15 more great cities for drinking beer

by Gadling Staff on

Last month, the writers at Gadling spent a lot of time at the pub, creating this list of The 24 greatest cities in the world for drinking beer. We had so much fun and got so many great comments, we decided we couldn’t stop: we headed back to the bar and asked for another round. Here’s 15 more of our favorite cities in the world for drinking great beer. Did we include your favorite? Take a look.

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Edinburgh locals proudly boast to have the highest concentration of pubs of any city in Europe. Nightly pub crawls of all varieties and themes weave an intoxicated web through both the New and Old towns, dutifully infiltrating once-sleepy pubs and leaving empty pint glasses littered in their wake. If you want to get closer to the source, head over to the Caledonian Brewery, a place where beer is proudly “brewed by men, not machines.”

Wellington, New Zealand
This funky little capital city at the base of New Zealand’s North Island is teeming with Kiwis who are keen for their beer. While nationally popular Monteith’s is brewed on the South Island in the sleepy town of Greymouth, Wellington Brewery still has beers ending up in the hopping bars and nightclubs lining the infamous Cuba Street. No stranger to hosting events, Wellington will open its doors in 2010 to the New Zealand Beer Festival, only serving to further the raucous bar scene this city churns out nightly.Prague, Czech Republic
Beer drinking visitors agree: there’s nothing quite like a tall stein of pivo in Praha, the traditional home of Pilsner and arguably the world’s best beer. Allegedly consuming 156 liters of beer per capita each year–the most of any nation–beer is a simple life necessity for the Czechs. Long a staple city on the European beer circuit, the glory of Czech beer is highlighted nowhere more than at the annual Czech Beer Festival, held in Prague each May.

Homer, Alaska
While not exactly what many would consider a city, Homer is one of those “drinking villages with a fishing problem” that exudes nothing but good-natured charm. All of the action in town is centered around the Homer Spit, a flat outcropping of land that holds all of the town’s bars, most notably the world-famous Salty Dawg Saloon. After hauling in a 300-pound halibut, most fishermen head out to the Spit to celebrate with one of the many flavors of the Homer Brewing Company, or perhaps even an “import” from the Alaskan Brewing Company in the far away capital of Juneau.

Austin, Texas
If good beer has partners in crime, it would be good music and eager twenty-somethings ready to let it all hang out. Fortunately for anyone visiting Austin, there is absolutely no shortage of either. Host to two of the largest music festivals in the nation, Austin City Limits and South by Southwest, Austin frequently swells from the University of Texas all the way down to 6th Street with beer-battered locals and music lovers alike. A number of microbreweries are scattered around town, and with top acts and loads of talent moving through the city, the opportunity to imbibe is never far away.

Phnomh Penh, Cambodia
Phnomh Penh comes in on this list for one reason alone: $.25 beers on tap. Not only is a draft beer only a quarter, but the Cambodian national brew, Angkor Beer, is one of the finest lagers in all of Asia. Aside from the cheap price and the smooth taste, modern-day Phnomh Penh is lined with French cafes overlooking the mighty Mekong River, all serving obscenely cheap Angkor on draft. For those wanting to take the Angkor deep into the night, the city boasts an impressive nightclub scene, and for anyone really wanting to get creative with their drinking, every evening there are mass public aerobic sessions in the many parks across the city.

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada
You know any beer served this close to the Arctic is going to be cold. A rugged outpost town that is known for its rough mining history and plentiful outdoor adventure opportunities, hardy souls have been putting back the beers in Whitehorse since the gold miners and prospectors first came to town. These days, the Yukon Brewing Company keeps everyone in town from going thirsty, and their Yukon Red was just recently awarded the Canadian Brewing Awards 2009 Canadian Beer of the Year.

Sydney, Australia
Few cultures are as receptive to a good time as are the Aussies, and the wide beaches and deep discos of Sydney provide the perfect venue for such carefree merriment. Frowning upon their Melbourne neighbors who would rather swill Victoria Bitter, Sydney locals will proudly partake in the locally-brewed Toohey’s, most likely beach-side at Bondi between the bikinis and the BBQ.

