American Bar, the best bar of the year 2017
“Everyone has a sacred place, a refuge, where their heart is purest, their mind clearest, where they feel closest to God, or love, or truth, or whatever they worship. For better or worse, my holy place was Steve's bar."
It is one of the touchstones of the handful of glorious pages with which he starts The bar of high hopes , first Pulitzer Prize novel J.R. Moehringer. A confession goes: my essential book of this year that is dying and perhaps also the best of the last five.
Moehringer speaks of (and in) a bar of lost and fragile men that, like Sabina, they never disgust “the last drink or the next bar”; but it is much more than that, it is actually an ode to survival and wholeness in (this) world we don't understand , which every day is more foreign to us —the only thing left to us is that pinch of familiarity and belonging that so often happens in a bar: “Like love stories, bars depend on a delicate mixture of coincidence in time, chemistry, lighting, luck and –perhaps most importantly– generosity. From the first moment Steve declared that, at Dickens, no one would feel left out."
Factotum
A bar as a sentimental setting, as a homeland and as a refuge ; a country where flags are not needed (every bar in every part of the world is an embassy of that nation whose only language is dialogue and a couple of drinks ) because the only flag is the heat.
This is what is rewarded every year, and for just three years, ** The World's 50 Best Bars ** in a selection that, and we do not understand this, does not include any national bar among the top 50 (they sneak in ** Salmón Guru ** in Madrid and paradise beside Dry Martini in Barcelona, from 50 to 100), is there really no place for ** Angelita , Del Diego , Residence or Solange ** ?
In short, the best bar of the year is the already legendary ** American Bar at the Savoy Hotel , with Ada Coleman, Harry Craddock and Peter Dorelli as bartenders ** that have the aroma of so many stills from the second season of Mad Men . We are pleased.
We are glad that a bar continues to be (a little bit) the center of the world, a bar that helps us never forget that fireproof truth of Juan Tallón ( 'As long as there are bars' , Chalk Circle) : “A town that loses the ability to call a meeting around a bar is a dead town. It doesn't matter if it still has inhabitants. As a people, it is a corpse.”
** [List from 10 to 1: the best bars of 2017]**