Nights Out: Uptown Tavern
By Fritz Hahn
Washington Post Weekend Section
Friday, March 10, 2006
Losing a popular local hangout is tough, but two -- in the same week no less -- is a serious blow. Cleveland Park faced a double hit last spring when the owners of Brick's Tavern and the Park Bench Pub declared bankruptcy and then faced liquidation. Just like that, thousands of singles and young professionals lost the neighborhood's best places to watch sports and found themselves with two fewer places to head after work or on Friday night, whether for late-night dancing at the basement-level Park Bench or to soak in the sun on the rooftop deck at Brick's. Both were, admittedly, running unevenly and looking shoddy by the end, but they still had loyal patrons.
It took almost six months for the two spaces to reopen under new ownership, and although they initially looked like carbon copies of the previous occupants, they're beginning to take on personalities of their own.
The new owners of the Park Bench Pub -- rechristened the Uptown Tavern -- had a much different task in trying to turn around the fortunes of the former sports bar. The Park Bench Pub's main room was a dingy, windowless basement dive that looked like a college rec room -- albeit one with a kitchen, a Golden Tee machine and a couple of televisions. There were occasional holes punched or kicked in the walls, and the less said about the bathrooms the better. Still, it served a purpose, drawing crowds of Maryland fans for basketball games, shown on a large projection TV, killer wings and cheap beer. DJs played to filled a makeshift dance floor on weekends. (A one-room, above-ground addition, around the corner on Ordway Street, has windows.)
Uptown Tavern is keeping to the same ideas, though they've been refined with a new soft-blue paint job and more flat-screen plasma televisions, plus new events such as Texas Hold 'Em poker on Monday nights. Crowds, though, don't seem to have changed much. Sporting events bring out those persistent Maryland alumni, as well as fans rooting for other ACC and Big East schools, and energy levels are high. Weekends are as likely to find mid-twenties guys in polos and baseball caps playing foosball as young women who've dressed up to come dance to crowd-pleasing '80s and hip-hop.
The Uptown is going for a younger crowd than most other places in Cleveland Park, and its list of rotating specials, featured on a chalkboard just outside the front door, includes $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon, $3 Miller Lite bottles, half-price wings, $3 kamikaze shooters and $5 martinis for women.
Unlike the martini bars or Irish pubs on the same strip, the Uptown prominently features a refrigerator filled with Red Bull cans behind the bar, just waiting to be added to vodka, and a Jagermeister machine that allows the licorice-flavored shots to be chilled to about 5 degrees. If that doesn't get the party started, who knows what will.
Those who miss the still-shuttered sunlit portion of the Park Bench can relax because it should open in about a month. Let's hope they'll paint over the "Park Bench Pub" logo first.
