Earlier this month, William Grimes wrote in the Times about the wave of faux speakeasies apparently holding some segment of the population in their inevitably overpriced thrall. These gin joints, he claims, “represent one of the strangest exercises in nostalgia ever to grip the public, an infatuation with the good old days of Prohibition.”

Really?

To Grimes, prohibition seems like a strange thing to wax nostalgic about, but it actually couldn’t be much more predictable. Bar culture loves reviving drinks long associated with another time: absinthe, the grasshopper, and the sidecar, to name a few. More to the point, though, nostalgia is rarely about longing for or reviving things that are objectively worthwhile. It involves picking and choosing, bringing the good part of a phenomenon into the present and leaving the rest in the past. In this case, as in so many others, the good part is mostly aesthetic, and the bad part is socio-political.

Grimes notes that thirteen years of prohibition amounted to a horrible time for cocktails—even if they had great names: the Fluffy Ruffles! The Pom Pom! The Cream Fizz!—and that since a lack of regulations meant that alcohol could be toxic, “it required a certain amount of nerve to lift a glass to the lips in the otherwise fabulous Jazz Age.” Today we love our drinks “lethal” only because we’re not worried they will actually kill us, and we flock to semi-covert watering holes as a sort of homage to the nerves we don’t actually need to summon for a night out. We’re glad getting a drink is so easy, but we like to imagine that bourbon might have tasted better back when getting it involved more work. Rarely noted is that at the time, under-the-radar drinking establishments couldn’t really qualify as fashionable, because everyone was going to them.

It’s no surprise that patrons of all sorts of bars—from the stickiest dive to the fanciest lounge—put a premium on exclusivity. Having a bar to call one’s own is no small thing, and knowing the location and password to the “secret” bar seems to make you an instant insider. Mysteriousness was a necessity during prohibition, but today it translates to a veneer of specialness, and people get off on the furtive-seeming entrance rituals that make them feel superior to everyone else trolling for booze.

Grimes reports that one bar in Cleveland goes “the extra mile down the nostalgia highway by distilling its own gin.” That decision seems more in line with the well-documented trend towards things that are “local” and handmade than it is an embodiment of nostalgia. But it’s worth asking where one impulse ends and the next begins, or whether they’re so wrapped up in each other that they become impossible to separate.

Pointing to a bar named after the 1896 Raines Law—which “banned the sale of liquor on Sundays, except at hotels, where guests could be served drinks during meals”—Grimes pronounces the law an odd “pivot point for nostalgia,” strangely oblivious to the irony of naming a bar after the law that restricted alcohol sales. New “speakeasies” are a salute to the inventiveness that was once necessary to skirt the law, and while their patrons and proprietors may admire that spirit, they don’t long for the conditions that made it a survival skill.

Mostly, they’re just looking for the next cool, unique-seeming thing on the bar scene. Often, the latest thing is a throwback, a romantic atmosphere characterized by “rough floorboards, dark wood and [a] stamped-tin ceiling,” and perhaps a “Cinerama-scale mahogany bar.” And twelve-dollar artisanal signature drinks instead of scuzzy moonshine.

Photo by chadmagiera