Borak: The Elusive Fountain

My dad went to a bar he could call his own. Being eight years old, and this being the '80s, I naturally thought that the Colonel's Pub looked something out of Cheers—stale smoke, wooden bar stools, cheap television, yellow light. It was a place where men like my dad stopped in for a drink, laughed away their worries, and was called by name whenever he entered the place. My dad was Norm.

But the bar burned down a few years later, and it was never rebuilt. All that remained of the place was ironically a matchbox lying around at home. He rarely mentioned the place since, but you could tell he missed it. After all, it was a place where he felt he was more than a customer running up a bill. Those places are hard to come by.

Since my old local, a place called Broadwalk, called it quits, I'm beginning to understand why it's so hard to find a decent watering hole in KL. For one thing, you never find a bar that you're comfortable with intentionally; it's almost always by accident—mostly stumbling in after being lured in by an all-night happy hours banner. And as the city progresses, there's a worrying trend of bars that, as a writer for KLue, I am asked to describe as swanky, cool, cutting-edge, or sophisticated; all of which mean, in a roundabout way, that it has a very cool restroom that you pay for via the overpriced beer.

Seldom does the Valley spring up a bar that I could describe as wooden, smoke-stained, and laughter-filled. Those that I can name off hand are old drinking institutions—Backyard, Green Man, Rennie's Pub, Ronnie Q's—but I can't seem to recall many new ones. You know the type. It shouldn't be too hard to find a place like that, but seeing how some try so disastrously hard to recreate that pub-like feeling—that's you, you Irish-theme pubs—it's clear that some bar owners don't get the concept of what it means to be a good ol' fashioned pub.

So what gives a pub that indefinable quality? It's the smoke-stained air, the mismatched furniture, the perpetually faulty lighting. The regulars who spin the constant gripe about their football and politics, giving you a drink if you lend them a ear. The menu that's unchanged for years, while knowing that they only ever serve fries. It's the shiver down your spine whenever you order a cocktail, not knowing when the barkeep last checked the expiry date on that carton of milk. All I know is that the pub is never perfect, and any effort to improve it would be plainly foolhardy.

Pubs on television—and by television I mean an extension of real life—share these qualities of constant imperfection. Cheers, Moe's, The Drunken Clam; none of them have anything much going for them besides what's on tap. There's none of the frills, there's no need for fancy decor, cool lighting, or a washroom sink designed by Apple.

In other words, there's no need to impress the women, which is a dilemma of the modern pub. I simply don't see why it's worth putting in such a futile effort, because most guys—and the bar owner is probably one—have the interior design sense of a 16-year-old. The movie posters, football scarves, the pool table, a Beano comic strip pasted on the restroom wall—this is the culmination of every boyhood dream of having their own clubhouse that serves alcohol. Girls, needless to say, didn't exactly fit into the original blueprint. Bars who know this don't bother pleasing everyone and continue to pump up the CCR and Iron Maiden. That's why they're so successful—they dispense with the contrived pleasantries and give their customers what they want.

Maybe I'm just getting old, complaining about the noise and nonsense that these trendy kids now flock to whenever there's a new bar where everyone has to be seen at. But I know I'm not alone; others out there have shared the same gripe with me. I don't know about you, but all I look for in a bar is talk, cheap booze, and a bartender who can't make a cocktail. But even the simplest things, it seems, just have to be stumbled upon.

John Lim still dreams of opening a bar and pretend to be Sam Malone.