There is a small civilization that exists at hotel bars after ten p.m., and the longer we live, the more we appreciate it.
A hotel bar is not a bar in the local sense. The locals, mostly, are not there. The room is filled with people who are between things — between the arrival flight and the morning meeting, between the wedding upstairs and the room they have to go back to alone, between the version of themselves they’ve left at home and the one they’ll have to be tomorrow. This in-between quality is the whole point.
We think hotel bars are sanctuaries because the social contract is different. At a regular bar, you might be performing — for friends, for someone you came with, for someone you’re hoping might come in. At a hotel bar, almost no one knows you. There’s nothing to perform. You can read. You can sit in silence. You can talk to the bartender or to the person on the next stool, and the conversation will end when one of you goes upstairs, and that ending is built in.
The bartender at a good hotel bar is a particular kind of professional. They are not your friend. They are not trying to be. They are something better — a person who keeps time. They know when you want another and when you’ve slowed down, when you came here to be alone and when you came here to be left alone, which are not the same thing. They get the difference within five minutes. Tip them.
The lighting is always low. There is no hotel bar with bright lighting, anywhere on earth, that we have ever wanted to spend a second hour in. The good ones have small lamps on the tables, brass, the bulbs the warm tungsten kind that flatter everyone over thirty-five. The room reads more or less in sepia.
The drinks tend toward the classics, and this is correct. Hotel bars are not places for innovation. They are places for the Manhattan, the Negroni, the gin martini, the glass of red wine that comes from a bottle the bartender has uncorked twenty minutes ago for someone else. You don’t go to a hotel bar for a smoked-cardamom-something. You go for a drink that has existed for a hundred years and will exist for a hundred more, and the room is full of other people drinking those same drinks.
What we love most is the kind of solitude available there. It’s not lonely solitude. Lonely solitude is what happens at home, alone, when the dog is asleep and the apartment feels too big. Hotel bar solitude is companionable. You’re alone, but not alone — there are others around, doing the same private thing, none of you obligated to each other. It is the most civilized version of being by yourself we know of.
If you travel at all, you’ve experienced this. Some night in Chicago, or Boston, or a city that wasn’t on your itinerary until last Tuesday. You drop your bag in the room, you splash water on your face, you come back down to the lobby. The bar is half full. You take a stool at the corner. Someone reads the paper near the window. Two women in their fifties talk quietly two seats down. The bartender brings your drink without being asked twice. For an hour, no one asks anything of you. The day, finally, is over.
We have spent a lot of time in these rooms. We have ended trips with one drink at the bar in the King Cole at the St. Regis, the Rose Bar at the Gramercy, the lobby bar at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans where the carousel goes round so slowly you can read a paragraph between rotations. None of these places needed us. We needed them.
If we had to give a piece of advice about traveling alone, it would be this: leave time for the hotel bar. Not as a stop, but as a destination. Forty-five minutes at the end of the night, with a drink and nothing to look at. It will be the part of the trip you remember most, and you won’t be able to explain why.
The hotel bar is a small grace built into the architecture of moving through the world. Use it.
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