Barfly: BarAnon
Every week, Barfly attempts to summarize the best and worst of west LA's bar scene for of-age SMC students. As a rule, we don't run "bad Barflies" because negative reviews usually say more about Barfly's pent up aggression towards his father and his suppressed abandonment issues, devolving into the kind of rambling, bludgeoning criticism usually reserved for parking tickets or overdraft fees. However, in the interest of entertainment, we're including this unnamed, slightly edited bar review, to show you that not every bar gets Barfly's approval.
Imagine that it's August of 2005, and you live in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and you just caught your wife banging your best friend and the plumber at the same time in front of your dog. Then you wake up to find it was all just a bad dream, except you really live in the Ninth Ward, and it's actually April of 2010, and you just went halvsies on a shrimping business.
That's what it's like to spend a night at BarAnon. I could save 1000 words by showing you a picture of what my night was like, but they wouldn't let customers take pictures – at a BIRTHDAY PARTY! I don't know if you've ever celebrated a friend's birthday in public, but having the bar you're celebrating in request that you stop taking pictures of each other at a birthday party is like being at a rock concert and being asked to use your inside voices.
Dear BarAnon bar staff: it's a karaoke bar in Culver City, not an A-List club in Beverly Hills. If you want people to enjoy themselves at your bar, stop being so aggressively pretentious. It's as if you're challenging your customers to give less of a shit about karaoke bars as a whole. BarAnon is the bar equivalent of those middle-aged women who still go to clubs, shooting tequila and wearing tee shirts that say things like "It Ain't Gonna Lick Itself" in rhinestones. And while I can at least suffer through being inside a drunk, snobby, 35-year-old woman for a couple hours, BarAnon would come in dead last if I had to choose between drinking a pint inside its crowded bar, or drinking a pint chest-deep in baby shit.
The drinks were under-poured and over-priced, and while this isn't the first bar I've reviewed to offer disappointing drinks, it's the first to reject the idea of compensating for bad drinks with excellent service, because BarAnon only employed assholes. I'm assuming management thought this would make the bar appear to be hip and edgy, but it just makes BarAnon appear to be a bar full of self-aggrandizing prima donnas (read: assholes).
The only good thing about the bar was the number of hot women, except even that sucked because there weren't any. If I had to rate this bar on a scale from one to bacon, it would be a cellulite-buttered bagel.
Despite all of this, the company I kept carried the day, and we ended up having a pretty good time. I just wouldn't want to give any of the credit to BarAnon for facilitating this. All I'd have to do to make our night infinitely more pleasant is relocate my party to essentially ANY other structure on the planet. Like an outhouse. Or a shooting range. Or an S&M dungeon with no safe word.
It comes down to this simple rule: If you want to open a bar, and all you want to do is make money and be blatantly rude to everyone in general, don't open a bar. Do something less deceptive and more directly offensive. Open a plumbing business and bang married women in front of their pets.