— The above was written by Kyle Ellison, Seed contributor

Lewes, Delaware
Don’t tell anyone, but this sleepy former whaling village may or may not be the oldest town in America – the Lewes town sign proclaims it “the first town in the first state”. Lewes is home to the stellar Dogfish Head brewery, which makes a particularly good early summer beer called Aprihop. For those who typically ignore fruit-tinged beer, this brew carries enough dried-hop bite and pleasant fragrance to remind us of that time of year when the air is warm but the ground is still cold. Look west and the bay bends in a way that the sun actually sets into a watery horizon. That alone is worth the trip.

Ensenada, Mexico
Ensenada’s colonial past creeps just below the city’s surface: Spanish architecture and design are evident everywhere, and the town is sprinkled with old missions glowing under shiny terracotta tile roofs. There’s a bar in town called Hussong’s which seems to creak and moan like an ancient sailing vessel, and whose bar is packed with taps for German beers. The place was founded by a German prospector who followed rumors of gold to Mexico in the late 1800’s and never left. This is also the place to savor a Schloss Eggenberg Urbock 23 – if you don’t know what that is, maybe it’s time to strap that old waxy shortboard to the roof and drive south for a couple hours.

Toronto, Canada
Toronto is a city best viewed from on high, the ideal spot being the CN Tower, which attracts 2 million visitors annually. It’s the kind of view that can make the bottom of your feet tingle, and by the time you return to solid ground, you’ll be ready for a cold one. If you’ve only had Canadian beers in green bottles, you’ve missed the rich variety our northern neighbors have to offer: Unibroue Brewing makes beer called Maudite which has a deep copper color and a pert aroma of wild spices and floral hop notes. It’s a complex brew, deep and intoxicating in taste and smell. They also make a white ale, Blanche de Chambly, which sounds like something Austin Powers would say, but satiates thirsty travelers in a way that no beer with a “moose on the label” ever could.

Santa Fe, New Mexico
This desert town that has become synonymous with Pale Ale is a beer drinker’s delight. Hot, dry, and handsome, the town teems with artistry, old hippie money and raw desert beauty. Few experiences stimulate the senses like watching the sun rise across the desert floor while the light paints a mural of reds blues and oranges. Best to see it after staying up all night drinking Santa Fe State Pen Porter, a smoky and mysterious experience that compliments the desert night air.

Boulder, Colorado
Boulder, Colorado has a reputation as the “church of the outdoors” – when people aren’t hiking, they’re skiiing. And they’re young: the median age is 29, a time when your body is best suited to burning off those extra beer carbs. Boulder is home to the state’s first microbrewery, Boulder Beer Company, whose products include a dry-hopped ale called Hazed and infused for it’s multiple hop aromas that result from introducing the hops late in the brewing process. The bar also sports a “Magical Mystery Tap” which seems to exist solely to tempt the thrill-seeker within each of us.

Portsmouth New Hampshire
If you like seafood, but have never eaten at a northeastern lobster shack, you haven’t had the full experience. Along the coasts of Maine and new Hampshire, there are smallish, greying buildings that serve pots of steamed seafood right from on the dock. Portsmouth in particular has a number which carry the local brewer Smuttynose. Known for their Big Beer Series, few epicurean experiences compare with the steamy smell of lobster and clams alongside a big mug of Farmhouse Ale.

North Hollywood, California
A place where weird is normal and the absurd is commonplace, you’re as likely to see Flea bouncing a basketball down Otsega toward the park as you are to see a homeless guy wearing a red dress. It’s happy hour all day long here, and the neighborhood moniker “NoHo Arts district” seems to have multiple levels of meanings. As in Europe, a cold beer isn’t usually frowned on at lunch, and it’s easy to slip into that hazy way of thinking, maybe after three of Mendocino Brewing Company’s Red Seal Ales, continuing the charade that is North Hollywood is still a good idea.

