Sadie Stein in The New York Times:
As Herman Melville wrote, “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.” Not everyone would read these words and think: cocktail bar. But for Bryan Schneider, the connection was obvious from the first time he read “Moby-Dick.” “I’m always reading from the bartender’s perspective,” he said. Schneider spent years tending bar for some of New York’s premier hospitality luminaries, Toby Cecchini, Julie Reiner and Daniel Boulud among them. All the while, he was thinking about Melville’s novel, which turns 175 this year.
Particularly inspiring was a description of a whalers’ watering hole called the Spouter-Inn, where the narrator, Ishmael, casts in his lot with the damned crew of the Pequod:
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way — cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round — you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously.
“I’d never read a vivid description like that before — so poetic,” Schneider said. “There were just so many cues for a bar! Yes,” he admits, “you could call it my white whale.”
More here.
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