Though I'm not of German descent and know little about the culture, I'm adding an extra holiday to my calendar. It'll be called Hofbrauhaus Day, and will be observed with fierce dedication every year on January 31, with smaller but equally ambitious celebrations sprinkled throughout the rest of the year, as often as possible.
After watching the German beer hall and garden across from the Hard Rock in various stages of construction for the past seven or eight months, I was delighted when it finally opened at the end of last month. I know the Hofbrauhaus will be a success, if only because there's not another place like it in town. The three excellent, German-import house beers, not to mention the building itself, an impressive replica of the original 1589 Hofbrauhaus in Munich, alone are worth the trip. That said, if you're not a fan of beer, or of rowdy crowds, the Hofbrauhaus may not be for you.
Sarah, Jessica and I headed down for its opening night. When we arrived, I was surprised there weren't more people, but its size—the beer hall seats 380 and the beer garden can accommodate 430—and the little publicity it had generated probably had something to do with it. We grabbed a table and ordered a round; Jessica and I had the Munchner Kindl Weissbier or wheat beer, while Sarah went for the Hofbrau Dunkel or dark. Both were extremely tasty.
I spotted Travis, Nick and some other friends across the room. When I joined them, they pointed out a variety of stains on the wall behind them. They said that before we got there, a food fight had broken out between them and the table of Rebel football players behind them. Travis pointed to different spots and said, "That was a radish, and that big spot over there was a pork chop." Then the three footballers jumped up on their bench and started stomping along with the polka-tinged, '50s pop the band was playing.
While we watched the jocks dance, Nick—who claimed the next day that he'd been too drunk to remember anything—started whispering hilariously naughty things in my ear, then progressed to trying to lick my neck, which actually set a strange precedent for the evening. But, our love was not to be, because as I slowly moved down the bench, farther and farther away from him, he gave the waitress his number and started shouting directions to his house at her as she walked away laughing. (This is actually typical bar behavior for Nick.) Soon after that, Travis decided it was time to take Nick home.
After about half an hour, Jessica and I decided to go to the front and dance with a little, old man who'd been dancing alone for quite awhile. Not long after, the band stopped playing, so Sarah, Jessica and I asked the band if they'd take some pictures with us. They said yes and told us they're actually the house band at the Munich Hofbrauhaus. They're only here until the end of February, so anyone looking for max beer-hall authenticity had better go sometime this month and check them out.
While we talked to the band, I ordered a second beer and got some horrible news. In keeping with original Hofbrauhaus traditions, the management planned to stop serving drinks when the band stopped playing. I was so distressed that the waitress got a manager, who was surprised when I told him that stopping beer service at midnight on a Saturday in Vegas was going to be bad for business. While the early closing time was disappointing, I'm sure that both it and the slow service—the biggest problems I noticed—will work themselves out in a few weeks, if they haven't already.
While we took our pictures, a group of guys came over. Sarah and I discovered that they knew a friend of ours, which seemed to encourage one of them (I think his name was Travis) to jump into a few photos, and strangely, start trying to lick me. I'm not yet sure if this desire to lick people, well, at least me, is a side-effect of the Hofbrauhaus' beer, but it speaks well of its potency.
By that point, I'd finished my second beer—a small half-liter, painfully insufficient after my previous one liter—and since sadly there was no hope of getting any more, we headed over to Fado to catch the end of Darby O'Gill and the Little People's set, but that's a story for another column.
Maria Phelan sets a new bar for drinking. E-mail her your favorite watering hole at [email protected].