Pub-hopper's glossary

PEOPLE LIKE US

Six months back, I stopped going out to eat, choosing to order in every time the family felt like a change. The reason was not altruistic, merely practical.

I was writing a book, and authors don't have the time to prop up bars, merely to burn the midnight oil in search of the elusive phrase. In the short while I had been away, metaphorically speaking, the capital's palate had turned.

No more did diners spend time debating whether a pub was merely a bar that served a ploughman's lunch. Pubs, I learnt, were passe, and gen-x thought of bars as merely remnants of an alien century.

So, what did people do these days? "Hang around," said Sarla, my wife's best friend, "just hang loose." "How do you do that?" I asked. "You go to a lounge bar," she said, "and chill." "You mean," I admit to being astonished, "you pay money to go sit on someone else's sofa?" "Yep, baby," said Sarla acidly, "unless you're too stingy to part with some bucks."

"I knew you'd make me look small," complained my wife when Sarla had left. "I insist you take me out so I don't resemble a country bumpkin when friends talk of sheesha bars and hooqa bars." "Er," I said, "what bars?" "Nobody," hissed my wife, "goes to a restaurant to eat any more." "Why else would you go to a restaurant?" I asked in amazement.

"For conversation," my wife said. "A hooqa bar or a sheesha bar is where you sit with friends around a hubble-bubble." "But what if you don't smoke?" I said. "Silly," said my wife, "it's not like serious smoking, it's just dragging on a puff or two."

I was still not getting it: "But don't you eat?" "After some time," she said, "though the whole point is to hang around, have a couple of drinks, peck at a snack or two, order a meal that you look at in desultory fashion, and then smoke some more."

"I don't think I might like a hooqa bar," I said, "a lounge bar may be more my scene." "You don't eat all that much in a lounge bar either," she responded. "A lounge bar is about trance music, or shall I say a hooqa bar without, if you will, the hooqa."

"At least people don't smoke," I offered. "You don't get anything," sighed my wife, "in a lounge bar you have humidors from where you select cigars, and spend the better part of an evening trying to light one. And all conversation is laconic, never informed, and never about politics or religion."

Since all the restaurants I used to know were now lounging dens, I did not know where to go for a meal, and so was glad to accept an invitation to the launch of Rouge. "With a name like that, it must be a nightclub," I pointed out.

"Nightclubs and discs are history," my education resumed and, arriving at our destination, my wife peered through the smoke and flickering candlelights to assure me we were at a lounge bar. We ensconsed ourselves in sofas and lounged while waiters served drinks, but were altogether parsimonious with the food. "You're right," I agreed, "this must be a lounge bar." "No, no," said a voice in the gloom, "this is a resto-bar."

"You never told me about resto-bars," I accused my wife. "Because I've no idea what they are either," she confessed. "Perhaps it's a place to rest," I giggled. "It must be a restaurant with a bar attached," she came back.

"Whatever it is," I hazarded, "it seems to have too many sofas, a lot by way of drink, and only a little food." "Then," concluded my wife, "a resto-bar is really a pub by another name."