Feeling a little isolated in our terminally online society? You and I both. Thankfully, Esquire’s social media editor Mark Alan Burger has stumbled upon a solution: Become a regular at your local restaurant or bar. You’ll meet new people, establish a home away from home, and create an event to look forward to every week. If you need some advice on how to take that leap from occasional patron to barstool stalwart, Burger supplies guidance at the link below. —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.
When Gertrude’s opened in our neighborhood, my brother and I made it a point to show up as often as we could. We wanted to support the new spot, of course, but the goal was to become familiar enough that we could always, or almost always, get a spot at the bar. Through sheer repetition and recognition, we’d have a place that wasn’t our apartment where we could get a drink without having to mix it ourselves. The food was unpretentious and delicious, the martinis were freezing cold, and the music was an excellent mix of ’80s pop and ’00s indie. In an area lacking fin(er) dining and relatively kid-free establishments, Gertrude’s checked several boxes. The only question was when we’d go.
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For proof that men in their sixties, and beyond, can still be stylish, you need only look at the boardrooms of the fashion industry itself. British founder-designer Sir Paul Smith, seventy-nine, is a walking billboard for the well-cut navy suit. And at the spritely age of eighty-five, Mr. Ralph Lauren is a testament that the innate sense of adventurous pleasure that style offers—be it westernwear, classic prep, or even slick Wall Street tailoring—is open to all, whatever age they may be.
But some of the latest big-ticket ad campaigns have highlighted a specific demographic: men in their sixties. Designer Peter Saville, sixty-nine, appeared in a Ferragamo campaign recently. Watch collector Auro Montanari, sixty-seven, was in a recent Zegna campaign. Actor Richard E. Grant, sixty-eight, took the runway with aplomb for Burberry. Hollywood offers even more inspiration: Sixty-four-year-old George Clooney, sixty-one-year-old Brad Pitt, and sixty-eight-year-old Spike Lee remain among the most stylish men in show business. It seems sexagenarians have never been cooler.
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It’s a Big Stupid Summer, America! As I have said before in Esquire, things have leaped forward in the field of stupid. Yes, our overall level of discourse has gotten dumber, our politics nastier, and our entertainment more insipid. This much is obvious. But what’s even more concerning is that market forces seem to be conspiring to make us denser by the day, to give us no options but the most idiotic.
At an event hosted by the International AIDS Society in Rio de Janeiro last weekend, a senior State Department official gave a presentation about U.S. funding of HIV programs on the African continent. Unfortunately, this senior official used a map of Africa that was made by a junior (in high school, taking a remedial summer school geography class, and his edible had just kicked in). The map mislabeled every country the official called out in the presentation.
I found out the Czech Republic changed its name to Czechia when I saw it on the Eurovision Song Contest, and even I think this is embarrassing. Health officials from around the globe got to watch a representative of the United States work off a map that put coastal Nigeria in the middle of the Sahara Desert, made Mozambique much mo’ northern, and gave one unnamed country a bar that went nowhere. We have put our best foot forward once again, and once again we placed it right onto a banana peel.
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