no. 121: a short list of almost perfect bars
When we opened our restaurant, we changed the menu every week, sometimes more than once. This led Michael to ask: “but what of guests who might remember a particular dish with great fondness? Would you not want them to be able to return to order it again?” This sounded to me like a question from someone much older than us, which Michael was, and is. He has a check from Taillevent framed upon his kitchen wall, written in longhand that looks like it was meant for copperplate. Our intention was to look forward, not back. I didn’t say that his question presumed that restaurants still last decades.
Last year I went to Portland, Oregon, for a technical writers’ conference, and stumbled upon an almost perfect bar. The Bellwether lives on the ground floor of a historic house on the west side of Portland, and wears its pioneer-chic with a light and straight-backed ease. The room is almost monastic. There are curves, but I remember the right angles. Dried flowers hang everywhere, when sunset floods the room they blush like apricots again.
If you walk through the romanesque arch in the back of the room – a curve that feels square – and through a set of vestibular rooms with lower ceilings, paneled in even darker wood, you emerge into their back garden, trees for walls and clouds on the ceiling, strung with fairy lights that make the umbrellas look like silk. And because this is Portland in springtime, the trees will be a million shades of green, so as you sit there you fall into the endless moiré of the leaves.
Everything was twice as good as it had to be, precise and vibrant and apparently carefree. An everyday salad for the ages, chives cut just so, lettuce sweet enough to offset the vinegar, fresh as the air, delicate as a night under the stars. Pucks of panisse, exploding. A coulotte steak with a crust of blood and midnight. A tiny martini, impossibly cold. And all around us, the neighborhood, humanity at ease, dog bowls in the garden, laughter like twilight stars. It doesn’t take much. Simple cooking, good weather, a garden. Cocktails as strong and precise as ballerinas. And yet it’s so hard to do this at all.
I went back to the same conference this month. It was in the same building in Portland, but this year it was a totally different space – a bomb shelter, or a ration queue. Most of us work in software, kraken are stirring in the deep. There are always leviathans circling. They take turns, and it’s just a question of the monstrosity du jour. Most years the vanishings go unremarked, the suckings-down into the dark. This time everyone was peering down.
One of the conference speakers brought up this essay called “I want to see the claw.”1 It’s about being able to see the traces of the people in the software they write. The “quality of care, the striving towards excellence and mastery,” that you can sometimes see in code. The essay is from last October, and the author, Vicki Boykis, was writing about the kraken, their unending hunger, and our hunger for them.
I work in software because it pays my rent, and because they hire weirdos like me. But I also work in software because there are corners of the software world where you sense that people are making something real. These corners tend to be defined less by what’s being made, and more by who’s working there. Some people make bits feel solid.
I guess this is important to me, because ultimately everyone who works in software is ultimately sitting in an air-conditioned room. We are getting paid very well to type all day. We are not getting sunburned in the tomato fields. We are not mucking out grease traps, or loading the helpless onto stretchers, or sweeping the pavement in front of our offices to make our streets feel welcoming.
Spring was colder in Portland this year. The roses were buds, last year we walked in a city of fathomless color, a conjunction of peonies and roses and irises, daring us to ignore their beauty. This year the air was crisp and grey, last year it flirted with a week of sunshine. We went and stood in all the scorched places where we’d be struck by lightning: Jacqueline, Cafe Olli, Dos Hermanos, Roseline. Part of the magic is making sure you really can’t find it again.
Some new friends brought me back to the Bellwether for lunch. By day the dried flowers look like strange bones, and the booths sit up a little straighter. You see how tired they are, the effort shows. You have to order at the counter there, which makes ordering feel like an occasion. The bartender stirs Negronis like she’s meditating, while people fumble with their wallets, the unfamiliar names of amari, the decisions they didn’t think to make. The bartender doesn’t say, “hi, I’ll be taking care of you today.” They just do, and pull you beer that’s very, very cold.
We got cauliflower roasted dark and butter soft, asparagus, prawns that snapped and jumped, roasted fennel blitzed to silk, that green salad again. The garden was so quiet we could hear the birds. We sat for hours, talking about food and religion. It doesn’t take much. And maybe the point is that it isn’t easy, that the only thing that makes a bar this good is desire.
Only later did I realize it wasn’t the same menu as the spring before. Nothing was exactly the same, and everything was, like someone had broken off a shard of a finer world and stabbed reality with it.
The Bellwether has a sister now, called Bar Loon, in a nondescript storefront on an undistinguished patch of Belmont Street. The building is modern, low slung, built for efficiency and retail, and sits across the street from the only H Mart in the city. The stretch feels like Allston, but Bar Loon is full of the same quiet magic that animates the Bellwether.
The title “I want to see the claw” refers to an incident that sounds apocryphal but isn’t. In 1696, Johann Bernoulli addressed a letter to the mathematicians of Europe challenging them to solve the brachistochrone problem. He received an anonymous solution in January 1697, and immediately recognized it as coming from Isaac Newton. “We recognize the lion by its claw,” Bernoulli said, and the phrase has entered idiom. The essay cited is by Vicki Boykis, who writes one of my favorite software blogs.