You know things have slumped to a new low when life becomes a serious impediment to lifestyle. Certainly there's nothing like a mortgage and a steady job with a mingy vacation plan to interfere with what I used to live for: travel.
Not so many years ago, this would have been an article about Airport Bars I Have Known and Loved.
But because my bank account now so clearly warns that next year will not be in the Maldives, I have taken up vicarious travel in a big way. Over the years, for example, I have become an !B aficionado of the great hotel bars of New York.
Most New Yorkers seek them out because they are plush and cozy, with a soupcon of luxury rarely to be found in a neighborhood pub. Even most out-of-towners will find them worth visiting.
What I particularly love about them is their very hotelness: You come upon people wafting through the lounges with the aura of their foreign lands.
Drinks ordered in accented English, then murmured patches in another language to a companion, followed inexplicably by peals of laughter. The lighting should be soothing, the music &r; sufficiently moody, the potential for romance, for a dangerous liaison, should always hover, like an italicized question mark.
A bar should revere that most perfect of composite words: wanderlust.
A great hotel bar celebrates the now almost unaffordable glamour of travel, its eternal promise of adventure -- tomorrow I will see something I've never seen before. Anything may happen.
And so I sit in those overstuffed chairs, shamelessly eavesdropping, listening for accents and dramatic stories. A good hotel bar is always ripe with suggestion.
And irony, of course. Because in the heat of my traveling days, I could never afford to stay in hotels like these; indeed, having a drink in a New York hotel bar is truly a foreign experience.
But what is a local, particularly a New Yorker, doing hanging around tourists? It's important to remember that there are hotel bars for tourists and hotel bars for travelers (a distinction that, admittedly, remains quite fluid).
When I want to travel vicariously, I go to the latter, with the kind of clientele whose homes I can easily fantasize about renting for the first and last weekends of a six-week trip. One night at the Mark, for instance, I decided that a certain merry, well-dressed couple sitting two tables away had the ideal charming apartment in oh, say, Amsterdam, which they could readily let me use because they, after all, were out of town.
But the tourist hotel bars have their moments, too.
Indeed, sitting in a fabulous tourist bar like the Broadway Lounge at the Marriott Marquis, surrounded by people staring fixedly at subway maps, I can feel my smug confidence returning: I can dream that I am a New Yorker again, a resident in a world-class town that all these people want to visit.
Where to go in Manhattan? Of course, there are the Parises and Romes of hotel bars, grand standards like the Algonquin, the Oak Room at the Plaza, the Bull and Bear at the Waldorf-Astoria, the King Cole Room at the St. Regis and Harry's New York Bar at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. For the air-kissers among you, for those who relish watching Europeans who look just like ultra-stylish New Yorkers, there is always the Paramount or the Royalton.
Here are some less obvious ones, the Cincinnatis and Singapores of hotel bars. Some I bonded with, others I did not:
The Mark
(25 E. 77th St. [212] 879-1864.)
A lovely, hushed jewel box. Dark green walls with gold trim on the moldings, low lighting, a dozen tables, comfortable upholstered chairs, discreet corners, a beautiful velvet love seat, piped-in jazz standards. High-end champagne poured by the glass: Mumm Cordon Rouge. The all-day menu includes such ideal bar hors d'oeuvres as Thai chicken satay, quesadillas with shrimp and avocado or goat cheese and herbs, and slivers of roasted potatoes with caviar, chives and creme fraiche. The sort of place where you probably won't see anyone you know, but may see someone you recognize.
One night a waiter not only graciously abstained from addressing a friend and me as "ladies" (that unctuous term so often pronounced with a patronizing edge), but saved the love seat with the coffee table just for us. Sex and accents mingle in the air: Two people on a blind date met at the bar; a woman with a Scandinavian accent spoke heatedly to a young Englishman )) about rock and roll and space exploration. Oh mystery, oh aura! On another night, I counted four women in a row who walked in wearing cunning little hats, including one with a black netted veil across her face.
The Michelangelo
(152 W. 51st St. [212] 765-1900.)
Passports, please. In this small marble palace of a hotel, there's a cozy, modest lounge with small couches and coffee tables, often frequented by the most terrifically politically incorrect customers. Pure Italy: furs, beautiful leather jackets, lots of people talking very fast and smoking frantically. When I asked the waiter what champagne was to be had by the glass, he looked utterly offended. "No cheap stuff!" he insisted. "Very good champagne, you'll like it." Perrier-Jouet. He was right.
