What Happened to Drinking Before Noon?
By: Aaron Goldfarb
Photo Credit: Illustration by Sisi Recht
Last month I acted as official witness for two friends as they got their marriage license. Afterward, she went to work while he asked if I’d like to celebrate with a drink.
It was 10 A.M. on a Tuesday.
We left the City Clerk’s downtown and walked north, passing century-old Irish pubs with their doors chained shut, chic Tribeca brunch spots not serving anything stronger than freshly-squeezed OJ, and East Village dives closed since 4 A.M. After an hour of walking through neighborhoods, which surely used to have countless morning drinkers a generation ago, we realized we were thwarted.
Drinking before noon isn’t just shunned by society nowadays, it’s almost impossible to accomplish.
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What Doesn’t Count
I know what you’re thinking, “This guy is a loser. I drink before noon ALL THE TIME.” Maybe, but not at those before-noon times I’m referring to. Sipping “bottomless” Bloodys with your Saturday morning Eggs Benedict is boring. Popping that first Coors Light while tailgating on NFL Sunday is no big deal. And who doesn’t wake up on a quasi-holiday like Columbus Day and think: “No work…might as well finish a handle of Old Grand-Dad.”
Drinking before noon doesn’t count on weekends, holidays, or “days off.” It doesn’t count when you’re staying at a hotel, if you’re having a 9 A.M. Jack and Coke while playing the Vegas slots, and it most certainly doesn’t count if you’re drinking anything served in a flute. Proudly tell me you “day drink” every “Sunday Funday,” and I’ll tell you to have some dignity, man.
Blue Collar Boozing
In gritty movies from the ’70s, many characters start their mornings with an eye-opener to help get them through their tough jobs. I think fondly of Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, popping cans of Rolling Rock before heading off to the steel mill. But does this even occur any more?
As I walk by construction sites nowadays all I see are… men doing their jobs. Officially, drinking in public was outlawed in New York City in 1979, yet City Councilman Frederick E. Samuel noted, “We do not recklessly expect the police to give a summons to a Con Ed worker having a beer with his lunch.” Aha! So pre-noon drinking was indeed happening in the recent past. Former construction worker Tom Franzson confirms as much:
“My own day drinking would sometimes start at 6:30 A.M. with a coded knock on a midtown tavern (where I) would gain admittance to a darkened refuge for men going to work, or, a number of city employees ending their night shift.”
Do these places still exist?
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The Actual Laws
Let’s discuss the actual laws for a second. Because, when it comes to liquor laws, assumptions are often tossed around by people too lazy to even use Wikipedia. It may vary where you live, but in New York state, there are only four hours each day you can’t serve the good stuff: 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 A.M., clearly the least happy hours.
So I should have been able to find some joints serving from 8:00 ‘til noon. And, in my neighborhood, I finally did: diners, which you’ve probably noticed always have a few bottled beers and boxes of wine stacked near the register. I popped into Gracie’s Corner one morning and ordered a Corona with my lumberjack’s platter. Under the bright fluorescent lights, surrounded by old farts reading the Daily News, it was one of the least satisfying tipples of my life. I would have to do better.
Before-Noon Nirvana
So, the next morning, I did something atypical for a stay-at-home writer: I rose early, showered, and actually got dressed. I left my apartment at sunrise, blending into the throngs of be-suited commuters boarding the packed trains headed downtown. They were heading to jobs in law and finance, but I was headed to drink at one place I knew would be open.
I arrived on a quiet, cobblestone street in the South Seaport at 7:45, wanting to see what actually happens when the legendary Jeremy’s Ale House first opens. I imagined a Black Friday-like stampede of drunks, eager to get their morning’s first fix of Wild Turkey the second the doors unlocked. Unfortunately, that Norman Rockwellian vision of alcoholism no longer existed. Jeremy’s front door was already open and no customers were inside.
An employee mopping the floor gave me a weird look as I entered, probably thinking I was some fanny-packing tourist looking for coffee. I asked if I could get a beer. He checked his watch and shrugged, setting his mop in the bucket to walk around the bar.
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Jeremy’s famously serves beer in 32-ounce Styrofoam cups which are humiliating enough for a thirty-five-year-old to be slugging in the evening, much less the ass crack of dawn. I had planned on ordering breakfast with my beer to make it feel less weird, but unfortunately Jeremy’s menu consists solely of fried fish. Though their calamari was “voted best in NY” (no citation), I passed. I nursed my Killian’s for a half-hour, but, unfortunately, not another patron entered. It was too bad, because with discarded bras lining the ceiling, Jeremy’s is quite fun at a more reasonable hour.
I ventured on to the second spot on my breakfast bar crawl, the nearby Whitehorse Tavern—not to be confused with the place Dylan Thomas died—a little further south on Bridge Street. It had signs prominently advertising “Happy Hour All Day,” but at 8:45 it also had a steel bar over the door, double-padlocked. Its Yelp page claimed it opened at eight, but maybe I needed to know one of those coded knocks. The nearby Nassau Bar was likewise closed. I’d been told by a friend “in the know” this was where third shift construction workers headed after work, but if that was true in the past, it no longer was now.
Now I may not be the world’s greatest reporter, but I’m damn good at sniffing out a drink when I need one. So it was shocking how difficult this was continuing to prove. The Financial District, once legendary for early morning drinking, was a wash, and heading further uptown was no better. Had people simply quit drinking before noon? Or were the only people who now did so Roger Sterling-types, well-heeled enough to have an office bar cart loaded with decanters of Scotch? Luckily, I knew one more spot to try and whet my early morning whistle.
Milano’s is a legendary joint on East Houston, dingy and divey in an area of town that no longer is. So when I peered through the foggy windows I was surprised to actually see customers chatting with a bartendress. Neither side of that transaction even seemed depressed. I entered, plopped on a tattered barstool next to an older gentleman, and ordered a Jameson.
Now people who drink before noon don’t look like the kind of folks who want to be questioned as to that fact, but after finally finding a before-noon drinker, I had to ask, “What brings you to a bar at this hour?”
The man studied me, not even annoyed, before matter-of-factly responding, “What else I got to do?”
He had a point, and, by the time I’d finished my whiskey, the bar had become full of similar men with nothing else to do. Men who surely had a deep understanding of that Johnny Cash lyric: “The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.”
I did have stuff to do. I wasn’t meant to be a before-noon drinker. I decided not to have one more for dessert and instead grabbed breakfast at Russ & Daughters down the block. I ordered a $14 bagel with lox. It was the best drunk food of my life. It was 10:15 A.M.
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