Last Friday night, my friends and I launched a girls-night-out attempt to occupy ourselves with something other than getting drunk - a trek down to E Street to catch Forest Whitaker as really, really bad guy Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." It turns out that Whitaker won something called an Oscar for the movie a few days earlier, and the show was sold out. Forest Whitaker was enough of an excuse for us - it looked like we were going to have to get drunk.
A friend of mine, who's dating a guy up in Petworth, had been nagging us to check out their favorite neighborhood bar, a place called Temperance Hall, for weeks. A few blocks from the Georgia Ave.-Petworth stop, the bar is a bit of a hike, even on the Metro. But despite the bar's spot near the alluring dancing lights of what I'm sure is a nasty-ass strip club, and a Jamaican place my friend insists "smells better than it tastes," Temperance is surprisingly upscale. Long mirrors give the interior a strange illusion of grandiosity, and splashes of brick, stained glass, and green velvet wallpaper lend to the bar's throwback whimsy. The place was packed with a mix of post-college kids and neighborhood folks talking close over low lights and sipping brown liquor from tumblers. I felt drunk the second I walked in.
We spent most of our time in The Whiskey Room, a small, darkened space down the stairs and past the kitchen. The Whiskey Room is stocked with a short second bar, a long, community table, and a refreshingly non-internet jukebox that's stocked with classic rock and soul, but played Kanye West more than once. The basement bar also leads to one of the best post-ban smoking areas I've seen yet - a pleasant patio where smokers can grab a table or warm their faces on an outdoor heater instead of huddling out front with Georgia Avenue's late night crowd, who called us their "Snow Bunnies" and hung out their car windows to enquire as to whether we were interested in partying with them. We declined.
A friend of mine, who's dating a guy up in Petworth, had been nagging us to check out their favorite neighborhood bar, a place called Temperance Hall, for weeks. A few blocks from the Georgia Ave.-Petworth stop, the bar is a bit of a hike, even on the Metro. But despite the bar's spot near the alluring dancing lights of what I'm sure is a nasty-ass strip club, and a Jamaican place my friend insists "smells better than it tastes," Temperance is surprisingly upscale. Long mirrors give the interior a strange illusion of grandiosity, and splashes of brick, stained glass, and green velvet wallpaper lend to the bar's throwback whimsy. The place was packed with a mix of post-college kids and neighborhood folks talking close over low lights and sipping brown liquor from tumblers. I felt drunk the second I walked in.
We spent most of our time in The Whiskey Room, a small, darkened space down the stairs and past the kitchen. The Whiskey Room is stocked with a short second bar, a long, community table, and a refreshingly non-internet jukebox that's stocked with classic rock and soul, but played Kanye West more than once. The basement bar also leads to one of the best post-ban smoking areas I've seen yet - a pleasant patio where smokers can grab a table or warm their faces on an outdoor heater instead of huddling out front with Georgia Avenue's late night crowd, who called us their "Snow Bunnies" and hung out their car windows to enquire as to whether we were interested in partying with them. We declined.
