Tigre

105 Rivington Street, New York, NY 10002

There are really only two types of Martinis: two but with a secret third.  There are the Bemelman’s Martini, which is really two martinis, and there’s the martini available at whatever your local bar is.  As for myself, Clandestino can make a good martini but I wouldn’t think to recommend it if asked; largely because I so seldomly get one myself.  Once, I was there with one of the bartenders, Paolo, and watched him order a martini from one of his coworkers, Sarah.  He took a sip, hung his head, sighed, and, in all sincerity, asked us “why didn’t you tell me Sarah makes a better martini than me?”  The secret third thing is a martini at Dynaco, in BedStuy, which is both a spiritual midpoint whilst furth enough its own to form the third point of a martini glass triangle.

I am having a hard time typing “Tigre” without putting “Le” in front of it.  I had been told it is Grace Jones themed but even with forewarning I don’t see how.  I was also told they would bum you a cig if you asked. They didn’t.  A friend who had been to Tigre before and told me of the “cigarette martini” and said it was described to her as “like you just kissed someone who was out for a smoke.”  This was more than enough to get me there as I did and still do need to know what that is.

“Two cigarette martinis please.”

“Oh I’m sorry we are actually out of the cigarette martini tonight.”

This was not an option I had expected.  In the bar world things don’t often run out no?  Especially the second menu item and calling card? A keg taps, occasionally, sure, but there’s always another beer. Or maybe you want a Paloma and that bar just doesn’t have grapefruit juice and you change your mind.  I momentarily consider that I have cigarettes and could bum them one if that would help but I return to the menu instead.  The menu describes, under “martini (by ratio),” the options “04 - to - 1, 08 - to - 1, 12 - to - 1, 16 - to - 1” and finally “01 - to - Nothing.”  In what I give them the benefit of the doubt of assuming is an endeavor to simplify the ordering of your truly unique and special martini of preference, they have created perhaps the most difficult and confounding bit of mathematics I have ever seen; famously I received an A in Calculus 2 during my brief stint as an engineering student.  What is even more infuriating is that every word in the entire menu is either written sans capitalization or COMPRISED ENTIRELY OF CAPSLOCKED TITLES OR DESCRIPTIONS, yet, the “N” in “01 - to - Nothing” is given the noticeable privilege of being uppercased.  If they had had the cigarette martini in stock all of what you just read could have been avoided and I wouldn’t have had to type all those pesky little dashes.  I quickly flip past the martini algorithm and past the wines-by-the-glass list, which is long, and arrive at cocktails and rub my eye to stop it from twitching.  The section features two lists titled “then” (classics) and “now.”  The “now” is 4 cocktails, two of which have names in French (cherchez le femme et se si bon), so we chose the two in English: the “mister softee SINGHANI, SAGE, PINA” and “foreign places BANANA EAU, COGNAC, NUTMEG.”  Stop me if you've heard this one before but years ago I coined a cocktail called The Banana Hammock, which is a Sidecar with banana liquor (get it?), and though I have seen similar takes put up here and there none have the courage to slip in a dick joke. 

The friend I have brought with me for this visit is wildly intoxicated.  She had met up with me after leaving her work holiday party so she is appropriately wasted.  She is the kind of wasted one gets on someone else’s dime.  She is the kind of wasted that one only can get when that dime is coming from the people who require you to go work, in an office, 5 days a week, for less than you know you are worth.  I ask her to touch the plant behind her, to see if it’s real or fake, and she genuinely can’t tell.  As soon as we walk in she does a bit of a physical comedy routine for the manager, who wore a gold dress and was very patient with us, but she did not realize she was seeing improv and therefore didn’t laugh.  She sat us and my friend immediately requested to be moved.  She is making me look like the responsible one but just barely as for the last 3 hours I was having many beers and many shots with my new friend Harold who I met because he was sitting next to me. He was in town from Italy, where he lives by a lake, and tells me he has kept his apartment here because it is rent controlled from 1990, when he moved in at 26, and is actually two merged apartments taking up the whole top floor of the building.  He tells me how he went to re-park his car on 9/11 (the one in 2001) because of alternate side parking “because it was a Tuesday” we both said in unison.  When he got back up to his 5th floor walk up he went out onto the fire escape to water his weed plants and saw the smoke engulfing the first tower and swirls of paper in the air and thought “are they making a movie?”  As he did he saw a plane moving low across the horizon and do a little turn and plow into the second tower with a sound he imitated with mouth as the air being sucked out of the room (shooooosh) followed by a bang (BANG).  This apartment just happened to be across the street from Tigre.

The bar feels like you are underground even though I knew very well I wasn’t as I walked in.  That being said, it really should be underground.  The door is a nondescript black service door covered in stickers and tags (coool) and the doorman is big and doorman-like.  “You gotta pretend to be a lot more sober than you are,” I say to my friend and she doesn’t.  The ceiling is subjectively low and adorned with differingly heighted elements of light and stalactitic flair.  There is a hotel on top of us, I assume is called The Rivington Hotel, and I feel submerged so the sum total reminds me more of a cruise ship than a speakeasy or lobby lounge or what have you.  

Everyone that works here is beautiful.  The bartenders are both feminine presenting as are the two servers and the manager and they are all quite attractive.  Soon they will all be kept far from us two drunken degenerates as manager is replaced by a server of model aspect with menus and eventually we are speaking with a tall individual with long brown hair that looks like Johnathon van Ness from Queer Eye when but when they don’t have a beard.  They are delightful and help me specify my wishes on my third cocktail.  Everyone here is in a uniform of sorts that reminds me of working with women in places where there were uniforms of the femininely accentuating variety.  They had a dress smock with 3 quarter sleeves and not terribly long hem that my coworkers would often complain about as some were tall and some weren’t and no one much liked having to bare leg when the rest of us were in pants and shirts.  Ultimately I didn’t stay working there long enough to see how it was resolved and it was the owner who had designed the garments so that may have made him bias.  The uniform at Tigre appears to be white, skin tight, and sans brassiere.  While I do not disapprove aesthetically, I was surprised since the environs don’t seem to necessitate, nor expect, such piquant livery.  I briefly approach the bar, where naturally I had initially requested to be seated but wasn’t able, and start bothering the bartenders.  I ask about some odd small blue bottle I see on the top shelf saying “what’s that up there it looks like aftershave?”  I am told it is a chartreuse of some sort.  I ask a second question about who knows what and they answer “I’m sorry sir we don’t take drink orders from the bar you’ll have to ask your server.”  Right yes true, I thank them for putting me down gracefully and realize this means that I am not only internally drunk but the rest of the world can tell.  I go back to the table, chug my second martini (the normal one at the top of the menu not the one requiring a degree in physics), and calmly walk to the bathroom, which even as I am doing it feels weird.  I had just had two martinis and a cocktail back to back to back and was feeling fine.  Surely after two martinis I should be feeling unwell.  They are $23 I deserve to be suffering afterwards.  I wonder why I don’t feel like hell in the bathroom as my phone starts to ring.  It is my compatriot saying “I just broke so many glasses.”  “I left you alone for 3 minutes what happened!”  I return to find several serveresses, on hands and knees, with towels and shards.  The check is dropped, sans demande, tout suite.  Were their martinis stronger I can only assume we would have been arrested.  Instead we went to Thee Parkside, who were very much going to close early had we not walked in, and then to Sophie’s, where I am told I played pool, and, as un pièce de résistance, went to friend’s house with her and her boyfriend until 7 in the morning and slept on their guest bed.  The next day was not my favorite.

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