According to the weights and measures sticklers over at The New York Post, a number of city bars are shortchanging customers by serving pints in twelve to fourteen ounce glasses, instead of the standard sixteen ounce glasses.

The rigorous scientific study determined that 9 out of fifteen bars in the East Village, West Village and Williamsburg serve pints in glasses less than sixteen ounces. Some culprits include Three Sheets Saloon and Blind Tiger in the West Village, Vbar St. Marks and the Village Pourhouse in the East Village, and No Fun on the Lower East Side.

“If you order a pint, you expect to get a pint — not less. It’s not cool,” said Village Pourhouse customer Marcos Rodriguez. According to The Post, the Pourhouse’s pints measured a paltry twelve ounces. Not cool, guys.

Pourhouse co-owner Erika London claimed that while her beers were proper pints, “some of the signature glassware that the beer distributors provide us with look smaller than the average glass, but we are instructed to use them by the distributor.”

Personally, we blame the Imperial System. And Bloomberg, just cause.

Pearl's Social & Billy Club in Bushwick. (Facebook)

Those pesky hipsters are at it again, with their subversive non-weekday work schedules and socially destructive late night PBR-drinking, according to an article in the Daily News.

Bushwick’s Community Board 4 has taken a stand against Sunday sipping, according to the paper, by requesting that bar and restaurant owners stop selling alcohol by midnight on Sunday night.

“Sunday, that’s the day when people rest," district manager Nadine Whitted told the News. “We have to be fair to everybody. It’s not a hard thing to do.”

The State Liquor Authority can still approve a liquor license even if a bar refuses to comply with the suggested Sunday curfew. However, the agency plans to investigate each individual bar or restaurant applying for a license, according to SLA spokesman William Crowley.

“The hipsters are out of control,” said 38-year old perfect caricature of a Brooklyn resident, Monica Hall, to the Post.

“You go into a new land and think you own it," continued Ms. Hall. "Sleeping on a Sunday night, for people with children and who have nine-to-five jobs, is the difference between getting a good night’s sleep and starting your week off right, versus trying to sleep with noise coming from over grown children."

In response, a number of Bushwick bar owners are doing their best to appease the local residents. Betsy Maher, owner of Pearl's Social and Billy Club on St. Nicholas Ave, has installed a bouncer outsider her bar at night to try and keep noise levels now.

“There’s a lot of resistance between old and new,” Ms. Maher told the News. “It’s making the two sides butt heads even more.”

This issue is emblematic of an ever-growing divide between long-time Bushwick residents and the colonizing hipster crowd, who are more likely to shun traditional work patterns in favor of, you know, not having any work patterns (if you believe Girls is an accurate representation of real life, which, duh, it is).

Clearly those old fogeys with their 9-5 jobs and their mindless subjugation to the corporate hegemony don’t appreciate that when you’ve been slaving away all weekend perfecting your newest round of splatter paintings and hawking reclaimed furniture at the Brooklyn Flea, Sunday night is actually the perfect time to kick back with a few brewskis. Can't we all just get along, bro?

Nevertheless, the event was a rousing success: it turned out that the appetite for atavism was robust among the drinky class in New York.

“Just because we’re older doesn’t mean we don’t like the same things as when we were kids,” explained Tim Donnelly, who helped organize the event. “We can just be drunk while doing it now.”

He restated the problem, “If there were a Chuck E. Cheese for grownups, I would totally go.”

As it turns out, there is; in fact, there are many of them. In the past half-dozen years or so—at an increasing rate—bars with children’s games have been opening in New York, particularly in the garland of yuppie Brooklyn extending from Gowanus to Greenpoint.

At Red Hook’s Brooklyn Crab, there is mini-golf and cornhole, a beanbag-tossing game. In Clinton Hill, there is the Brooklyn Tap room, with foosball and Ping-Pong tables. In Williamsburg, one finds Barcade, with its vintage video-game machines; Full Circle, a skee-ball-themed bar, and Bushwick Country Club, which features a down-at-the-heels putt-putt course out back. In Manhattan there is Susan Sarandon’s SPiN, a boozy table-tennis club, and the West Village’s Fat Cat, the apotheosis of the phenomenon, which features a myriad of games, including Ping-Pong tables for “$5.50/per person/per hour (prorated .09/min) Sun-Thu.”

