You Can't Get There From Beer

A famed speakeasy reopens and proves that nostalgia is a chump’s game, but a great burger is forever.

- Alexander Nazaryan

I WAS READY to hate the new Chumley’s. The old Chumley’s was the Greenwich Village speakeasy squeezed into a Bedford Street rowhouse that was visited by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cather, Faulkner and just about every other writer you read in high school and tried to emulate in college. When I discovered it in the very early 2000's, it seemed to me far more interesting than the self-consciously literary bars and cafés drawing New York City’s ambitious and bespectacled to Park Slope and the East Village.

Chumley’s was too old and too small for such pretensions. Though the dust jackets of its famous patrons’ famous books adorned the walls, it had become a bar for firefighters, as well as for the kind of refreshingly ordinary people New York had steadily been pushing out in the name of progress. There was a secret entrance, down Barrow Street and through Pamela Court, and leading friends through the haunting, nearly sacral silence of the courtyard, and into the beery warmth that awaited inside Lee Chumley’s famous cave suggested you were in the know, privy to some secret Greenwich Village not yet turned over to Stella McCartney and Marc Jacobs. The burger came inside an English muffin, and it was beautiful.