My Top 10 Places to Grab a Drink in Dallas

The backyard of the Amsterdam Bar.

Weeks are long, especially in America where people work some of the longest hours with some of the least vacation days in the developed world. To counteract this, some brilliant dudes or dudettes long ago invented a way to give people excuses for not getting anything accomplished for limited periods of time - alcohol. People have been drinking for a long time obviously, but going out for a drink in Dallas, Tx. presents a special set of challenges and pitfalls likely unique in world history.

Like an expert navigator, my stir craziness has provided me with years of experience which I use to navigate these turbulent seas. There are no rocks or menacing shorelines, no soul crushing squalls to contend with in the cool controlled atmosphere of the modern Dallas bar, but I'd take jagged cliff faces and unexpected reefs over a $30,000 millionaire douchebag any day of the week. But that's the kind of obstacle that abounds in the Dallas social scene, where you can on any given night fully expect to -

• Battle with said douches just for the honor of receiving a warm Bud Light (with lime of course)
• Be stomped on by throngs of shiny manufactured people, many of them mysteriously wearing the same shirts and high heals...
• Be robbed by drinks that are so overpriced your CNN knowledge of economics makes you wonder when the bubble will burst. If you drink enough it's not hard to imagine the little bastards literally coming alive, reaching into your wallet, taking your money and shooting you the bird while laughing a gurgly immersed in liquid laugh.

But when you break through it all, there are some amazing places to hang out. These are some of the ones I found, and I definitely welcome any recommendations!

My Top Ten Places to Grab a Drink in Dallas

1. Zubar – great bar staff, regulars, and quirky crowd with events that change daily. Love the seeming contradiction inherent in the place. Pretty posh interior that nevertheless houses regulars and a neighborhood bar atmosphere in the early evening. As the night comes on the music gets a little louder, crowd a little crazier. The ability to pick your poison makes it a great and very unique place.

2. Amsterdam Bar – amazing outdoor area, friendly crowd, Strongbow ciders, occasional outdoor performances and BBQ's. Did I mention the incredible outdoor area? I once sat sweating like a pig (do pigs sweat where does this come from?) but refused to take shelter in the air conditioned insides. Dehydration is worth that kind of cool. Plus you get buzzed quicker if that's your goal.

3. Times Ten Cellars – incredible patio and good wine at good prices. This is a great date spot fellas. Don't forget to tell her she "looks beautiful in the candlelight". Which of course is always true. Especially after 5 or 6 glasses of wine.

4. The Bone – awesome music with amazing views of downtown from the rooftop. Great sound system and great energy. Perhaps best of all if you like quirky concoctions there's no better place in town. Shot that tastes exactly like Key Lime Pie? Check. Then there's the Jolly Rancher, the Chocolate Cake, the Orange TicTac, the Sex With the Bartender (just kidding on that last one, I don't know if it tastes exactly like that.)

5. The Old Monk – great décor, staff are fun to talk to, people are friendly, lots of selection. Incredible food. Seriously incredible (try the roast beef sandwich yum!!!)

6. Balcony Club – great old school feel. Close your eyes. Now open your eyes. Now close your eyes. Now open your eyes. You're in a Jazz club in 1940's Chicago, and you've drank too much hence the excessive openings and closings of the eyes. "Imagine". They make some stroooooong drinks here.

7. The Libertine – awesome feel GREAT food and friendly people

8. Capitol Pub – expansive patio overlooking busy intersection feels very Pittsburgh or east coast, which reminds me of...the east coast. Huge beer selection and excellent Fish & Chips.

9. Pearl at Commerce – this former sanitarium (so the story went one night) has the most amazing interiors of any place out of the bunch. Very laid back atmosphere with lots of local and national acts passing through to bring in a passionate and friendly crowd.

10. The Gingerman – great selection of beers that’s really driven home by the well considered organization of the taps. Good crowd through the week though weekends can get douchy, which is the only reason for the low rating.

Still Thinking About Opportunity...and Feeling Prescient!

My last post (read it here) on labor mobility and America as a land of opportunity has got me feeling prescient today. A story in the New York Times talks about western lawyers going to India for opportunity. It's only the beginning. Check out the article here -

Legal Outsourcing Pulls Western Talent to India

Writes the Times "American and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India — are re-evaluating." For now, this involves only movement on the high end of the foodchain. However, it's only a matter of time before young lawyers resumes show that they spent 2/3 years in India or another market doing the basic work that many now do in the US upon first leaving law school. The central point to my argument was that it is now necessary to look around the world to find the best opportunities and challenges for personal and career growth. That America is no longer uniquely "the" land of opportunity and that that will not be changing.