And they have done very well catering to the new alco-lescent crowds.

But whatever happened to just having a drink and a lively conversation? The idea that intelligent, interesting adults could gather over some glasses of one fortified thing or another and carry on an exchange of sentiment and ideas while getting somewhere between reasonably and blindingly drunk? While such things do still happen in some corners of the city, there is an annoying emergence of these establishments that not only cater to but encourage patrons who prefer to behave like their much younger selves.

“Everyone knows this—it’s not something I think—there’s a very prolonged youthfulness now. It really seems to last forever!” author and conversationalist Fran Lebowitz told The Observer recently. “Their idea of being sociable is not to sit around and talk. Their idea of being sociable is to sit around and play games. To me, this seems childish. Whenever people ask me to play a game, I say, ‘I don’t play games.’ And they say, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘Because it’s a game ... There’s been a general disappearance of adulthood.”

To Ms. Lebowitz, who will be in conversation onstage with Frank Rich at Town Hall later this month, there is little in life more important than the verbal arts.

“Conversation to me is something that requires lot of time. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I think you’d have to look long and hard to find someone who has wasted more time than me. I mean, I’ve wasted decades of my life—mostly talking! Talking to me is something that fills my life.

“When our current and perhaps endless mayor, when he was only in his like 10th term, whenever he made that smoking law in bars—which actually really shocked me—I actually said to him—although if you were questioning him, he would not recall this—I said, ‘Do you want to know what sitting around in bars and restaurants talking and smoking is called? The history of art, that’s what it’s called.’”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine many great ideas have been hatched over a microbrew and a foosball table.

Nevertheless, The Observer and a companion decided to take a tour of these atavistic drink shops on a recent Sunday evening, starting with Williamsburg’s Barcade, to witness this Never Never Land of liquor and perpetual children.

A cavernous, characterless room with 1980s arcade games lining the walls, Barcade is a dystopian version of a teen hangout, Blade Runner meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

After securing a drink, our companion left to survey the room. The Observer approached a 20-something couple visiting from London, Amy Chapman and Chris Curd. They were huddled around a Frogger machine, by their account faring “piss poor” at the game.

Ms. Chapman was particularly impressed by the concept of Barcade. “It makes me want to go home and start one myself. It’s such an amazing idea,” she enthused.

“It’s awesome,” Mr. Curd concurred.

Agree to disagree. But did they not have similar diversions in London?

“Not in bars. It’s mostly gambling machines,” responded Mr. Curd

“It’s mostly a thing for kids,” added Ms. Chapman.

Fancy that. We rejoined our companion at the bar. He informed us of his attempt at regaining the gaming prowess of his youth. “I just made it 30 seconds into Contra and just died. I just blew a dollar on Contra,” he said. “Fucking Contra.”

But what of the vibe, the boozy teenageness of the joint?

“There’s something very nonthreatening about this place,” the companion mused. “There’s no one attractive. It’s like, ‘Let’s just go and play some video games.’ I mean, I guess they’re just nerds ... Alright, I’m getting some change.”

In addition to being childish and silly, there was something decidedly unsexy about the superimposition of adolescent accoutrements into the context of a bar. It took away the potential, the edge and the libidinous quality that the best boozing joints give off.

When we reached him by phone, Jason Kosmas, co-owner of the swank bar Employees Only, went even further, pointing out that games of this sort, while ostensibly sociable activities, are actually kind of antisocial.

“You go out with your friends and you spend time with your friends,” he explained. “You know, it’s a wagon train. You go out with your friends and you sort of form a little fortress, and nobody else really comes in.”

As opposed to his establishment, which he said is structured around possibility. “Ultimately, in those places [like his own], people are going to get laid,” he explained. “The word ‘laid’ has different connotations for different people. It might be that they want a great drink, or they might want to see someone famous, or they might want to make a business connection. Something’s gonna happen to them that is out of their ordinary life. Or, most importantly, get laid.”

