Popination Asphyxiation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Japango.
Also: Steakhouse #316, and the hotel bar at Moxy.
Every year around the holidays, I take it upon myself to help Santa out a little bit and go stocking stuffer shopping for my men. Three stores on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder are best for this: hippie-dippie crystal and jewelry shop El Loro, famous kite and toy emporium Into the Wind, and posh/novelty cooking boutique Peppercorn. Since I was making it a day trip, I also went to get my hair done and to say hello to my parents.
Soon after this trip, I was hit with a nasty illness and therefore no energy for a fresh place to popinate, BUT! Just as I began to recover enough from the flu-ish thing that had flattened me, we took one more epic trip to Boulder just before Christmas Eve, which turned into something of a high-end bar crawl, and I want to share that too. So let’s make today’s essay a cornucopia of Popinations, shall we?
But the mall is not a pub!
Neither is Japango, technically, but it does have a good bar. More than one, in fact. I went to the forward bar in Japango for a cocktail and sashimi treat after shopping, to wait for rush hour (and therefore uber prices) to ease up a bit. Japango is more fusion than other sushi places in town, and more ostentatiously posh (say that five times fast). But I enjoy their bartenders’ choice cocktails very much, so if I’ve got the moola, I like to go there whenever I find myself in Boulder, to wait out the traffic.
I love me a good sushi meal. I first learned how to eat sushi at an eminent old Japanese-expat-run restaurant just off of Pearl, called Sushi Zanmai. It’s a really good place, and one of the oldest-school eateries still active and itself in a town that’s constantly in flux. I went there first with my good friend Christina, who showed me the American way of adding the wasabi and the ginger to the little dish of soy, and the Japanese way of eating the nigiri in one bite. I learned that I love a good creamy salmon raw, and do not like the little cooked omelette kind. And how delicious unagi is. Much later in my sushi experience, I’d learn that my favorite last bite is masago with a quail egg—a sensual gustatory experience worthy of multisensory poetics like that found in Like Water For Chocolate.
But Christina and I would go out weekly to Zanmai, because I was directing and she was stage-managing a little indie kids’ show called Four By Seuss, a dramatization I made of four Dr. Seuss classics and done movement-theatre style. She and I were in charge of everything except for performing (and actually I ended up performing pretty often when one of my actors would cease showing up), and so at the end of each night of Seuss, we’d gather up our ticket sales and go to Sushi Zanmai to organize the next weekend’s endeavors. From Seuss to sushi. (Seuss-shi??? Omg I love it…)
But Zanmai is not Japango!
Japango, unlike the down to earth authenticity of Zanmai, is way slick, hip-lit and posh decorated; its food and especially craft cocktails strange combinations of various ethnicities’ traditions mashed up with a tragic level of modern trendiness. It’s a lot of fun (not unlike Jing, actually, but less corporate-flavored, if that makes sense). My cocktail that evening was a delicious elixir that included chartreuse along with an almost floral bourbon, garnished with a snapdragon or mum bloom. Were the flowers okay to consume? Well I didn’t eat them, so. But I thought mums were poisonous? Anyway.
The next trip started as a casual meeting for our engagement with one of my partner’s work friends and his spouse, an upper-class pair that have lived in Boulder since way back in the day but not quite as far back as us. We began at Corner Bar, as that’s where he’d met with my dad to discuss my hand in marriage, but then proceeded to Oak. I haven’t written exclusively about Oak yet but I did mention it I think at one point when I was there on my way home, as I often have to do when I need to wait for the uber to be less than two hours long and $100 wide, like with Japango as mentioned above. I’ll write about Oak more later. Maybe. But not here. Here, I want to discuss two other high-end bars that we ambled our way to next.
This is how the monied bar-hop? Cool.
Our friend kept calling it Aspen 316 but the sign said Steakhouse no.316 so I dunno which it is (but no research on my Popinations, remember?). What I do know is that it used to be an Irish pub called Conor O’Neill’s, where my ex-husband used to bartend and we co-hosted a weekly trivia night that we designed ourselves. That was a cool place: its blue facade was packed up and shipped to Boulder from Dublin, where it had been an actual pub there too. So it’s like: they broke down and packed up a real Irish pub from Ireland and Boulder erected it right where an older pub called The James used to be.
We waited for just a few minutes for a place at the bar (a really pretty bar, too) and then ordered a couple drams as we decided what snacks to nibble. My partner began to chat with one Joe, the saint of construction men, who was sitting beside us and, on hearing our happy news, bought us a round of some of the poshest and best tasting whiskey I’ve ever imbibed. What was it called, again? Stagg something?
And here we are yet again: if you ever want to talk with me about the income inequity of those of us who’ve attempted to make a living in academia vs. this lovely man who builds all our environments for us, please ask me about Joe. And about myself. And trade school. Or go read my memoir. But really, once we paid attention, we hadn’t spent any more money than any local lower-end place, not really. We’ve been noticing this lately, my partner and I: we go out someplace fancy and then are consistently surprised when we get the check and it’s not a huge difference between it and even our near-daily place across the street.
Moxy My Socks Off
I’ve been enjoying our staycation habit, which is really something more akin to not wanting to drive home after many drinks at night with traffic and insanity on Highway 36 being that irascible. So, this is why hotel Moxy was out next bar. And how cool it was! From Pearl Street, it was only a short walk up The Hill (which has changed so much since I went to school up there), damaging my precarious health. I’d been sick with a flu-ish thing for a few days, as I’ve mentioned before, and felt my lungs filling with fluid a bit on that very short walk. But it was nothing a local craft beer couldn’t fix.
Moxy was pretty dead, which makes sense, as it’s a brand new hotel built almost on campus. So, what with it being so close to the holidays, the students aren’t there in nearly as many numbers, nor are their families coming out to visit them and thereby staying there, which is why I assume they demolished an entire city block to build the thing. But it was really nice inside, with the huge lounge area up a small dais from the bar being a gorgeous, art-laden, comfortable place that I can envision hanging out in even if I weren’t staying there.
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Thus is the kaleidoscope of holiday meanderings and appreciatings (and Popinatings) in my world as of very recently. And the take-away is, besides that I very much like exploring new places and spending time with My Person, it’s that marveling about high-end stuff that keeps coming back to kick my impostor syndrome in the nuts.
Going out posh isn’t really that much more than a non-posh place. What with happy hour and other stuff, fiancé and I were amazed at the similar tabs we’d been served at these ostensibly fancy places, and marveled that we’d easily have spent that same amount on our ‘local,’ for a long lunch. It’s just what you pay these days when you go out at all. Which is kind of fine, really. I guess. As long as the service is good, which is another story (at least at Corner Bar, it’s become near-glacial). But yeah.