— The above was written by Eric Hunsaker, Seed contributor

Related:
* The 24 greatest cities in the world for drinking beer
* The 25 greatest cities in the world for drinking wine
* The 20 greatest cities in the world for foodies

Before you go, be sure to check out Travel Talk, in which the guys visit the spiciest restaurant in NYC — try to slake their thirst with beer.

Naples’ Infernal Bliss

by David Farley on

Naples, Italy is the most peaceful city on the planet–at least it seems that way when looking down on it from high above. Its narrow, laundry strewn streets appear still and almost lifeless. A steady stream of morning fog from the bay hovers over the sprawl of post-war apartment blocks. The mountainous isle of Capri peeks coyly through the fog. Even the usually ominous Mount Vesuvius–the volcano whose eruption instantly buried the nearby city of Pompeii in 79 A.D.–looks like just another cloudy hilltop. I’m standing on the roof of the Castel Sant’ Elmo, a massive 14th-century fortification that’s perched on the mountaintop district of Vomero, far removed from the infamous chaos of southern Italy’s most densely inhabited metropolis. Before I venture down to what some have described as a crime-ridden hell, a logic-defying jumble of streets, a concrete jungle where obeying traffic laws is beneath consideration, I want to see what I’m up against.

The Grand Tourists–those 19th-century upper-class Brits whose classical education was not complete until they toured the great cities of Europe–used to forego Rome for Naples. They came to see the Caravaggios and the Correggios, the Raphaels and the Riberas. They came to observe the goings-on at one of Europe’s oldest universities. They came to see how the Greeks’ first colony on the Italian peninsula (called Neapolis, or “New Town” in 470 B.C.) had evolved into what a European monarch once said was, “the most beautiful crown in Italy.” Some modern tourists still come for these reasons. Others are drawn to Naples for its uniquely chaotic splendor–to see a modus vivendi unfathomable in Baltimore or Brussels, Munich or Miami.

I came for a different reason. Pizza. Yes, pizza in Naples. It’s impossible to utter the topic today without thinking of two words: Elizabeth Gilbert. But good food is transcendent. And pizza, a dish that may be the most popular in the world, will transcend literary references as well. Especially here, where it’s ubiquitous. It’s impossible to be in this town of nearly a million people and not eat pizza. Naples credits itself as being the birthplace of the pizza–the first recorded evidence of which is from the 16th century. My guidebook says that the more rundown the pizzeria, the better its product will be. I had to find out for myself.

As I stomp down the long cobbled steps toward the historical center, I pass old villas with chipped facades and green shutters. Bristly weeds grow through the steps’ cracks. In an open window a cell phone rings–to the sound of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” From the next villa the sweet smell of fresh bread–or is it pizza dough?–pours out at me. The hilltop residents here labored up and down these same steps for centuries. Today, they take one of three funicular railways that clank up the mountain. Colorful shrines to the Virgin are fixed at almost every bend on the stairway, some of which are decorated with neon lights, evidence that these shrines are more than just a relic of the past. I wonder if there’s an Our Lady of the Pizza Pie. In this city, there should be.

My Roman friends warned me about Naples before I took the two-hour train ride south. “Neapolitans are criminals, but they have a great sense of humor,” said my friend Enrico, which I suppose is some kind of consolation, since he followed up by saying that Sicilians, on the other hand, are just criminals. As I enter the most cramped quarter of the city, the Quatieri Spagnoli, the solitude of the hilltop fortress is already far behind me. Cars race by. Scooters whine. Medallion-wearing fat men bellow at one another. Two women stand on a side street yelling at each other and gesturing wildly. This is Naples: they’re probably just trading recipes. Three teenage boys and a dog ride past me on a scooter looking like they’ve done this a gazillion times. Behind them is another scooter driven by a man with two kids tucked onto the seat in front of him. Seconds later, another scooter zips by–this time it’s a man riding shockingly alone, and even wearing a helmet (!)–who is managing to talk on his cell phone and eat a piece of pizza.