Imagine as part of this metaphor getting the day’s high score on Galaga. Doesn’t work, right?
Cocktail guru Jim Meehan found that his bar PDT had so much sexual charisma—and such drinkable concoctions—that he had to institute a “No PDA at PDT, hands on the table, tongues inside your mouth” point of etiquette.
“It’s bizarre to me,” he said of the gaming bars. “I work all the time, so going to a bar with my friends to catch up is actually a luxury. I would never go to a place to play lawn darts.”
From Barcade, The Observer and our companion ventured next to the Bushwick Country Club, whose mini-golf course the bartender humbly described as “six holes which you can put a ball into with a club.” It did, however, have a windmill made of entirely of PBR cans. (Go Bushwick!)

There were no golfers present, so we asked the bartender about the proliferation of games in bars.

He responded with consternation that his friends had signed him up for a cornhole league.
Had anyone ever gotten laid by playing in a cornhole league?

“Probably,” he said. “Every team has to have at least one girl on it. I’m sure that someone can get laid from cornhole. You end up with a lot of guys with their shirts off. But those same guys would probably have their shirts off anyway.”

We headed over to Full Circle, a bar so wedded to its skee-ball-centric identity that its name is the term for rolling an expert-level round of the “sport.”

The crowd, if that’s the word, was exclusively male, save the bartender.

(After sinking $10 into the skee-ball alley in about five minutes, we realized another incentive for bar owners to feature games.)

We encountered George McNeese, co-owner of the buzzy Bed-Stuy eatery Do or Dine. He comes to Full Circle about once a week and is even in a skee-ball league with his girlfriend.
He apprised us of the tyranny of small differences within the alco-lescent demimonde.

“If you go to Barcade, it’s going to be filled with people who are more or less looking for a bar scene. You know, it’s going to be filled with hipsters and all sorts of shit that I don’t want to deal with,” said Mr. McNeese, who was wearing oversize clear-framed glasses, a tote bag that looked like a Nintendo controller and a phone cord as a necklace. “It’s gonna be packed, and the drinks are gonna be overpriced. You know, I just want to have a couple beers and play some skee-ball.”

This last reminded us of something Jim Meehan had pointed out. “In a city like New York,” he said, “where there are so many bars and so many people, each bar can fill a specific niche, because they don’t have the collective responsibility. For instance, I just got back from Michigan—there were like two bars in town. If you’re one of two bars, there’s probably more pressure to appeal to a broad audience, whereas if there are like a million bars for 6 million people you can, and especially if you’re small, you can fill a specific niche and be successful.”
Unfortunately, he was right: there is clearly a market for bars catering to nostalgic activity-philes.

Of course, the infantilizing of the bar-going experience is lent a kind of dismaying symmetry by the recent contretemps at the Park Slope beer garden Greenwood Park, where among Yelp reviewers there has been considerable outcry not about grown-ups behaving like kids, but about them actually bringing kids.

“It’s not daycare it’s a BAR,” groused one.

“Too many kids, and I don’t mean 20-somethings, I mean actual children,” bitched another.
And a third noted, “Bars also don’t have proper entertainment for kids.” Erroneously, it turns out. You guessed it, Greenwood Park has games!

As Fran Lebowitz pointed out, “Any environment devolves to the youngest person in the room.” So, why not gather around the bocce courts, young and old alike, and collapse the distinction? In no time, one could look from child to adult, and from adult to child, and from child to adult again, and already it would be impossible to say which was which.
bgallagher@observer.com

We like to think that because most New Yorkers live above the shop, we are the restaurant capital of the world. Yet even with the heralded arrival of Danny Bowien, it turns out San Francisco kicks our (pork) butt when it comes to restaurants per capita. Even worse, so does Fairfield County in Connecticut and--gulp--Long Island.

Those were the findings of Trulia economist Jed Kolko:

Using Census data, we found the metros with the highest density of restaurants and bars, adjusting for the number of households (details at end of post). We didn’t try to measure quality since that’s a matter of personal taste, and the best-restaurant or favorite-bar debate can get fierce. Instead, we focused on the quantity of restaurants and bars that locals can choose

When it comes to bars, neither we nor San Francisco even come close, with New Orleans taking the top spot, followed by a bunch of depressing Midwestern cities, which, given the collapse of local industry and the recent droughts, sure could use the drinks.

Interestingly, there seems to be no correlation between the cost of homes and the density of eateries and breweries, except that the places with more of the latter tend to be quite a bit cheaper, which, when you think about it, makes quite a bit of sense.