Radisson Empire Hotel
(44 W. 63rd St. [212] 265-7400.)
Across the street from Lincoln Center, the Empire has a lounge on the second floor that is ideal for before or after a performance. Don't be alarmed if you hear piped-in Strauss waltzes in the high-ceilinged lobby; the ambience switches when you climb up one flight.
The lounge resembles a spacious English club room, with lots of mahogany and wingback armchairs. A back room with a pool table was temporarily closed for construction. The music was American jazz from the 1930s and '40s; the cocktail-hour free hors d'oeuvres were just fine: fruit, crackers, cheese and hot barbecued ribs. Single travelers bellied right up to the small, elegant bar, but a young family also looked right at home.
It is a spot enjoyed by travelers and tourists. I heard a sprinkling of accents, but also saw some flash cameras going off. As a friend and I sat down at a couch and chair, a tall man with a cowboy hat and a bolo tie politely moved his coat aside and asked us little ladies if his smoking bothered us. He had a great twang, and so we replied that it did not.
Omni Berkshire Place
(21 E. 52nd St. [212] 753-5800.)
The Rendezvous, the hotel's official bar and restaurant, is conventional and pleasant enough, with polished brass railings and a pianist. But the gentle surprise of the Omni is the airy Atrium, a separate area off the main lobby with pale green couches, a greenhouse ceiling, enormous hanging plants and the carefree mixed metaphor of an Oriental screen and two Cupid statues.
Because the lighting in the Atrium is brighter than that of a typical hotel bar, it's more of a 5 p.m. footrest, and a cafe more than a bar, with a coffee-and-pastry setup right there. But a waitress will happily bring you a glass of Charles Heidseick from the Rendezvous.
The Four Seasons
(57 E. 57th St. [212] 758-5700.)
I know, I know, the hotel of the minute, gorgeous in the contemporary-daunting style, and a magnet for Hollywood magnates. So what. The bar at 57 57th has major potential for adventure and eavesdropping, and the champagne is pretty serious: Louis Roederer and Piper Sonoma. The crowd is admirably sleek, with lots of men who can wear a daring tie with confidence. But the room itself, though dimly lighted and elegant, is uncozy in the extreme: cavernous, with sharp-edged tables.
Marriott Marquis Hotel
(1535 Broadway, at 45th Street. [212] 398-1900.)
Two bars, two concepts, one hotel. For those with strong stomachs only.
Both bars, the Broadway Lounge and the View, revolve slowly, taking about 45 minutes for a complete turn. Some visitors may find the effect sweeping and romantic; others may feel hung over before they've even placed their drink orders. I find it novel and kind of great, once or twice a year.
The View, on the 48th floor, is more of a travelers' bar: dark, sophisticated, with banquettes, piped-in music and a spectacular all-you-can-eat $7.95 appetizer buffet, with desserts, crudites and hot steaming things du jour. The name of the place says it all, of course. For midtown, it's almost unbeatable. The champagne is Charles Heidseick.
But for those days when the city squashes you underfoot like a bug, the Broadway Lounge on the eighth floor is the bar of choice. Completely silly, utterly cheerful. The champagne is St. Jean and there's a $2.99 drink special each night: Monday is Miller Lite Drafts, Tuesday is frozen drinks and so on.
The brightly lighted lounge, with the pianist perched precariously on it, revolves around the bar itself, like the Earth around the sun. The view is blazingly Times Square: As the lounge slowly turns, you find yourself staring into the red, green, purple neon, now vertical, now diagonal, now Samsung, now Camel; there are the latest billboard underwear -- or nearly underwearless -- models and now the hotel's own glassed-in elevators popping up and down . . . the return of that familiar, dizzy feeling . . . jet lag.
There is no intrigue here, but there's an eagerness you'll rarely find in the other hotel bars. The other night the tables around me included women in the garment industry from the Midwest, an Israeli family, three Frenchmen and four Germans dressed in black, who were working overtime to appear nonchalant as the lounge made its revolutions.
Later, two women, old friends who live far apart and meet in the city every once in a while to take in a show and shopping, sat down near me. They began discussing the merits and demerits of each of the five performances they had seen of "Les Miz," a show I may never quite get to. I felt a snicker coming on.
But they were so excited to see each other, to be in the city, to be away from home, that eventually their good humor rubbed off. I paid and walked out with a new-found smile on my face: happy trails to you both, I thought, and as the ancient Irish blessing puts it, may the road rise to meet you; may the wind be always at your back.