There's nothing like a bad flight, complete with two or more delays and false promises of free booze to ruin your day.
I made the mistake of scheduling a flight back to Las Vegas from Colorado on New Year's Day. More accurately, New Year's Morning, that special time when most dedicated fans of the bottle should be soundly passed out, doing their best to transform a potentially nasty hangover into a slight headache. Instead, I was traipsing across Colorado from airport to airport, trying to keep down the Jagermeister shots some evil person had ordered the night before, scrambling for a flight home as my airline announced delay after cancellation after delay.
When I finally got a flight, 13 hours late, a flight attendant announced that since we had waited for so long, drinks would be on them. I was euphoric until I heard a guy sitting behind me order a beer. The woman handed it to him and said, "That'll be four dollars." When the guy asked about the announcement that we'd be receiving free booze in exchange for all of our patient waiting, the attendant told him she didn't know what announcement he was talking about. My ice-cold, hair-of-the-dog beer turned into a far less satisfying ginger ale as I decided against giving the much-delayed airline any more of my money.
Needless to say, by the following night, I was badly in need of some beer-flavored therapy. Since I also was in need of a familiar place with a relaxing atmosphere, my friend Sarah and I headed to The Dispensary, a great little bar on Tropicana and Eastern that a co-worker introduced me to about a year ago. The food is greasy, the beer is relatively cheap, and the decor is, well, priceless.
If you haven't already been there, the only way to get an accurate idea of the interior is to imagine a basement family-room somewhere in the Midwest, circa 1975-1985, complete with dark-brown wood paneling; thick, brown carpet; low-sitting, wood-frame love seats, complete with avocado-, orange- and brown-striped cushions; and the dim, murky lighting this sort of interior design demands. There's also a gigantic water wheel (which actually works) against one wall, and the cocktail waitresses uniforms of black leotards with leg-warmers and shiny tan tights, or tied-up, white cotton button-downs with black tap pants and pumps, to add to The Dispensary's unique charm.
While we sipped our New Castles and ate some of the hottest, tastiest fried bar food I've had in a while, I couldn't help but lament that there weren't more people there. Sarah kept naming the ways the place reminded her of the basement in her parents' old house in Idaho.
Occasionally the service at The Dispensary is a bit odd. An ex-boyfriend and I once had a waitress who came and took our orders, wrote them down, walked away, then came back three times because she had forgotten what we'd ordered. Each time, she looked down at her note pad and exclaimed, "Oops, I have it written right here!" But that night, the waitress, who was also bartending, was very attentive and nice enough to let us put in a last-minute food order.
We re-hashed our New Year's Eve adventures. I had gone to a hilariously empty dive bar in Colorado, where the "live band" (a guy with a guitar and a microphone) let my friends and I sing with him when we got drunk, while Sarah went to a rockin' house party in Summerlin. While we talked, I kept getting that relaxed, at-home feeling The Dispensary is so good at providing. Besides the waitress occasionally taking plates or bringing drinks, the few people in the bar were completely uninterested in what anyone else was doing, simply having quiet conversations or watching the news.
After a few rounds, a couple of greasy plates and enough time to fully appreciate The Dispensary's excellent sound track, made up primarily of '60s and '70s R&B and soul, I realized that a place like this probably couldn't really exist anywhere else, and I started to feel just a little bit glad to be back in Vegas. And the New Castle's role in shaking the remains of my New Year's hangover couldn't have hurt either.
Maria Phelan sets a new bar for drinking. E-mail her your favorite watering hole at [email protected].