Today in Regrettable Unhinged Rants

People served free food at a bar with their drink order, 19th century. The horror.*

God knows I love me a rant. And a lot of them are pointless but if there’s one thing I am never going to rant about, it is being served free food in a bar:

The common defining characteristic of free-pizza bars is that they are geared toward the very, very drunk and the very, very impressionable. Have I accepted free pizza from a free-pizza bar when I was drunk enough to believe it to be a pizza-shaped, cheese-flavored pint of beer? Sure. Did I go to free-pizza bars when I was young, wide-eyed, and enamored of novel ideas like body pillows and home-cooked bar snacks? Of course. Now, I see the light. I’d rather seek out mediocre-to-good pizza on my own time, resulting in personal satisfaction in both belly and spirit, than be tossed a platter of cooked flour and tomato sauce straight from my middle school cafeteria just because I showed up to get blottoed.

I should not be rewarded for drinking heavily. The reward for drinking heavily is drinking heavily. Part of the understood struggle of drinking heavily (as all good must come with bad) is that food must be sought out with wanton but fierce dedication. If you find pizza, which is almost everywhere in every city in America and most often at late-night hours, you will feel infinitely happier than if you settled for some grimy bar’s unwarranted handouts. And if you’ve stayed out too late and nothing is open, your punishment has been writ and you shall bear its truth.

If free pizza from a bar tasted like fucking caviar, maybe I’d try it once and a while. But it doesn’t. Pizza that is given to you from a bar always tastes like three-days-old diner grilled cheese. The tomato sauce is high fructose corn syrup swamped in red dye and the crust, well, there isn’t one—the whole thing is a mistake, its a blurry facsimile of pizza’s bastard son. It’s what a drunk person would say if they were asked to describe pizza to a person who’d never cooked it before.

There are so many problems here. First there is like a 200 year old history of bars serving drunks food to keep them in there. The term “bum’s rush” is a reference to bouncers watching the food buffet at 19th and early 20th century American bars that served free food if you bought a beer (mostly paid for by the breweries who had monopolies over the bars). When I go to Oaxaca, Mexico, it is standard there to be served free food with drinks. At worst, you get awesome roasted peanuts with garlic and chile and a ton of salt–making it the best bar snack ever. At best, tacos and who knows what else. It’s amazing.

Second, of course you deserve to be rewarded for drinking heavily. Isn’t this the common thread that holds LGM together. We even tolerate a vodka drinker in SEK because at least he still drinks. Do I need to expand on this? No, I do not.

Third, who cares if the pizza is bad? Why does this really matter? You are drinking. You know what is good while drinking? Fatty, salty, low quality food. I don’t even want the pizza to be that good because after a bunch of beer, would I even enjoy it? And if this does matter to you, I have a secret–you can always decline and let others enjoy their pizza. The 19th century food wasn’t necessarily all that great either (seriously read the link, which is a New Yorker article from 1940 about McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York). But it fed you.

This is all very silly. But I want to make one thing clear. I went to a bar last night. It was free plate of fries night with a beer. And those fries were tasty. Also they were free.

In a related story, even I have standards. Which are not to drink beer with offensive names and labels. I will drink Stone because I don’t find arrogance particularly offensive, but Flying Dog Raging Bitch, no. Why would I do that? With that many options, even in beer weak Rhode Island? I am just not going there. And as for that beer with the medieval “wench” whose breasts are exploding out of her top, I’d rather dump it down the drain than buy it. Knock it off bros, beer should not be for sexists. I will say though that Will Gordon is great and I look forward to his daily beer reviews as long as they last, especially has he goes into comments and smacks jerks down hard. Not that I’ve ever wanted to do that.

* I have no idea what the central theme in this image is supposed to be. Some sort of violence, perhaps anti-Chinese? In any case, it’s the only image I could find of people eating at bars in the 19th century.