THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES: In The Loup
Hitchens, Christopher
In The Loup BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS What does one seek in a place of refreshment? Or what qualities, once found, make one think of a bar as in some way one's own? I would list in no special order...
...Beyond two sets of double doors by the entrance is an alcove with tables set aside for smokers...
...One wants the certainty of a few familiar faces, but not too many of them or not except at predictable phases of the day...
...separation rather than segregation but quite enough to satisfy all but the most hysterical anti-inhaler...
...The waiters and waitresses read you your rights about the odd special, without making an operetta out of it, or making you want to say "Hi...
...It could perhaps be a fraction longer, but it is big and handsome and it runs much of the length of the room...
...In line with this, it should be a setting of moods: a slow start in the mid-morning, a bit of a bulge around lunchtime, a languorous afternoon and then a gradual quickening of pace after 6 p.m., culminating in a commitment to some sort of late-night or after-dinner or post-theater crowd...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 93 and sometimes I still get that impression of it...
...It's not absolutely necessary to experience all of these things in the same 24-hour cycle, but you should be able to say that you have experienced them all and can in some way count on them...
...Can't they just enjoy them without having to justify their enjoyment-or having me justify it for them...
...The clientele should be various, but not atomized...
...one just notices it as one of the warps and weaves of the place...
...When I was a teacher of teenage pop-music addicts, I used to make them pick a song that they liked and then tell the class why they liked it...
...In other words, my true bar should have an element of cafe-society to it...
...Thus, the essential purposes of the place are well enough affirmed at once.The room is long and dark, with defined dining areas and a ceiling that is not too high or too low The music-I don't have much of an ear for this sort of thing but I sure know what I don't like-is principally jazzy and bluesey and doesn't force itself upon you...
...In a very reassuring way, the bar is the dominant feature...
...Pardon me, then, if I seem for a moment to condescend, but the reason why we sophisticates sneer at the "know-what-I-like" school of criticism is that we assume a little culture is enough to teach us why we like a thing...
...I have dined by candlelight (I took a good friend there the night he'd had all his teeth extracted, because the light was so comfortingly low and sparing) and stayed at the bar until the small hours debating with newly-met factcheckers from glossy or obscure magazines, or grizzled MittelEuropa exiles...
...Lovely women are to be found there in sufficient profusion and often enough-I don't know why this is a good sign, but it is-either sitting alone or in groups...
...a place for newspapers and espresso as well as cocktails and basic food, and a place where you could bring your mother, if you had a mother, for a light lunch as well as your mistress or male lover, if you had a mistress or male lover, for a late-ish nightcap...
...I hasten to add that I have not actually seen Exit Wounds, but I have seen enough movies starring Steven Seagal to make an educated guess as to its quality...
...The defiant movie-goer who insists that he found much to enjoy in Showgirls or Battlefield Earth would at the very least have to acknowledge that in doing so he was part of a tiny minoritythough not, perhaps, quite so tiny as the minority of us who love and revere the works of Eric Rohmer or Abbas Kiarostami...
...America's microcosmic Bohemias have taken a pasting of late from property values and gentrification-look what's happened to North Beach or to much of the rest of the Village-but here a bit of the old atmo clings...
...The boxes are illustrated with a nice shadowhand silhouette of a wolf, and they used to-I can't check this at the moment have the phone number with a letter prefix instead of a numeral one...
...But it's never been anything as obvious as a gay hangout...
...There used to be something definitely but indefinitely gay about the old Loup...
...I have had long lunches in the near-deserted bar area, being allowed a big round table for only a few guests...
...There are black-and-white photographs of the Steiglitzian school, and there is a rack of magazines and papers (it was there that I acquired the hard-toget but hard-to-lose habit of picking up the New Criterion...
...At different times, I have wandered in for mid-morning coffee and newspaper while the bar is being set up and the deliveries are taking place, and been the only customer while not being made to feel it...