I consider entering the first pizzeria I see, a dilapidated looking place, until the cook, leaning against the front doorway, begins violently coughing, gurgling up things I don’t want to think about. Instead, a block further, I find a seat at a slightly nicer pizzeria, which doesn’t appear to have a name. The minimalist (or, some would say, “indifferent”) interior–slate marble tables and blank walls–are a nice contrast to the disorder just outside the door. There are two pizza choices: the marinara (tomato, oregano, garlic, and oil) and the margherita (tomato, basil, oil, mozzarella). I go with the latter. The dough is thicker here in southern Italy, and there are socio-economic reasons for this: historically, the south has always been poorer than the north. To make their pizza more substantial, southern Italians used excess amounts of dough, which is cheap, and less toppings, which are costlier. American-style pizza is so thick because it was the poor southern Italians who immigrated to the United States in hope of a better life.

While eating my first Neapolitan pizza, I begin to wonder if life can get any better. It’s something about the San Marzano tomato sauce, which along with the melted mozzarella, is bubbling like volcanic lava. It’s tangy and delicious. The beauty of dining in Italy, especially the further south one travels, is the informality of it all. The waiter, often the restaurant’s owner, takes orders by memory and then when it comes time to pay, he tallies the bill in front of the customer, sometimes adding up the total on the paper table cloth. Wine comes in a ceramic jug and is often drunk from a glass tumbler.

After lunch, I’m not ready to battle the racing scooters and the mess of strolling crowds again, so I take a quick left down an alleyway lined with merchandise for sale and crammed with black down jacket-wearing locals. Everyone mills about, like they have no direction; like their ancestors have done for centuries. “Musica! Right here!” screams a grey-mustached man hocking illegally made CDs. Anything can be bought or sold here: jewelry, incense, clothes, shoes, car parts, fried things. My favorites are the fish salesmen who seem to be on nearly every block in the Centro Storico. The seafood is fresh to the point of still being alive: two-foot-long unidentifiable sea creatures squiggle through murky shallow water, hundreds of snails jiggle in a rusty, metal bucket, and long slimy eels gracefully slide past one another in a makeshift Styrofoam tank.

It’s now late afternoon, and it feels that every resident of Naples is packed into these tiny streets. This is the first circle of Dante’s hell that I was anticipating as I stood safely on the mountaintop earlier this morning. People are pressed up to me on all sides. We sway back and forth, moving two inches at a time, as we slowly pass shop windows displaying shoes, bags, and clothes. The ubiquitous rattle and screech of scooters attacks my ears. Everyone is smiling and greeting one another. This is normal. This is Naples. I’ve got a death grip on my wallet.

And, just then, I spot in the distance, another pizzeria. A real ramshackle one, whose name is also not so obvious, with a paint-chipped façade that looks like it had its last makeover during the interwar Fascist period. I’m not really hungry but my Rome-bound train is leaving soon and, who knows when I’ll be back.

“Marinara or Margherita,” the waiter asks.

I order and then take a deep breath and watch the maddening crowds outside. Naples, I decide, is much better with an escape. But between viewing it from a hilltop fortress or sitting in front of a bubbling pizza, I’ll take the pizza any day.

David Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.

New York diary: six sweet scenes

by Don George on

One of the things I love about travel is the fact that no matter how well I may think I know a place, I always find some new surprises when I re-visit there. Take my trip to New York earlier this month. I’ve been to New York a couple of dozen times over the past few years, but on this last trip, I discovered new delights each day. Here are six that stood out. For those of you who know New York well, many of these will be boringly familiar – but for this out-of-towner, they were sweet slices of the city.

Restless Legs at the Lolita Bar
Early in my visit I was privileged to be one of the speakers at the mostly monthly Restless Legs reading series organized by the indefatigable David Farley. Restless Legs is a terrific idea that Farley launched in July 2008. It’s set in the Lolita Bar, which is a welcoming space with a long curving wooden bar and scattered tables, chairs and stools on the ground floor and a long, narrow meeting room, which Farley has dubbed the Restless Legs Arena, underneath. Before the reading, people congregated convivially at the bar over $3 well drinks and $5 margaritas and mojitos, then at 6:00, everyone filed downstairs and crammed into every square inch of sitting or standing space. There was a microphone at the front of the room and all in all, it was the perfect place for a reading.