Update 2: Melanie Lemieux, is the owner of The Cash Bar. Read more below.

Crif Dogs is passe. The queue outside the empty gallery that serves as a front to Fig19 is a dead giveaway on the weekends. Both Milk and Honey and Little Branch have become way too high-profile. Employees Only should just rename itself to "Please Review Us On Yelp."

So where in the city can you go to find a good secret bar? How about 58 3/4th East 34th Street?

Outed by Thrillist today, there's not that much intel yet on The Cash Bar, a new Murray Hill secret locale located behind an out of service ATM. We do know they serve their cocktails in teapots, serve tapas, and have a plexiglass case with "a million dollars cash" in it.

The website for The Cash Bar is frustratingly sparse, but since the domain begins PartyRockNYC.com, (See: Update 2) a little sleuthing reveals that it belongs to the same organization that owns Billy Hurricane's, Point Break, Thunder Jackson's, Sweet Jane's, and the "private party rooms" of Risky Business.

In terms of keeping a low profile, Party Rock NYC is doing a pretty good job of keeping their team as secret as their bars. Kyle Radzyminski is the owner of Billy Hurricane's, and a stake in Thunder Jackson's, but if he has partners, they are the silent variety.
We've emailed The Cash Bar to try to gather more information (like...do they take Visa?): stay tuned for a response!

Update: We just received an email containing a press release about The Cash Bar, which officially opens Thursday:

So, let's get this straight... opening up is a bar daring a "hush-hush" secret ATM entrance, era-less presidential cocktails, $1,000,000 in cash on display, enticing tapas menu, accepting any currency from across the globe, with a low maximum capacity... and is in Murray Hill? Are you serious?!

Damn right...

Attention, Gamblers & Fancy Ladies, shhhhhh... and welcome to thecashbar - this neo-speakeasy is located in Murray Hill, a stones throw from The Empire State Building. Grasping Lower East Side charm, yet standing without all the pretentiousness that comes in tow... thecashbar is more of an accessible "blind tiger" in comparison to all other speakeasy style establishments in NYC. Yes, we agree that a mustache on a man is awesome & it is encouraged, but unlike others... it's not mandatory folks.  Whilst calling on creative cocktails, boasting beautious bourbons, bestowing bottles of choice brews and accompanied by a tasty tapas menu; thecashbar has everything one would need for a fantastical evening out.  Opened by seasoned music industry veterans & bar'atuers from New York City to Montreal, Quebec... there is always an ecclectic mix of sounds to please a variety of ears, and a great selection of libations to tantalize the tongues of all.

How can one find this quaint little joint is a question you may be asking yourself.  Well, simply look up for the "$" sign on East 34th Street between Park & Madison and find the "Out of Order" ATM machine in the foyer of an unassuming sports bar. Yes, it will say "out of order", but you should really look past that façade.Come on down celebrate the One Worldly Common Denominator... L'argent, Geld, Soldi, Dinero... Money.  thecashbar is the city's biggest little bar.  Cha'Ching!

Party time. Excellent? (Dennis Crowley/Flickr)

Even as the city has gotten squeaky clean over the past decade, in some ways, it is still as nasty as the Bowery at its worst. Case in point: Booze hounds. According to The Times, drinking-related problems are at modern highs.

In 2009, alcohol was responsible for more than 8,840 hospitalizations in New York, a 36 percent increase over 2000. Additionally, the proportion of alcohol-related emergency-room visits among New Yorkers ages 21 to 64 doubled from 2003 to 2009. There were 70,000 such visits just in 2009.

And it is not like 2000 was exactly a tame time in the city, with Silicon Alley booming and the Millenium New Years probably pouring more champagne than any time since the end of Prohibition. Then again, in the midst of a depression, what better things to do than kick back the bottle.

Yet the real issue may be, if this is a problem, is there anything the city can do about it? Or even wants to do about it?

The Bloomberg administration, for its part, is adamant that it is not seeking to reduce the number of bars in the city, a spokesman said. (“The answer is no.”) Responding to inquiries earlier this year about whether the city might discourage the opening of more bars, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, said, “We’re deeply committed to encouraging entrepreneurs to start and expand small businesses in the city.”

