Last Call at Elaine's

Beautiful and lirical - made me almost be able to taste the cheese burger.

 

Damn it, you're right. I've been to that one and I had forgotten about it. It's just north of Division, which sets it a little bit away from the mayhem of Rush & Division.

It is a good place.

They opened another on on Armitage near Clybourn. It didn't last long.

 

P.J. Clarke's was our NY bar when I covered baseball.
Great story from another writer:
He has an "import" and they take a cab from the Hyatt to meet us at Clarke's. It's the end of the roadie the guy has $74 in cash in his wallet (a $50, a $20 and 4 $1s). The fare is something like $2.60. He throws 3 bucks at the cabbie and comes into the bar.
We're sitting at the end of the bar right by the front door. We all greet the guy, tell him it's his round. He orders drinks, digs into his wallet and he has 3 bucks. He gets pissed because he realized he accidentally gave the cabbie $71.
About 20 minutes later, he looks up and he sees the cabbie. He came into the bar and was looking for the guy. The cabbie said, "I couldn't live with myself if I took this." Astounded, the writer thanked him profusely and gave him the $20.
One of those weird coincidental things. A cabbie returning money. His next fare was only a few blocks away. If he had an airport run, no way he comes back. We happened to be near the front door of Clarke's. Would he have checked out the whole place if he didn't see us right away? Really weird occurrence.

 

I never once set foot in Elaine's. I had other Manhattan bars, and nobody would go there for the food rather than for hanging out. Not knocking Elaine's. I'm sure it had plenty of regulars who loved the place and never set foot in the Lion's Head, either.

 

I always liked Runyon's.

(The original hole-in-the-wall place).

 

I'm proud to say I was going there before the "Seinfeld" show (read about it in the New Yorker, I think). Al didn't know me from a tourist from Des Moines, but I got the fruit, bread and chocolate every time, so I think it was standard, George Costanza's experience nothwithstanding.

I miss it. There was nothing better on a chilly Fall day than stopping by for a soup made to perfection by one of the world's great soup artisans.

For the record, the fruit was perfect, too. I never got a piece that was damaged in any way or less than ripe at that exact moment. The guy was eccentric, but he had standards.

 

I also was a Runyon's guy. Not just a sportswriters' bar, an American League beat writers bar. That's pretty specialized. But the Lion's Head was my favorite. Pretentious, I know, but not as much as liking Elaine's.

 

For a couple years I lived 10 blocks south and two blocks east and I never set foot in the place. I think out of sheer contrariness.

 

Any bar that prominently posts Jenkins' ten degrees of drunkenness can't be all bad.

 

'the lion's head' over 'elaine's' by a country mile for real writers not aspiring to become one of the members of the biggest boors on the planet. 8)