"Your Kind of People" Aren't Welcome Here
This past Friday night, a group of Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill residents headed out for some drinks, but their usual favorite watering holes (the bar called “Bar” at 280 Smith and Zombie Hut at 273 Smith) weren’t an option: “Barbar smelled funny, and Z-hut was too crowded,” reported the reader. Instead, the group decided to check…
This past Friday night, a group of Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill residents headed out for some drinks, but their usual favorite watering holes (the bar called “Bar” at 280 Smith and Zombie Hut at 273 Smith) weren’t an option: “Barbar smelled funny, and Z-hut was too crowded,” reported the reader. Instead, the group decided to check out Quench, the lounge on the corner of Sackett and Smith. They ordered cocktails, but then learned that the bar is cash-only. One member of the party left the bar to grab some money from a nearby ATM. That’s when the trouble began…
“The owner and the bouncer got all huffy thinking that we weren’t going to pay. Then, it turned out that the drinks were terrible/un-drinkable, but they wouldn’t give a refund or remake the drinks and told us they didn’t want our kind of people there anyway! Now, they could have meant ‘the kind of people who would say something about a disgusting drink,’ but looking around, the other patrons were 100% guys who shave their arms and girls with fake tans, so we left the paid-for drinks on the bar and went home.”
Damn, girl! We hate to besmirch a bar that has bestowed us many a cheap happy hour—we’ve never been given any flak while sipping their refreshing $5 mojitos. (Granted, we have been hit on by men who were old enough to be our dads while we were ordering said cocktails, but that’s a small price to pay for such potent $5 drinks!) That said, this anonymous tip doesn’t seem to be an isolated occurrence—we found a couple more haters with similar complaints on Citysearch. Has anyone else had problems at Quench?
Ironic that everyone seems to think it’s okay to talk about the “guidos” and the “greaseballs” and mark thinks he’s cool enough to describe something as “dykey” (hey mark, unless you’re a dyke, don’t go there) when the whole point of the original story was that the bartender told this guy “you kind of people aren’t welcome here.” Frankly I think you’re kind of a bunch of assholes who should do your drinking at home.
@Mark
OP’s account is pretty clear, isnt’t it? His party was told to leave because “their kind of people” weren’t welcome there. You tell me — who’s the prejudiced prick in that story? Sounds to me like OP was being decidedly non-judgmental by going into that establishment in the first place. Everybody knows its a guido bar.
lionel your comment vexes me . . . you sardonically encapsulate the good old days in quotation marks but then go on to say that the neighborhood has been destroyed by transplants. It seems to me that a fairly safe neighborhood with a few annoying yuppies is better than a place where a kid gets beat up for being black . . .
I grew up in Downtown Brooklyn. I met my wife at BarBar. Quench used to be kind of dykey, then it became greaseball central. I once watched a crowd of guidos from there beat the crap out of a black kid, I guess because he was black, just like back in the “good old days”. I don’t live in Brooklyn anymore because it sucks, and the recent transplants suck, they’ve absolutely destroyed one of the gems of this town.
I meant “your,” obviously. Oops. [see directly above]
“the other patrons were 100% guys who shave their arms and girls with fake tans”
Maybe “You’re kind of people” refers only to obviously judgmental, prejudiced people who come into the bar and look down on the regular customers?
You my friend are a prejudiced prick. I’m so sad you live in my neighborhood.
I am one of those people from San Francisco who moved to Carroll Gardens and I love the neighborhood. The characters, pretty much all of the bars, Scotto’s, the crowd that hangs out in front of the salon next to D’Amico’s, whatever. Most of all I try to respect the neighborhood and find my own little niche and not go around like I own south Brooklyn. There is a place for people like me, as long as we keep our mouths shut and settle in gently.
I did buy a Mets hat, though . . .
Screw Smith St. on the weekends, it actually makes the LES seem palatable. Head down to Red Hook where at least it is civilized. I like how the bartenders at the Bait and TAckle on Van Brunt maintain what they call an “asshole free bar”. Quality booze, no doormen and an ATM. sweet. Plus you can always jump next door to the Pioneer if you need to get your jerk on.
Bring back the days when Red Rose was the only option for anything on Smith, and where the waiters said “anytime you got a problem, you can come in here–we got baseball bats and we’ll take care of it.”