Audio By Carbonatix
The Institute of Drinking Studies would like to congratulate Westword on the best cover we’ve seen since we started dragging down the collective IQ of Denver. We’re referring, of course, to the May 19 issue featuring the backside of (we sure as hell hope) a young lady. This visual appealed to our sensibilities both as guys with porcine tendencies and strict disciplinarians. As a group, we’d like to invite this woman, her friends and her sisters (sorority or otherwise) to join us for enough drinks to lower their inhibitions and standards.
This invite stems directly from a conversation that the Jewish Representative, J.P. and I had while at the Uptown Tavern (538 East 17th Avenue). After a few beers, our discussion naturally turned to the plight of the single guy. The Jewish Representative had recently met a young lady of seemingly excessive moral standards, who was either “not attracted or not slutty.” After a good laugh at how patently impossible the former was, we realized that the end result was the same either way: Nothing was going to happen.
Having bonded in this extremely sensitive fashion, we decided to solve all our problems in a way that keeps brainless daytime-TV hosts like Oprah and Dr. Phil stocked with semi-retarded guests who took out a second mortgage on the trailer in order to scrape up enough money for airfare so that they could be humiliated and, as Dr. Phil puts it, “bitch-slapped” on syndicated TV: We buried our feelings in bathroom humor, booze and food.
Uptown is ideally suited for such endeavors. It appears to be quite the hot spot for people looking for trouble — especially young women. While the bar doesn’t have Guinness on tap, it attempts to fill the void with Beamish Irish Stout, which according to calorie-counter.net has only thirty more calories than its more famous big brother. But your waistline isn’t the only thing that suffers from the switch. Real stout drinkers like something they can almost bite into; Beamish is disappointingly flat and watery. Fortunately, the Tavern’s mixed drinks were very well done. J.P’s rum-and-coke was the perfect mix of caffeine and booze, and it just barely saved him from suffering a narcoleptic fit and falling backwards out of his chair.
We also destroyed some appetizers and one of Uptown’s pizzas. Shortly after it arrived, J.P. and I had to make a pit stop — which is when J.P. pointed out that we’d left the Jewish Representative, who can eat more than any man and most lions, alone with the pizza. We finished our business quickly and returned to just enough superb pie that we weren’t weighed down as we pursued our goal of becoming so pleasantly antisocial that one of the young ladies at the bar would take pity on us.
Uptown’s open main room — dotted with small tables and couches arranged strategically underneath multiple TVs — is a fine place to ogle. There’s also a back room with games and sporting activities, including bowling, so guys can seclude themselves after they become really antisocial. The best space, though, is the back patio, which has its own bar that saves you from having to walk more than ten feet for a beer. This bar has PBR on tap, and an effort to go “old school” one night last summer resulted in one of the worst hangovers ever, when we waited hopefully for the end of the world or death, convinced that hell couldn’t be any worse than what we were going through.
All in all, this is an excellent bar, suitable for anyone who’s hungry or wants to socialize with a gaggle of friends or even look for that first date. Sadly, we here at the Institute cannot guarantee that said date will meet the rigorous immoral standards required to provide instant gratification. But if she looks like the May 19 cover girl, you’d be crazy not to try.
