I used to frequent this place called Pasqually’s in West Philadelphia. It wasn’t fancy, but it had decent pizza, a couple of TVs, and a fantastic beer selection. I’m talking about rare IPAs you couldn’t get anywhere else in the city. Alas, the owners sold, and it’s no longer the same. I wouldn’t call myself a regular anywhere anymore. After reading Esquire social media editor Mark Alan Burger’s story below, I’m invigorated to find a new bar or restaurant to call home. Click the link, read, and you might start searching too. —Chris Hatler, deputy editor
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Online reservations, social-media hype, around-the-block lines, delivery apps—have drinking and dining always been this isolating?
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On a Monday in June, like almost every Monday for the past two years, my brother and I walk into Gertrude’s, a bistro at the corner of Carlton and St. Mark’s in Brooklyn. The evening air sways through the covered patio, where the general manager greets us with a smile while sporting a striped party hat—it is, after all, Gertrude’s third-birthday party.
Inside, it’s already buzzing. Whitefish croquettes are shuffled from the kitchen as freshly filled Nick and Nora glasses leave the bar. Balloons bounce on the ceiling, blown around by the air conditioner; someone turns up the stereo. The shelves behind the bar, lined with wooden and rubber ducks of all varieties, are trimmed with rainbow garland. As we settle onto our stools, we’re suddenly congratulated by one of the owners—it is, as it happens, our hundredth visit, or as one server puts it, our centennial.
“This is actually all for you,” quips the director of operations.
At first, it was a joke between the two of us: The Burger brothers attend burger night. After a few weeks, however, the staff started to notice our continued presence, and they got to know us. Yes, we’re actually brothers. Yes, our last name is actually Burger. Our reputation often precedes us, but every now and then, we’ll meet someone new from the back of the house who inevitably chimes with sudden clarity, “So you’re the Burger brothers.” That’s how we know we’re something that’s not so common anymore, something lost in a world of delivery apps, online reservations, social-media hype, and around-the-block lines: My brother and I are regulars.
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Deep down, I’ve always been a Keen guy, always been from a Keen family; I just needed some reminding. My first hiking boots? Keen. The work boots my brother, an electrician, wears? Keen. The shoes I slip on to run to the grocery store? Keen Uneek. While these days I’m typically in cowboy boots, Chelsea boots, or cheap sneakers to work out in. I wasn’t dying for a Keen sneaker release. But that changed when I slipped on one of its latest pairs.
A pair made its way to my desk, as style products do in this job. I took them for a stroll around the office, felt good. I wore them to the gym in our office building a few times. They’re much better than my beat up Chuck Taylors on the treadmill, but they’re fashion sneakers, really. Once I brought them home, they became my go-to errand-running shoe, then my neighborhood shoe. And now? They’re my do-everything shoe. Turns out, the KM2 Joggers got me. They got me hook, line, and sinker.
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The whole world may remember Sam Neill from the landmark blockbuster Jurassic Park, but there is another performance by the actor, who died yesterday at the age of 78, that will chill me forever. This performance of his remains haunting and powerful, even though it debuted almost 40 years ago and is now largely forgotten.
The role was in a 1987 ABC miniseries called Amerika, a cold war alt-history parable about what life in the United States might look like under Soviet rule. Neill played Colonel Andrei Denisov, a KGB apparatchik and administrator of the occupation, who meets one night in the city with a midwestern politician and USSR collaborator named Peter Bradford (played by Robert Ulrich).
This was Sam Neill’s great power: On the surface, he emoted an air of icy confidence, whether it was as the paleontologist Alan Grant in 1992’s Jurassic Park, the suspicious husband who discovers his wife’s unthinkably twisted secrets in 1981’s Possession, the insurance investigator who unwittingly opens a case into cosmic evil in 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness, or that same year as the playfully scandalous painter of nudes in Sirens. He entered these stories with the swagger of someone who knows his shit and isn’t going to be thrown off course.
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