A couple of weeks ago I found myself staring down a Martini glass at a place I thought was dead, but is, in fact, very much alive. Temple Bar, for my first ten or so years in NYC felt like one of those places where only fancy people with fancy jobs and a lot of money went, and it just didn’t seem like somewhere I’d enjoy. And then, thanks to the magic of somebody else paying for drinks, I went when I was in my late-20s, and I quickly fell in love with the spot. It had this very specific mood to it that could only have come out of the little window of time in the 1990s, a few years before Sex and the City and a few more years added to that before the Bowery Whole Foods and all those markers of what people like to think ruined certain parts of lower manhattan. It was opened in 1989, prime Patrick Bateman years, so it had this sort of feeling that I found myself drawn to immediately around 2009. I once described it as something like an older, stately nobleman from some Eastern European country who was into some decadent shit but didn’t flaunt it. I went for a few years, and then, in 2017, it closed. The space did what spaces do in NYC, and it just sat dormant for a few years until folks behind a few places I really like decided to reopen it and basically not change much from the old days. The free snacks are still good, the drinks are as well and it’s dark as hell. I love it.
New York City has been undergoing a collective longing for different parts of the past. It’s the 20-something TikTok people going to Bemelmans or people going out of their way to eat at the Odeon to the point where walking up and seeing if there’s a table isn’t really a wise idea anymore. This is all great to me since I love both of those places, and I think it definitely all has something to do with the fact that we’ve let too many classics slip away, so people are trying harder to hold onto certain places that have a connection to the old New York so many of us tend to mythologize. It’s not a trend per se, especially since the Odeon thing was happening before the pandemic was even a consideration and places like Cafe Dante or Minetta Tavern took over old spaces and repurposed them a few years before that. But as I recently wrote in my piece about Forlini’s closing up, I do wonder if we’re going to see more things like that happening in New York. Less new places, more new old places.
If that is the case, I’d like to throw my hat in the ring for one very specific place that I actually feel like could really work in a big way despite the fact that it might not seem like it would. It’s a place that was gaudy but also stylish, decadent and a little trashy, fun, strange and, most importantly, moody! Yes, friends, I’m talking about Keith McNally’s Pravda.
I know some people are saying, “Jesus. Pravda,” and that’s exactly what I’m going for. If you’re one of those people, then I’m guessing you also saw your career really start right before or smack in the midst of the Great Recession, when people who you thought “had it together” had to do things, like decide on keeping their kids in a posh Upper East Side private school or trying to sell their third home or publishers, had to figure out how to change with the times so a decade later people who worked in media could actually have careers and not worry about the bottom dropping out all the time.
Oh, wait…
Pravda just didn’t make sense then and that’s maybe why it was so beautiful. In Bret Easton Ellis terms, I think it opened at the End of the Empire, or maybe it was post-Empire, or maybe those are the same things. Either way, it had this very party at the end of the world sort of feel to it that I love and I’m glad I mostly had people with more money or expense accounts take me there because there was no way I could afford it. The two things Pravda specialized in, if I recall, were Martinis and caviar. They were good at those two things and they even combined them in what the Wall Street Journal described as a Martini that “uses house-infused vodka flavored with cucumber and dill, and the drink is served with a small spoon to help you slurp up the precious black globes that settle along the bottom of the glass.”
It’s funny to think about this now because when that article came out in 2011, we were just about to start seeing an uptick in things like the $100 gold donut. It all felt a little much back then, but now I look back and I think, man, people really needed to feel anything a decade after 9/11 and not long after it felt like the entire country was crumbling to pieces but then it somehow stayed together. A little glue, some duct tape, a bunch of money to bail out banks and the auto industry, and America was back, baby!
Doesn’t that feel kinda quaint now? In hindsight, that sort of delusion seems nice and I wish I could crawl back into it, but that’s just not how things work. So what I’m going to suggest is more things like Temple Bar. More specifically, I think Pravda should reopen. If that can’t happen, I’d like to see more ostentatious vodka Martinis. Yes, I said ostentatious vodka Martinis. You can’t make that one Martini Pravda named after Gogol, the one with a pickled quail egg dropped into house-infused horseradish vodka, with gin. Horseradish gin? What sort of a freak are you to suggest such a thing? I think we, the walking numb, need something like this. We’re all just trying our best and it just feels like things are getting stupider, so why not embrace a totally strange concept that somehow worked well for 20 years, and then closed in 2016 because…who knows. That was when people thought they suddenly knew everything about vintage cocktails and single malts and gaudy Martinis weren’t cool anymore. I’m sure that had something to do with it. And I’m fine with vintage cocktails and single malts and I know a gin Martini is better than a vodka one. But none of that matters right now. All that matters is we’re alive and hopefully we all stay that way and any distraction from all the stupidity is very welcomed.