In this instance an interventionist administration that recently called for residential buildings to regulate smoking seems oddly satisfied simply to play advertiser in chief.

But the fact of the matter is that even if the mayor thought he could do more to impinge on nightlife—maybe the smoking ban has helped more than it's hurt, making bars more inviting to all—because the State Liquor Authority is the one responsible for regulating these establishments. See the dread Williamsburgers faced with the prospect of a new mega-club, as well as the relief when the SLA turned the down. But only until the club's proprietor cleans up his place on the Lower East Side.

If the state cannot be counted on to properly fund the subways, what happens when it comes to the bar around the corner?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Here, every day's a holiday.

For the last two years, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, hailed by some to be New York's grimiest, sloppiest and most dastardly dive bar -- i.e. New York's best dive bar -- has soldiered forward with its captain, Stefan Lutek, gone. He died at the age of 89 after decades of tending bar at the joint, which he opened in 1965.

The place now may be on its last legs. Corcoran put the listing for its building, 75 St. Marks place, on its website today. Yes, the listing notes the Holiday Lounge's notoriety, but focuses on the important thing here: this building can be your condo.

EV Grieve alerted us to the warning signs, and though there's no definitive plans or anything, whoever buys the place would have little trouble emptying the glasses downstairs. Or, as EV Grieve puts it: "Might as well set up the dumpster out front tomorrow morning."

There's no shortage of poesy penned about the bar's drab elegance. "Even in Manhattan it can exist, quiet amid the chaos, authentic beside a cab-riddled road," reads a story in The New York Times, printed on New Year's Eve 2006. "The dive is un-self-conscious, beautiful in its gloom. Greater than the sum of its parts, it is as spare as a Raymond Carver story, as lean as a haiku. Sentiment condensed, it is a poem, an elegy, perhaps, that hangs in the air as a testament to an anachronistic New York."

Pretty words for a place populated by rotting drunks and whiskey-swilling malcontents (who are, full disclosure, joined by The Observer on certain nights). But there's a literary tradition that could justify the reverence. Regulars included Allen Ginsberg, Leon Trotsky and most prominently, W.H. Auden. Before he passed, Lutek spoke with the New York Press about just how sloppy one of the century's great poets grew when the Holiday Cocktail Lounge was pouring the drinks.

The modernist master W.H. Auden, author of "The Shield of Achilles," was the star drunk. He drank here with Allen Ginsberg, among others, living on cognac, V.S.O.P.—whole bottles in an afternoon as he sat by the window, writing with a stubby pencil, constantly erasing and rewriting. "When he sober, he can't write," Lutak recalls. "When he too drunk he can't write. You could never say when he was drunk, because he drinking all the time."

Who else would you see? Frank Sinatra came by, as his agent lived a few blocks down. Madonna, too, in her early days. But mostly you'll see the regulars, guys with bad gums and stories for days, sitting silently in the corner nursing whiskys as NYU kids or other passersby enjoy, oh, a Budweiser or something.

"He disappeared in the dead of winter," Auden wrote, in verse, upon the death of Yeats. "The day of his death was a dark cold day."

Winter is coming, so if the Holiday Cocktail Bar does close, it will be doubly cold and doubly dark that day. Warm up with a whiskey soon, guys.

You can do this Sunday night at a west side bar!

Earlier today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a mandatory evacuation of Zone A, the places close enough to the river to potentially experience massive flooding when the hurricane hits. Among the stricken land is the stretch of the west side from Houston Street up to Chelsea. There are a lot of bars there! But, with the massive and horrifying Hurricane Irene on the way, surely they will be closed, right?

Not so! We called a few boites in or very close to Zone A, and many will pour the drinks well into the End Times. Dive bars,  indeed!

The Jane Hotel is located steps away from the Hudson River -- will it turn away those who show up to the doors on life rafts après le déluge?

"Yes, we are staying open," a representative for the Jane told The Observer. "As of now, it’s open to the public from five on as scheduled."

The Jane Hotel too hip for your tastes? Well, you can still stop by Ear Inn, purportedly the oldest bar in the city. Might as well go now -- it's probably going to get washed away!

"So far we’re staying open," a waitress told us. "We did order a bunch of sandbags."

Sandbags! We'll see you there Sunday night, then.