Corporations, wealthy individuals, capital, and other entrenched and well-monied interests have taken advantage of globalization to pursue opportunities wherever they are in the world for going on a generation. Outsourcing is an opportunity to cut costs. Cross border capital flows (investing money in ventures based out of ones' home country) have sky rocketed. They represent, among other things, an opportunity for the wealthy to enjoy large returns on risky ventures in the developing world. I could go on, but an excerpt below drives the point home -

Western lawyers who make the leap to legal outsourcing companies come for a variety of reasons, but nearly universally, they say they stay for the opportunities to build a business and manage people.“In many respects it is more rewarding than jobs I had in the United States,” said Mr. Wheeler, who moved to India when his Indian-born wife took a job here in 2006.“If you’re talking about 15 employees in a windowless basement office, I’m not interested in making that my life’s calling,” he recalled thinking when he started talking to Pangea3. “But building a 500-person office, now that is a real challenge.”

Feeling prescient!

America: Land of Opportunity? Yes but...

No longer exclusively. Not by any stretch of the imagination. This, I think, is a great reality of 21st century economics that will need to sink into the heads of many Americans. Until then, their constant whiny bitterness has officially put me in "old-angry-shotgun-wielding-some-crazy-little bastards-are-pissing- on-my-lawn-reclusive-man-mode". It's a real mode. With lots of dashes. I personally came to this conclusion years ago, but a user's comment to a recent article on the blog of the "Dallas Observer" brought it back to the forefront of my mind.

The article dealt with a young man raised in America since the age of 3 by Bangladeshi parents who had immigrated illegally to the US. Their pleas for asylum repeatedly denied, the governement allowed them to remain in the country until the young man completed his high school education at the age of 18. Without getting into too much backstory (you can read the article here) the kid is now apparently in Bangladesh afraid to leave his apartment for fear of being kidnapped or harmed. In other words, the average FOX News viewer. The comment that got me thinking was submitted by user Hesiod -

He's better off. Soon all the jobs he would have been trained to do at UTA (University of Texas at Arlington where he had a scholarsihp offer) will have been offshored to Bangladesh, India, China, etc.. This way he might actually have a chance of finding steady employment, instead of going to 4 years of college, only to find himself on the dole! He can learn Bangladeshi. Better emigrate to where the jobs are, not to try to be where the jobs are leaving in droves!

I immediately thought that if this comment were a recipe it would call for a tinge of bitterness, a sprinkling of snark, on a big heaping of marinated unintentional insight, and finally a batter of popular public opinion. Don't try to fry it up you might get hurt. Besides, you can eat it for free every night on the nightly news. It's the only recipe Lou Dobbs knows. Yet its flavor hinges on a mythology. That mythology being that America is, in its very existence and as a facet of its inherent nature, singularly deserving of the label "The Land of Opportunity".

While it's true that America is a land of many opportunities, globalization now requires the use of the article "a". Sorry America. If it ever made any sense, "the" doesn't any more and more than likely won't ever again. Why be bitter? This change was as inevitable as the setting of the sun or the rising of the tides. That is to say, both depend on gravity and what goes up must come down. As one might expect, nation states fair no better in this respect than celestial bodies.

It's interesting that Americans for years watched immigrants arrive seeking opportunity here and wherever else they might find it in the world. Now that some jobs and opportunities are leaving, you've got people whining instead of...going wherever the opportunity is. The simple fact of the matter is that there was never any guarantee that that place would always be the US for all eternity. People just became spoiled; and spoiled people can get off my lawn.

We've got computer scientists whose jobs were outsourced saddled with debt working at Wal-Mart for the benefits. You've got recent college grads working in no relation to their degrees at Starbucks to pay the rent. All because they can't, won't, or aren't being encouraged, to see the bigger picture and to pursue opportunities outside their immediate sphere of experience.

Though the picture is obviously different for "high skill jobs" that have been outsourced than for blue collar work, fact is those jobs jobs didn't disappear. Wherever they went they still pay very well relative to the cost of living of a particular region. We've got millions with college degrees working in fast-food joints when they could be utilizing their skills and talents and making more relative to the cost of living if they just opened their eyes to the world before them.

There are many obstacles to globalizing labor markets as other sectors of the economy have been globalized. Some of them are institutional (no financial incentives for worker migration in search of opportunity as with businesses), some practical (language barriers), some more basic (fear of living in a foreign land.) Yet if you see the issue on these terms, and realize that if those holding protest signs, drinking themselves to death because their radiology job got outsourced to Mumbai, or spending their days thinking of catchy names to call "immgrants" (intentionally misspelled to reflect the stereotypical southern bigot) the main complaint seems to be that all opportunities are no longer conveniently located down the street from the house of the average American. Guess what? That's not going to change.

This need to consider that you may have to leave your country to pursue opportunity and better your standard of living is a scenario most of the rest of the world dealt with for over a century. That was globalization. It seems many Americans assumed that oft-mentioned process was a one way street. Reality is it's not and no one place has a monopoly on opportunity any longer despite mythologies to the contrary. Americans are drowning in debt in an economy where wages have stagnated as cost of living has soared. It's a pattern that's decades in with no sign of stopping. The important question really is - "is being leveraged up to your ears to own a moderate house 40 minutes away from any decent services or amenities in Suburban California or Texas really better than being debt-free, using your skills, and owning a condo in a mid/highrise in Mumbai?" It's a very long and grammatically fishy question. Yet the very fact that the answer is not as clear as it might once have been should show us how much things have changed when it comes to the "American Dream"...