Sunday, September 24, 2017

In search of drunk-brunch answers at the Post

This past week, East Village resident Robert Halpern sued the State Liquor Authority over a loophole in the 1999 law that allows bottomless brunches.

Steve Cuozzo uses that as a jumping off point in a column at the Post. Drunk brunch, and drinking in general among the millennial set, is a citywide scourge, he writes.

There’s never been as much binge boozing as there is today. It stretches far beyond the Lower East Side’s infamous “Hell Zone” to Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg and Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. In the Meatpacking District, vomit on the pavement makes me cringe more than smelly carcasses once did. Even hotel rooftops and high-end restaurants are affected: Top chef Michael White actually employs a bouncer to stand on Lafayette Street to protect his Italian trattoria Osteria Morini from “young, affluent, intoxicated people stumbling from one place to the next,” a manager explained to me.

Any explanations?

A few causes of this drunken oblivion are obvious. Affluent young singles cluster in neighborhoods oversaturated with saloons. Restaurants promote “beverage programs” more than food.

Some media outlets seem bent on driving half the youthful population into AA. Time Out New York’s September issue feature on the craft-beer scene is blurbed on the magazine’s cover as “67% information, 33% inebriation.”

Also! Citing stats that show Manhattan is home to 38 percent more women than men among recent college graduates, Cuozzo believes the imbalance is driving this demographic to drink.
What’s that got to do with binge drinking? When gender expectations are wildly out of sync, anxiety is soothed with alcohol’s fast-acting flood of relief.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

"What’s that got to do with binge drinking? When gender expectations are wildly out of sync, anxiety is soothed with alcohol’s fast-acting flood of relief." He should really stick to the law. Speculating on stuff like this adds nothing. It's illegal: period.

Anonymous said...

It wouldn't be the NY Post without a trip back to the 1950's, where "boys will be boys" but women are either good girls who want marriage and children or sluts who are giving it away for free. And, according to Cuozzo they're drinking their way to spinsterhood or drunken whores. Guess all of those piles of vomit only come from women.

Anonymous said...

How does the Post stay in business in a city which is overwhelmingly anti-Trump and anti-Republican? Boycott that shitrag!

Anonymous said...

@3:22 The problem is that the city is pro-wealth and anti-homeless irregardless of being anti Trump anti-Republican. In other words, people really don't care about class issues. I don't know about the imbalance causing the drinking. It's the culture, the real estate, Gatsbyesque snobbery. Some day they will choke on their own vomit but until then.

Anonymous said...

Part of the issue is the people who are flooding neighborhoods like ours have money and lots of free time on the weekends. These aren't kids who are paying their own rent by working two jobs. They have the freedom and the time to drink not just on Friday and Saturday nights but on Sunday afternoons, too.

JQ LLC said...

I thought it was a rather pointed piece on this new culture and new gilded age of debauchery, stupidity and hedonism with these alcoholic idiots.


Anonymous said...

Why doesn't everyone just chill out for a few years and realize that everything happens in waves. Some good news for all you teetotalers out there:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/well/family/binge-drinking-drops-among-teenagers.html?_r=0

The study showed that “frequent binge drinking” — at least two occasions of drinking five or more drinks in a row over the past two weeks — decreased among American adolescents over the period from 1991 to 2015. The study found, however, that drinking rates are decreasing faster among the economically better-off, and among boys.