Rosie Schaap Is a “Serial Monogamist” with Bars Like the Brooklyn Inn

Meeting Rosie Schaap is kind of a big deal. She’s basically the ultimate regular. Her brilliant memoir Drinking with Men details decades of her “serial regularhood” at bars in New York City, Brooklyn, Ireland, and beyond. The forty-four-year-old native New Yorker pens the Drink column for the New York Times and (!) she’s a freakin’ bartender in South Slope, Brooklyn, where she’s lived for nearly twenty years. I’ve prepared so many (too many) questions for our interview because I know she has the authority to speak on what it means to be a woman regular in a world of manly drinkers. She has great stories—plenty are packed into her memoir. As she works on a Jameson neat and a Miller High Life (the Champagne of Beers, natch), Rosie does not disappoint.

Of course, the bar where she’s a regular is a perfect pick: the Brooklyn Inn. Located in Boerum Hill, this gorgeously worn-down space includes an actual carved-wood bar from Germany in the 1870s. The magnificent wall behind the bar features a massive curved mirror that stretches all the way to the tin ceilings. Stained glass windows dot the front and back room, and natural light pours so fluidly into the rooms, it’s surprising everyone doesn’t appear in sepia tone like an old-timey movie.

Inside a dark little walled-off side room that you’d miss if you walked too quickly to the back, we sit at a corner table and talk almost furtively about all things regular, such as whether you have to be a hard drinker to be a regular, the difference between friends and bar friends, and how regulars at your bar can really become family.

The first time I came here, I think it was 1996. I had a job interview at a little literary agency half a block away. I was the first customer of the day. I had half an hour to kill before my interview, so I said, “Okay, one drink. One good stiff Irish whiskey before a job interview is right.” And there was this Irish bartender at the time named Aiofe, which is one of these great Irish names. She was charming and fun and everything I love in a bartender. I had my Jameson, and I went to the job interview, and I was hired on the spot. I came back and drank some more after the interview. And I thought Aiofe and this bar were a good luck charm because I got the job. So I kept coming back.

Jameson is like an old friend. Easygoing, not demanding, a little dumb, very sweet. I mean not sweet in nature, but very good flavored.

Regularhood and sense of community is what matters most to me in a bar. This is still a really beautiful bar where I still feel comfortable. For someone who comes here a few times a month versus a week, knowing everyone here doesn’t matter the way it did back then.

I call myself a serial monogamist with bars. And I’ve occasionally fallen out of love, and I’ve had my heart crushed when a bar has closed down. There’s been a bar for every major phase of my life.

When you walk into a place where you already know people, there’s no guesswork anymore. There’s no expectation. You just sort of go to be. And I love that about being a regular. I love not having to make plans.

I think being a regular means being who you are.

If you are a woman who goes to a bar alone they say something is wrong with you. You must be lonely or looking to hook up. There is something unseemly and impolite about being a woman alone at a bar. I really hate that stereotype.

If you are a woman going with a man, that’s socially acceptable. I think about one of the last bars to finally let women drink there. It was Farrell’s in Windsor Terrace [located in Brooklyn]. If you were a woman, for a long time there was a back entrance and a gentleman could go up to the bar and get you a drink and bring it to you. So you could be a woman in a bar, but you had to have a man as a mediator. It’s upsetting to me still that a lot of women have internalized this sort of stereotype that it’s not a place for us.

I’ve had my heart crushed when a bar has closed down.

Bars are fun places. They should belong to everyone. One thing I love about drinking in Ireland, and a reason I want to spend more time there, is that women are always in pubs there.

In my twenties, I would stay at a bar for eight hours. And in eight hours you are drinking a lot. I don’t do that anymore. Now I have a three-drink cap.

Have I known drunks? Absolutely. Have I occasionally been a drunk myself? Probably. I’ve gone through many long lost weekends. Probably a weekend a year. Sure. But I would have saved a lot of time and money if I had been drinking cheaper at home. At the bar we get to drink and we get the community.

Part of what makes a good bar regular is listening as much as or more than one is talking. So if you are really listening and really interested in the people around you, you are going to care about their shitty days as much as their good days and take them as they are.

There is something unseemly about being a woman alone at a bar. I hate that stereotype.

When I found out on Thursday my Aunt Ellen died, I was on a date. I ended my date. I excused myself and went straight to [Brooklyn bar] South. I wasn’t ready to go home yet. A bar is a space between home and wherever else you’ve been, whether it’s work or a date. A bar is a kind of break. I wasn’t ready to go home and take in that news in my own quiet, private space. I wanted to be around people but people who wouldn’t put pressure on me but would be glad to see me and receive my bad news graciously. I feel bars are really good for that.

The thing I love about a bar is it’s different from work or school. You are going to meet people you wouldn’t meet at either. And you become great friends with them.

There’s a reason one person is a regular in one bar and not another bar. It could be proximity, but also we respond to a feeling of a place and the spirit. When a person gets that, they don’t have to be there every night. They feel comfortable there. They are interesting to be around. They are willing to show up regardless of what mood they are in. It’s the real feeling and affinity for a place that matters more.

It’s lived-in and beautiful in all the ways I want a neighborhood bar to be. I look at this space and take immense aesthetic pleasure in it. There’s nothing shiny, sparkly, or trendy about it. It’s just lived-in and timeless to me.

There’s the Latin phrase genius loci, the spirit of a place. And I think some bars have a really great genius loci and some don’t. This place has it.

June 17, 2015

(Photos by Nicole Disser)