The room reminded me of smoky, closet-sized jazz clubs I frequented many decades ago as a wide-eyed student making my first big-city forays (of course, in 21st century New York, the smoke was only in my mind). It also recalled descriptions I’d read of the beatnik poetry reading scene in San Francisco’s North Beach during the 1950s. The Arena is a wonderful space for people to share and celebrate a passion, in this case, a passion for travel and for writing that transports us to other places. After the reading, there was a break to go upstairs and crowd around the bar and down more libations, then we all filed back down, mojitos and Guinness in hand, for a question-and-answer session. It was a simple and magnificent evening shared with fellow travel addicts. Restless Legs at the Lolita Bar – check it out.


Central Park in winter
I arrived in New York on the day that the great blizzard of 2010 dumped two feet of snow and more on the city and surrounds. Two mornings later I went for a walk through Central Park with my daughter, who had taken the train in from grad school studies on Long Island for the Restless Legs reading. Being in the land of seeing-my-daughter-as-a-full-fledged-adult-for-the-first-time was a very new and wonderful place, but that’s not the place I want to write about here.

The other place that was new for me was Central Park in winter, snow-softened and -rounded, icy and white. One hill showed a scene straight out of Norman Rockwell: Kids in puffy oversized coats and big ear-flapped hats dragging sleds up the snow and then swooshing and whooping down, over and over again. The carriage-drawing horses snorted little white clouds and clop-clopped the pavement, a family fashioned a red-scarfed snowman in one corner and kids flung flaky snowballs in another. I have walked through Central Park in spring, summer and fall, but never surrounded by plump white boughs and snowdrifts, and it was a new place with a wintry magic all its own.

Soho House
You have to be a member of Soho House to enter its cushy confines. Or be invited by one. Luckily, a writer friend who happens to be a member invited me for lunch on a Monday, so I gained a new view of the Meatpacking District. On the noon of my visit, Soho House’s Sixth Floor, where the bar and restaurant are located, looked like a cross between an old English gentleman’s club – overstuffed leather sofas and chairs, chandeliers, the kind of place where you feel like pulling out a cigar and ordering a snifter of brandy – and a swanky cyber-café, with creative types bent intently over laptops everywhere, throughout the drawing room, around the bar and even in the dining room.

People were building websites, negotiating screenplays, dissecting books — the very molecules in the air seemed to be tapping laptops. And yet somehow a kind of Old World sheen and calm reigned in the high-ceilinged, converted warehouse setting, with light pouring in over 9th Avenue, chandeliers sparkling and crystal gleaming. The lunch was delicious – we both had what my friend called the “glam chicken sandwich,” a marinated chicken breast with avocado and a piquant mustard on some kind of artisanal bread – but it was the setting that really made the visit for me, so beautifully New York, in its energy and its exclusivity. The annual membership fee is $1,800, but you can always try to find a member to befriend.

The Breslin Bar and Dining Room
On my next to last day in the city, I met a veteran guidebook writer at a place she picked – the Breslin Bar and Dining Room in the Flatiron’s Ace Hotel. When I walked into the lobby, I thought I’d wandered into the NYU library or a computer convention by mistake. Literally every available sitting space was taken by someone with a laptop open; no one was talking, everyone was reading or typing. Digitally disoriented, it took me a while to locate the entrance to the Breslin on the left side of the lobby.

When I did find it and wandered in, I was benumbed and bar-wildered. The place was packed nose to tail with people bellying up to the bar and spilling over, onto and around countertops. My friend had managed to secure one counter and I ordered the $8 Brooklyn IPA East Indian Pale Ale and we yelled at each other for a while. The ale was tasty and everyone around us seemed to be having a frenetically good time. We didn’t try any of the restaurant’s famous meat-centric menu, but we did order chips — and were momentarily flummoxed when instead of the platter of still sizzling thin treats we’d envisioned, the waitress plopped down a plastic bag holding a dozen pre-packaged crisps. What was sweet about the Breslin was simply that it was such a scene. There was a raucous, rowdy, “It”-spot energy to the place – a perfect whiff of eau de courant for this visitor.

