual, treasured appearances. The plush seating arrangements. The immaculate wifi. And let it be known: These venues never close, not ever — unlike every ambiance-forward coffee shop in this godforsaken city, oh so many of which have ushered me out at 5pm in spite of my work remaining unfinished. 

Better yet, these are locales in which you can opt between buying coffee, a martini, probably a seafood tower, and absolutely nothing. That’s right: Hotel bars are the only remaining places in all of New York City, perhaps the Tri-State area, where one can sit, undisrupted, for a 12-hour stretch, without making a single purchase. 

Of course, it’s worth mentioning: If you happen to look hungry or poor enough, it’s highly likely that someone else will spend on your behalf (hotel bars belong to the treacherously anachronistic class of places where someone will still buy you a drink from their table, after which a waiter will deliver you a glass of Sancerre, “compliments of those gentlemen over there”). Financially speaking, this is a win — unless you get hungry and/or thirsty before a wealthy savior arrives, in which case you can expect to spend no less than $36 on an Old Fashioned and a plate of french fries. 

This is, however, yet another pleasure of dining in hotel bars: Consistency. In a city that provides what can only be described as an excess of choice on the culinary front, there’s a reliable “brat diet” uniformity to a lobby bar menu. None of the experimental anchovy-pickled-fava-purée “small plate” culture native to Dime Square’s buzziest venues. Rather, in a hotel bar, you’ll find potatoes (several ways). Oysters. Probably a cheeseburger deluxe. Maybe a Ceasar salad beneath a molehill of grated Parmesan. Nothing will be worthy of Michelin accolades, but potatoes are potatoes are potatoes, as the ancient proverb goes. 

Mind you, while we’re on the subject, there are indeed trade secrets worth heeding: Bemelmans at The Carlyle will offer you a trio of complementary nuts, chips, and crackers with your $28 martini. Stick around, and they’ll refill your dish, too. The burger at the Bowery Hotel is only worthwhile when you’ve had a minimum of two cocktails prior. If you’re in the market for oysters: Dirty French at The Ludlow. Don’t bother with food at the Marleton; stop at Joe’s Pizza on your way back to the West 4th subway station. 

To be clear, however, my affection for hotel bars is not founded in their culinary merit. Rather, I use them to write. And as a working writer by trade, I’ll admit: Most days, I don’t write at all. Not really. In fact, I spend the vast majority of my daylight hours reading things by other writers and compulsively cleaning my room. If deadlines mandate, I’ll strong-arm my way through turnkey, pay-the-bills copy assignments. But here’s the important bit: Lately, it would seem my commitment to capital-W-Writing surfaces only in the custody of one hotel bar or another. That’s not small. 

My theory is this: The aforementioned momentum is a product of anonymity. For context,  I was never blessed with an arrival-in-New-York moment. This is my hometown — which is to say, it carries lethal, mortifying evidence of who I was at 5, at 10, worst of all, at 15. Brooklyn is the custodian of my personal revisions. I never got to shed those former selves in quite the way non-natives do — nor have I earned the pleasure of shedding the distinct possibility of running into, say, my 8th grade Social Studies teacher on the subway while on mushrooms (me, not her).

In a hotel bar, however, odds would suggest I’m not a New Yorker at all. I might very well be here on business. Here for the first time. An escort. An actress. A nice girl from a small town with a red truck, and an affection for a college football team that rivals any love I’ve ever mustered for a partner. There’s a peace in that. However briefly, it tends to unstop the cruel and nagging voice in my head that relishes in chastising all the ways I do and do not occupy the shape of “writer” as I’d imagined it. At the Bowery Hotel, I’m simply a girl with a laptop. Tell me: Exotic? Biennial? Invasive? Carnation? 

In any case, perhaps you, yourself are not a writer. Perhaps this tidy little detail of lobby bar patronage is irrelevant to your purposes. Well, bear with me. What I need you to understand is this: There’s a holy, irreplicable alchemy that exists in hotel bars, no matter what it is you intend to accomplish therein. Much like the subway, they mark hallowed territory; offer a refuge that presupposes nothing. They make New York feel less like home — whether it is indeed yours, or not. There’s a poetry to that; a leveling of ground that occurs rarely in these parts (order tap water; order caviar bumps). And with that comes romance. Take it one step further: It’s salacious. 

As you’re well aware, New York is hardly sparing in presenting opportunities to fall in love. But that very ethos is uniquely charged in a hotel bar. There’s a ruthless, mysterious quality to any contained room of people who, for all you know, are temporary fixtures: Here for a layover, a lay, a business lunch. This is, of course, only partially true — but regardless of its validity, the concept allows for a certain suspension of disbelief. In a spirit we tend to associate most intimately with traveling, these rooms open us up to opportunity. Moments are to be seized, strangers are to be approached. Unlike, say, interrupting your neighbor while they read on the subway, introducing yourself to the gentlemen seated beside you at The Carlyle is not a faux pas. 

Hotel bars are equal opportunity venues: They’re judgment agnostic. And frankly, even in the year of our lord 2022, they seem almost immune to the passage of time. You see, it’s always 8pm in a hotel bar — even if it’s noon, even if it’s 2am (a brilliant trick of the light). It’s always a Saturday — even if it’s a Tuesday — and everyone is dressed as such: Suits, heels, velvet bows, bejeweled clutches, as if preparing to board an airplane in the ‘50s. 

It’s a cardinal sin to order anything but a classic cocktail (9 times out of 10, the only appropriate option is a dirty martini, ice cold). Smooth jazz plays on an infinite loop, even if it’s not smooth jazz at all. And whilst sipping gin from the precarious up-turned bell of a proper martini glass, relishing in the antiseptic bite of clear liquor, feeling rinsed of your sins, positively sterilized — imbibing like a woman of poise, born of every New York era there ever was or will be, tracing skewered olives around the rim of your cocktail — someone named Atticus will greet you with a “well hello young lady,” a drink of his own in hand.  

However briefly, while the spell lasts, you might allow yourself to imagine Atticus or Philippe or Daddy Warbucks to be the sort of person beamed down from On High to offer you a book deal, or the lease to a rent-controlled West Village apartment, or perhaps a first-class plane ticket to his fourth home in Mallorca. 

For a moment, that’s a nice space to live in. A little fiction here and there is good for the constitution. But eventually, the moment will expire — when one or both of you feels the tug of the outside world, humming with relentless motion. And it will only be when you emerge, hours later, into the sharper metallic light of the Hoyt Schermerhorn G station, that you’ll recall that weeds, like flowers, have their designated plots, and seasons, and hometowns. That today has a date. That you’ve got 1800 more words to write before midnight. 

However transient, I maintain: this is worthy of marvel. New Yorkers are hardly a class to lose track of time; dismiss the countdown clock; divorce themselves from the tasks at hand. But escapism is a worthwhile medicine — if delivered only in doses, from within the confines of a hotel bar. It’s the reprieve that makes it feasible to live in this city, this borough, these pre-and-post-war buildings and bodies. We all have our contexts, shared or otherwise. On occasion, then, we all require a place to check them at the door, whether we can afford a room or not.

Illustration by Sam Graap.

Eliza Dumais is a Brooklyn-based (and bred) writer & editor. She loves hot dogs, anything pickled, and tinned fish of all varieties (bomb shelter foods). Contrary to popular belief, she does not drink her martinis dirty.