...Thus, it has its loyalists among the denizens of the New School (where I teach part-time) and among the samesex community of the Village, as well as among some of the rootless cosmopoli tans and freelance intellectuals who used to identify with the old Lion's Head on Christopher Street...
...Just because tastes change, or resist at their outer limits our attempts to explain them, they are not for that reason exempt from analysis, or from the judgment of the wise that they, or artistic manifestations of them, are "good" or "bad" or even (as they used to say) "correct" or "incorrect...
...I found this haven in New York some two decades ago, and it's called the Cafe Loup...
...At a certain level, indeed, such judgments are almost definitive...
...The bill can be oddly steep, but that might be the wine list, which is pretty good...
...The men's room is alarmingly small, but it does have a fine pen-and-ink drawing of a big wolf lifing its leg-I can't stand cutesy men's room art with the lupine injunction to respect elders, stay hungry, and stick with the pack...
...Perhaps they You Know What I Like BY JAMES BOWMAN G G 94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001...
...At the same time, we are right to resist the extreme relativism of this point of view...
...So, my few beer-loving friends tell me, is the ale agenda...
...I won't say that the Loup is a gourmet experience either...
...Most of us don't know much about art, but we know enough to know that that cliche is supposed to be THE TALKIES funny-like "some of my best friends are...
...We elitists are likely to model for ourselves the graph of taste as a bell curve with the truly abysmal and the truly wonderful as mirror images of diminutiveness while the vast, bulging majority in the middle stuff their faces with popcorn as they thrill to mediocrities like Hannibal or The Mexican or Exit Wounds...
...it's been a long time since any person of the male sex showed any interest in my person (or any interest of that kind, perhaps I should say in my own defense) Lovely women are to be found there in sufficient profusion and often enough-I don't know why this is a good sign, but it is-either sitting alone or in groups...
...a touch that seemed right for some reason...
...I too have a tendency to mark my territory and, even though NewYork has a more bewitching range of bars and restaurants than any other city on earth, I have often taxied many blocks or got others to do the same, in order to be reassured that I wasn't wrong the first time and that some verities still hold...
...We who have more reasons for liking or not liking movies, songs, books, paintings, and so forth than we know what to do with are too apt to forget the ultimate mystery of taste, summed up in their usual lapidary way by the antique Romans in branding it non disputandum...
...It's on Thirteenth Street and always has been, though it shifted from a spot between Fifth and University to a location between Sixth and Seventh, increasing in size as it did so but man aging somehow to take its ambiance with it...
...black/Jewish etc.-and would never be guilty of using it ourselves otherwise than ironically...
...Why did everything have to be analyzed and explained...
...I always have the same thing (oysters followed by tarragon chicken) and that decision was after some trials and a few errors...
...I can't remember if he was eating or not...
...don't know much about art, but I know what I like...
...But I've never left there feeling either hungry or insulted, and I can't say the same for many New York places with more stars...
...The dirty secret of the critical fraternity is that we know these are better questions than we are (usually) willing to let on-better, even, than those who ask them know, since the questions themselves imply feelings of guilt about not knowing why they enjoy what they enjoy...
...Most were driven into fits by the exercise...
...Why couldn't they just like it...
...Nowadays, people say the same thing to me about the movies...
...Lone wolves, nonetheless, are welcome (I mean in the bar itself, not the loo...
...Those who staff the place should by all means recognize a faithful patron, and pull the trick of pouring the favorite bracer as soon as he shuffles in, but they should also recognize those times when he wants to read, or write, or brood, or recuperate...
...I'm Christopher and I'm damn well going to be your customer tonight" Details.The Cafe Loup has its own matchboxes, which are proper boxes with a sliding drawer and wooden matches...
...I would list in no special order the following features.The place should be open early GREAT AMERICAN SALOONS and late and in between...
...I once found myself sharing the bar with the great restaurant critic Seymour Britchkey, who lives in the 'hood...
...There should be music-not a television-and the customer should be able to have some say in its nature, also its wattage...
...It is safe, I think, to assume that the throngs who recently pushed each of these movies up to number one at the box office had little idea about why they liked them...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 4