Basta Pasta
By a complicated suite of serendipities, I ended up meeting with a longtime friend and part-time New Yorker and his wife. I’d thought he was in India; they’d thought I was in California. And suddenly there we all were, on the sidewalk outside the Ace Hotel. To celebrate this unexpected reunion, they took me to their favorite Flatiron neighborhood restaurant, Basta Pasta. The moment we walked in, I loved the place. There was a joyous buzz and delicious scent in the air, the buzz emanating from the 50 or so satisfied diners at 18 tables, the scent from the open kitchen directly in front of us when we walked in.

My friends described Basta Pasta as an Italian-Japanese fusion restaurant, a concept that might seem strange until you take your first bite of spaghetti with tobiko fish roe and shiso and realize this is one of those intercultural marriages that make the world a better place. For openers, the fresh fish carpaccio was light and delicious and the cartoccio di funghi misti — three kinds of mushrooms baked inside sealed cooking paper with thyme, garlic and olive oil — was ambrosial. For dessert, I’d suggest the Vulcano, a luscious lava pool of melting chocolate inside warm cocoa sponge cake with vanilla gelato and fresh fruit. The service by our Japanese waitress was at once warm and efficient, and the atmosphere was infectiously exuberant, with anniversary and birthday celebrations and general goodwill all around. All in all, Basta Pasta was, in a word, oishissimo!

Idlewild Books
My very last stop before catching a taxi to JFK was, appropriately enough, Idlewild travel bookstore – whose name pays homage to the original New York International Airport (its name was changed from Idlewild to JFK in 1963). My favorite travel bookstore in the world is the incomparable Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, but Idlewild comes as close to that icon as any bookstore I’ve found. A pleasantly airy and expansive space, Idlewild has hundreds of intriguing travel lit titles, from the latest Jan Morris and Paul Theroux to classics like Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and hard-to-find books like The Travels of Marco Polo and Miguel Covarrubias’s Island of Bali. It’s an exceedingly intelligent and stimulating collection, organized geographically, and a half-hour there will surely stoke your wanderlust. Since opening in 2008, the store has also become a favored spot for book events and classes, from travel writing and journaling to foreign languages. I wish I’d had more time to browse – but I’ll be back in June, and I’ll make sure to land at Idlewild then.

So, here’s a very personal serving of six sweet scenes. I’d love to hear your New York favorites too, so I can start a list of serendipities for my June return.

Pick a dish randomly – Dining out tip

by Gadling Staff on

It’s always great to research restaurants beforehand. But sometimes it’s also fun to leave it up to chance. Be adventurous! Don’t be afraid of picking a restaurant without an English menu… the waiter and other patrons can always help. Or, maybe they won’t. So what?

During your vacation, pick one item randomly off the menu for your meal. One of the most memorable meals we had was in a little restaurant in Japan that didn’t have an English menu. We blindly picked several items, and I ended up with one of my favorite Japanese dishes that I would’ve never ordered if I had an English translation: ochazuke, or green tea with rice!

Pro tip: If you’re concerned about picking an unfamiliar dish, be sure to do it on a night you’re “venue hopping.”

Know the numbers (and the currency) – Dining out tip

by Gadling Staff on

The meal was delicious, and the atmosphere was divine, but then it comes time for the bill. As long as you know numbers in the native tongue, dealing with the bill should be no problemo. Perhaps you know your basic, uno, dos, tres… but try learn more numbers in the native tongue.

Parts of Italy are especially notorious for using some fast-talking to try and overcharge for even your basic bowl of penne. Make sure you have no problem asking for correct change or asserting that your meal was trece (13) euros — not treinta (30).

Pro tip: When you arrive in-country, look carefully at the money from that place. Learn what the different colors or sizes of the bills indicate. Later, when you’re feeling rushed — perhaps you’ve been drinking? — you want to feel comfortable with the cash and not throw down the equivalent of $100 when all you ordered was two beers.