15 Sep Eat the Rich: our very local, and very happy hour
Where we’ve been drinking: Eat the Rich
One of the marvels of our new home of Washington, DC, is this phenomenon called happy hour. In our former stomping grounds of Massachusetts, discounting liquor prices at bars and restaurants is illegal (wWHAat?) and happy hours are non-existent. Here in DC, happy hours are the thing. And it’s probably one of our favorite things about the place. On almost every corner, there’s a daily little party to celebrate the end of business and the beginning of fun. And in case you didn’t know, we really like parties.
Enthusiastic fans of it that we are, we still haven’t felt completely understood by happy hour. Most happy hours are severely biased in a beer and wine direction, with discounts on beer and wine only or, at best, including rail drinks. We’re willing to have more wine or margaritas than we otherwise would for the sake of joining in the celebration; nonetheless, this general skew toward wine and beer made us especially glad to come across Eat the Rich. In fact, Eat the Rich checked all of the boxes:
- near the office where Steph was working: check
- in a neighborhood we hadn’t explored yet: check
- $1 oysters: check (Here in DC, you can discount both food and drink)
- cocktails on the happy hour menu: check
- all happy hour food and drink featuring local products: check check
Rather than the typical specialty cocktail menu, the happy hour menu featured a make-your-own highball menu. A highball is a cocktail served over ice in a tall glass, consisting of a base spirit and a mixer, typically in a 1:2 spirit to mixer proportion. The mixer could be a juice (as in the Screwdriver) or a carbonated beverage (as in Rum and Coke). At Eat the Rich’s highball bar, you had your choice of several locally distilled spirits, to which you could add your choice of mixer. While I wouldn’t go with this method all the time, it was kind of fun. We chose Green Hat gin with tonic. That’s not terribly creative, but we went that direction because we wanted to be able to taste the gin as clearly as possible. It was a winner. So much so that we went out and bought the locally distilled Green Hat gin and are going to tell you all about it tomorrow.
And then there was the second drink.
This one wasn’t on the happy hour menu, but it was an experience worth paying full price: a grownup slushie. The grownup slushie had what we remembered fondly from the childhood variety: whimsy, a mixing of flavors (just like making your own at the 7-11 slush machine), and cool refreshment on a very hot day. It also had things we appreciate as adults: liquor, of course, but also fresh, high quality ingredients–and an absence of corn syrup. You can expect to hear about our own grownup slushie experiments sometime in the near future.
At Eat the Rich we tried the Ghost in the Fruit Machine, a Negroni slushi with added elements of cherry soda and coffee. It all worked together surprisingly well, the coffee especially being a surprisingly welcome bitter addition to the concoction. I can’t wait to try the Anything With Bananas (rye, banana, pineapple, lime, and allspice) next time; it brings a new meaning to the term blended whiskey.
We’re new to town and feel it’s our duty to try every happy hour and tell you which is best, but we’ll definitely keep Eat the Rich on our rotation.
In the meantime, our homework for you:
- Who are the local distillers in your town? Have you tried them? Do it! There’s definitely something to the pride of something being from your hometown.
- Dream about slushies during that not-so-exciting-work meeting. It’s bound to make it better.
