Sycamore Beer Fest/Ten Years of Creole Love

This is a double fun post cause I skipped last week.

On the drinking news in the city, Sycamore, a bar/flower shop in Ditmas Park had a lovely Ocktoberfest a couple of weeks ago. Grand and tasty beer was provided at $3 for a plastic up, $12 for a liter stein. Spaten OcktorberFest was the beer of choice for the event -- a nice fall taste for the cold weather. It was pure and cheap brilliance in beer drinking. The upside is that the special lasted from 12pm-midnight, and because my friends and I were there all day, one of the awesome owners, Justin, allowed us to keep the beer mugs. The bar is a favorite of mine, but I have to admit, I don't have many options in my hood. The only other one I've been to is the god-forsaken Denny's at McDonald Ave where bright lights, Phil Collins and women in spandex reign. The downside to the Sycamore bar, and there are few, trust me, is that it's the center of babyville. I get that parents need to get out and bring there little ones along, but I get very disconcerted when it's after dark and the large, wonderful backyard of Sycamore has an entire section of children playing about and throwing pebbles at each other while adults are getting openly plastered nearby. Overall, Sycamore gets three stars out of five for this beer lover's event.

In other news, I just celebrated my ten year friendship with my good friend K. He was one of my first drinking buddies in the city. The first bar we began frequenting in the city was the hideous, but oh, so cheap Cafe Creole. Cafe Creole was housed in a little downstairs whole on 99 MacDougal Street. It was a place of odd memories: ten buck strong Long Island Ice Teas, random bongo drummers, and even shaman that used to give you odd spiritual trinkets. I loved the bar because it represented the bar of our youth, our first years of drinking in NYC. But as time moved on, we find better bars to frequent, I didn't even know when Cafe Creole was shut down. On our anniversary, we decided to see what had become of our old bar. What we found was 99 Below, a more upscale looking version of our former, dirt floor, bongo thumping Creole. 99 Below has your standard drink prices with a decent happy hour on weeknights of $4 well drinks, a nice accomodating bartender, and good bar food. After the kitchen closes, you can still order food, it's the same menu, just made and delivered from some unknown location across the street. It also has to be a separate bill from your bar tab. K and I spent several hours here drinking and reminscing, but the overall downside to this otherwise nice, cute bar was the music. Never have I heard Alanis, Joan Osborne, and Cranberries all in one place. Instead of remembering our old college drinking days, it made the evening a slightly painful trip back to high school. We also noticed that the music might have kept the bar patrons from staying. At one point, at 9pm on a Thursday, the bar had a decent crowd, but as the hours past, at 12pm, we were the only patrons. This made the bartender like us, he even gave us two buy backs -- one of them being a nice so-co and lime shot for the road. I liked the bartender so much that I decided not to tell him how you should never play Joan Osborne in any bar -- ever.