Fuck Sports Bars. I Want A Cooking Show Bar.
I don’t need to root for the Yankees. I need a bar where I can sit with a rowdy crowd of other cuisine fans and boo Krissy on Master Chef. I wanna thump some stranger on the shoulder when Mary nails the Beef Wellington on Hell’s Kitchen, people who’ll bullshit with me about how they’d transform that leftover meatloaf on Chopped, get into friendly arguments because they think Rodney the Pie Man should be the Next Food Network star and I firmly believe that Sinmaster Russell should get in.
A place like that, though, couldn’t just be a sports bar, brimming with Budweiser and reheated potato skins. No, this would need to be the gastropub’s gastropub, a place with thirty perfectly-selected beers and beautifully-cooked appetizers, served beneath the big screens.
And before the Mystery Box is revealed, you can pay a fee to be one of the six tasters – and when the ingredients are on the table, the bar’s chef will begin cooking furiously along with the contestants, given the same challenge in the large and very visible kitchen so you can watch either the local show or the game show. (Assuming they have the proper ingredients on hand, of course.) When it’s done, he’ll serve you up what he would have done with the Iron Chef ingredient of cauliflower, and you can critique it before the crowd.
Where is this bar? Why does it only exist in my mind? Can someone local make this for me? Please?
Yes. Oh my gosh. YES!
Though I think you might be wrong on the scale. I imagine this pretty intimate, lively but not exactly rowdy. Dinner party, anyone?
You’d need crazy low rents and a high patron density to do it. I’d show up though.
What I’d really like is a genre TV bar. Instead of running sports, every night the patrons have stuff like Falling Skies, Continuum, Orphan Black, etc. (And where geeks can meet geeks.) Run DVDs during the day (though I know there are legal no-gos there.)
Or hell, if you can go big, just set a pod for each major network, and a few extra. People can wander and hang at what they want to watch each hour.
Sadly, the most viable thing I think there is right now would be an eSports bar, with maybe running some of these at off times as a sideline. And even then, that bar will likely flame out.
Sigh, economic realities, =/