Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Magician

118 Rivington St.
New York, NY 10002
(212) 673-7881

Bathroom situation
- a paltry 2 in the back which are regularly insufficient. The men's has a urinal and a stall with old west saloon swinging doors (the fuck?) and the women's is a one-person. If you have ovaries and you plan on spending a significant portion of your nite here, I suggest bringing a ziploc bag or catheter or something here cuz the line can get really unfortunate.
Takes credit cards? - Nah, brah.
Crowded on weekends? - the joint's main weak-spot. Your drink will be introduced to your shirt and it will be awkward.
Seating - Inexplicably, this place has a gang of tables, chairs and bar stools but you can never find one when you need one on the weekends. Any other time, you'll have no trouble finding a place to rest your wide American ass 2 feet off the floor.
Neighborhood - Part of the LES that wishes it was off the radar, but so isn't.
Type of crowd - allegedly this is known as THE "blogger bar" where the elite of the can't-have-real-relationships crowd meet to chop it up about how "dope" it is to sit on their wide American asses and clown on poor people.
Pretentious/assholes - lots of wool pea coats here in the winter...draw your own conclusions.
Cost of Stella - not sure...Visceralist is leaning towards Heineken more these days anyway.
What time people start showing up - relatively early at 9ish.
Bartender efficiency - tend to be real anal here about ignoring you if you dare try to wave them over. Visceralist can sorta sympathize, but still...
Official Website - no official site, but a goodly amount of reviews by the usual suspects. We have to interject tho: NYC bars, you are playing yourself by not having your own website. It'll usually show up as the #1 Google item and it's your biggest chance to convince out-of-towners that you still have some cred. And you know you can charge them whatever you want and they'll chalk it up to "damn, shit is wild expensive in NYC...had a great time tho..."
Food? How late - nah, and even if they did it'd prolly be some brokeass pita bread they'd charge you bruschetta prices for.
TVs? What's on - no, but most people here have iPhones so just ask them to pull up the "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" video up on YouTube if you get bored.
Guy/girl ratio - sleazeballs, creeps, stalkers and douches take note: this may be the one place in the LES that's regularly 50/50. Visceralist leaves it up to y'all to fix this.
Toys - nathan but the bizzooze.
Age of clientele - solidly 20s-early 30s. Your coming-from-a-broken-home anecdotes will not go unappreciated here.
Space for dancing - unless your dancing your hand into someone's back pocket to grab their wallet and do-see-do their dough, then no. It gets too crowded.
Décor - wannabe classy-chic. Really tho it's just that the lights are too dim to see how depressingly bleak it is in here.
Grimeyness - sufficiently-impress-a-first-date-able.
ID check procedure - Sometimes conducted by someone who looks like his side-project band's bout to play their first gig a block away.
Hood specificity - ELES(?)
Music medium, style & volume - comes from the ether, but is usually mildly annoying.
Specials or most popular drink - pshaw
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