Esquire Magazine names its best bar in America

Gerk · #1 09-15-2006, 09:56 AM

And Gerk can proudly say he has been there many times, maybe actually going tonight

The best bar in America isn't Irish. It isn't in a strip mall. It isn't the sort of place that charges an outrageous cover for people to stand around in black light pushing back shooters out of test tubes. It isn't a fight club or a meat market. There is no snobbery, and there is no tonic-water drinking. There are gimlets and manhattans, bottles of Zywiec, and a first-rate pissoir.

The best bar in America occupies a corner where the path to righteousness and the road to perdition run parallel, east to west, perpendicular to the muddy river that cuts this country in two, north to south. The best bar in America has occupied this physical and spiritual intersection since 1950. The best bar in America lies across the Mississippi from downtown Minneapolis over a bridge named for Father Louis Hennepin, and it has a sign on its yellow-brick exterior that points the way to Our Lady of Lourdes, cast in the red-neon glow of another that reads LIQUORS. The best bar in America also saw one of its doormen murdered last summer.
The best bar in America is Nye's Polonaise. More accurately, it is the two best bars in America—Nye's Bar, known as the "Old Side" to its ancient staff and unshifting regulars, and the upscale bordello kitsch of the Polonaise Room—connected through their shared fire wall by a pair of swinging doors. When it comes right down to it, you're either Nye's or you're Polonaise, making this place a kind of crossroads inside and out.