Your Bar Is Not a Speakeasy. And the Mob Would Be Ashamed.
Unless you're actually getting raided
I was invited to the opening of a new speakeasy a couple of weeks ago. It was announced, as any self-respecting underground drinking den should be, with a press release.
I could probably stop this Hot Take there, because while I may not have been alive during prohibition, I’m also pretty sure Al Capone wasn’t calling his publicist every time he started an illegal jazz club, trying to get the New York Times food critic a table.
But 90 years later, speakeasys have made a bigtime comeback. And now you see them everywhere - in subway stations, on cruise ships, and occasionally at very exclusive preschools.
The idea is cute: Knock on a secret washing machine, say a secret password like “Don’t eat the Tide pods,” and you’re escorted into a room lit only by a single lightbulb/Care Bears nightlight. You’re seated in a sea of velvet couches, and handed a menu so long that finishing it should earn you a personal pan pizza. The drinks all have 65 ingredients, at least two of which you’ve heard of. The rest, you’re pretty sure, are just words from “The Jabberwocky.”
And If you want to drink in low-light, enjoy a conversation, and sip a drink that couldn’t be duplicated in a frat house bathtub, it’s a solid night out.
But here is the problem: In Miami, secret speakeasys aren’t secrets. You can’t speak in them. And nothing about them is easy.
In Miami, our “secret” speakeasys don’t even pretend to be secret. A few years ago we had a speakeasy in Midtown called, I’m not making this up, Speakeasy, that had a giant neon sign over its door that said, you’ll never guess this either, “Speakeasy.” In 1925, that would have been a next-level police troll. Now? Be glad Meyer Lansky isn’t alive to see it.
Speaking isn’t really a thing at Miami “speakeasys,” either. Nearly all of them have a live DJ playing at roughly the volume of a snowmobile. And I get it, the underground jazz clubs of yesteryear had live bands, and sometimes Louis Armstrong or Chet Baker might play a little louder than the acoustics allowed. But it was cool, because it was Louis Armstrong and Chet Baker. Not a DJ who advertises crypto on the back of his laptop.
In Miami, getting into a speakeasy is the opposite of easy. Rather than a covert back door, Miami “speakeasys” have lines that stretch down the block, filled with people who think the secret password is “I know a guy at Surf Lodge.”
Some try and disguise their entrances with a secret phone booth, a shtick so played out we now have an entire generation of people who think phone booths are secret bar entrances, and have nothing to do with making phone calls. Last week I ran into a UM freshman frantically pressing 6-7 outside a gas station, asking me if the secret bar was somewhere inside the car wash.
So let’s stop calling every cocktail bar that opens a “speakeasy.” Much like with Fight Club, new haircuts, and therapy, the first rule is you don’t talk about it. If you’ve got a cool mixology lounge, that’s great. If you want to play music so loud it’s mistaken for a singing humpback whale, that’s also fine. But don’t insult the men who worked so hard to bring possibly-fatal moonshine to 1920s Americans by calling it a “speakeasy.” Call it what it really is: Money laundering.