Craving a porter and some bangers and mash as your city becomes the next Atlantis? Brass Money is your place. Hurricane be damned, the Meatpacking bar will keep the kegs flowing.

"Absolutely, we're staying open," a bartender told The Observer. "It’s just gonna be some rain."

Well that's good, a little rain. Cool this city down maybe. But what if, say, it's not a little rain. What if it's a hurricane.

"We have a lot of good pumps," the Brass Monkey barkeep said.

Hope everything goes well for you guys, then.

With all these bars staying open, we might as well go all out. Why settle for a bar near the river when you could go to a bar on the river? When the hurricane hits we're heading to the Frying Pan.

Or not.

"We’re on the water so no, we won't be open!" said a Frying Pan employee. "Would you go down there? It’d be dangerous!"

At least one saloon proprietor in this town has any sense. And if you do, too, you'll be following our plan for the weekend: bottle of bourbon, in our apartment.

"I heard you have a much better chance of getting in if you come by cab"

Stuck behind the velvet rope? The Times styles today offers a handy guide on what threads get you past the bouncers and inside to the sweaty free-spending masses who are just the coolest, because they got in. Last week, the Gray Lady's fashion-centric section informed us that girls these days are all wearing dresses. Big, floppy, colorful dresses, popping up all over Rockaway!

This week, they were a bit more specific about people wearing things in various places. Let's investigate!

WHAT TO WEAR TO: Continental (five shots, five dollars, people!)

An unironic mélange of ripped blue jeans, grubby backpacks, baseball hats and sneakers.

BUT NOT:

Baggy jeans or bling

WHAT TO WEAR TO: Provocateur

“A blazer, a solid button-down or a solid sweater.” For women, shoes are key. “Minimum five-inch heel,” he said. “Christians are our favorite,” he added, referring not to the faithful but to Christian Louboutin, the designer known for his red soles. Jimmy Choo and Christian Dior are also welcome.

BUT NOT:

Crazy stripes on his shirt to draw attention to himself

WHAT TO WEAR TO: Day and Night Brunches

A bow tie or, if you have to, go out and buy a $400 pair of sunglasses.

BUT NOT:

A T-shirt unless you’re a rock star

WHAT TO WEAR TO: Riff Raff's

A nice sports coat, a really great flower-print shirt underneath, maybe a matching pocket square

BUT NOT:

“It’s not what you’re wearing; it’s who you are”

Ah, OK, so it's what's inside that counts.

All these club names are confusing! Thankfully, The Times styles goes back to what it does best, and starts making sweeping generalizations about neighborhoods.

WHAT TO WEAR TO: "Hipster bars on the Lower East Side"

Natural fabrics, lots of skinny denim on boys and girls, a lot of draping fabrics and muted colors

(We live on the Lower East Side. We've been doing it wrong all this time! Hold on, jetting home to drape our fabrics and mute our colors.)

WHAT TO WEAR TO: The East Village

More rock ’n’ roll with punk undertones

WHAT TO WEAR TO: The Meatpacking District

Your party dress, your five-inch heels, designer bags

WHAT TO WEAR TO: SoHo and NoLIta

Anything goes

Anything goes! Sounds like a crazy place, this Soho. But we'll stick around our neck of the woods, dressed in all the draping fabrics we can get our hands on.

Goodbye to Mars Bar?

A few weeks ago, The Observer spent a hell of a long time in Mars Bar, the storied punk-themed dive on Second Avenue, expecting it to close any day. Then, we got word of a grace period that could last up to six weeks. They wouldn't go out without a fight. Old habits die hard. All that good stuff.

But today, EV Grieve reported that Mars Bar's bottles of whiskey stopped pouring. Could the beloved tattered closet of a saloon be done for good?

We called, and it seems the time of demise is still up in the air.

"Hello," a man said when he picked up the bar's clunky plastic land line phone.

It's The Observer, we said.

"We're closed," he said.

What happened?

"Health Department shut us down."

So, is this the end?

"No," he said. "I have to go."

The stalwarts, then, insist the place will get its act together before the wrecking ball comes, but that date's just a few weeks away. Aspiring punk rock revivalists, start looking elsewhere. You better pray there's another charmingly rude rust den to serve you Leroux Rock & Rye because Mars Bar is done, dead today or dead tomorrow.