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.

Steve Cuozzo digs DBGB, the Bowery

From his review in the Post today... which had more to do with the neighborhood than the restaurant:

Most people still perceive the boulevard in discrete sections: the gentrified blocks north of Houston Street; kitchen supply and electrical fixture-heaven below Houston; and Chinatown, south of Delancey.

But there's a cheerful, disheveled continuity here, an exotic ramble not yet homogenized by Duane Reades and bank branches.

Much of the Bowery still looks as it must have 100 years ago: a procession of low-rise, utilitarian structures, keepers of secrets known only to the weathered bricks and mortar. Thanks to the street's unusual width and mostly low-rise scale, it opens up like a time capsule, especially on sunny days.

[Image via Curbed]

Wikipedia's whoppers

In the Post today, Steve Cuozzo takes a look at Wikipedia's New York City entry. Let's just say it's not very accurate. Cuozzo writes:

[W]hen it comes to the city's geography and streetscape, Wikipedia can be wildly out of date - like its notoriously wrong-headed story on Hunts Point, which (to the neighborhood's dismay) cites 20-year old crime data.

Other entries read like dumb bus-tour guides' off-base spiels. One states that the East Village "is considered part of the Lower East Side" - by morons, maybe, but not by anyone who has ever crossed Houston Street. Nor was the East Village "formerly known as the Bowery."