OK, on to the Gopher Bar. Jeezis, where to begin with this shithole? Walking inside, this place looks like every dank neighborhood tavern you've ever seen. It could be in Beloit, Wisconsin or Vineland, NJ or Arnold, MO. Doesn't really matter, it smells like Budweiser farts and bologna, has a bunch of ridiculous bar clutter over every square inch of the walls. You know the crap - smartass bumper stickers, photocopies of pathetic homemade attempts at political cartoons by one of the regulars (you know, like Obama and Osama totally making out or something, sonofabitch those are just a fucking riot!), shoddy sports memorabilia, partially working neon signs, a Confederate flag. Oh, that's precious, a Confederate flag. I guess these guys are just big fucking rebels, huh? You know, "stick it to the man, I'm me and if you don't like me go fuck yourself. We're a smartass bar of regular people, warts and all, that's our appeal. Get it?" Oh wait, there's another Confederate flag, and another, and a sticker of a Confederate flag, and more Confederate flag bullshit everywhere. Christ, was there a Going Out Of Business sale at the local Klan warehouse or are these people just a bunch of insecure, racist, cocksuckers?
I get the whole punk rock, screw you, don't-like-it-then-get-the-fuck-outta-here attitude. I applaud it, I encourage it, I hope my kids have that healthy skepticism of everything in their world. Lord knows we need it. If no one has the balls to be themselves and tell others to get screwed we'd be living in a zombie world where everyone is a milquetoast Tim Pawlenty. Now THAT would be terrifying and depressing at the same time. But there's a difference between proudly waving your freak flag and just being a pathetic, white, angry VICTIM trying to live out some sad little Buford T. Pusser/Walking Tall fantasy. Go ahead and put the original 1973 Walking Tall starring Joe Don Baker movie in your netflix queue, you'll thank me. These dipshits need to wake up and smell the black and brown coffee. No matter how many asshole flags you put up, your lily white asses aren't going to one day crawl out of your little hovel and emerge into a pretendo world where everyone looks like The Waltons.
Oh, did I mention there's also a sign that says they SUPPORT THE TROOPS? Well fuck, they support the troops fer chrissakes! Damn straight. They can't be assholes anymore, can they? I salute you, Gopher Bar! Why don't you have a fundraiser concert for the troops and maybe Rand Paul while you're at it. Hire these guys:
Seriously, what the fuck is up with people like Rand Paul and the Ayn Randroids? Isn't Ayn Rand just an earlier version of the Tony Robbins rah-rah bullshit snake oil? After age 17, do real people take that retardo-pseudo-intellectual bullshit seriously? I refuse to believe they do. I can't accept that kind of delusion seriously exists in otherwise intelligent humans. Ayn Rand wanted to sell poor writing to gullible, pimply kids. It worked, she made a fortune, now grow the fuck up and get out of Hobbitland and into the real world, dumbass.
Anyway, walking in a little late I notice two of the WTF tines have cozied up to the bar with either a lonely regular or just some dude who wandered in on his way to Arkansas. The guy actually seems pretty cool, he kinda looks like Harry Crews, except he's not one of the greatest goddamned fiction writers in American history, he's a food carney here for Grand Ol Days this weekend. Go ahead, reserve a copy of Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews at the library, you'll thank me. God bless this food carney. He's from Oklahoma by way of Beaumont Texas and claims to make some damn fine gyros with tanzeeky sauce. What kind of damn life has he had to end up traveling the country in an RV selling gyro meat and tanzeeky sauce? I wish I had the balls to find out and live that kind of adventure. I've never had balls for anything. Complete coward, risk averse. I remember one summer in college I was hanging out with some other dipshits who wanted to get together and do some acid. I was all like "fuck yes! that will be awesome!" Then they went out and got it, I completely pussied out and never showed up to the party and was too mortified to ever speak to them again. I'd heard all those stories about people doing mushrooms or blotter and never coming back from their trip. They ended up being drooling idiots stuck in a series of medical experiments or ending up on hobo fight videos. No sir, not me! I knew I was destined for that mid-level managerial job with a deee-lux office cube out in the middle of nowhere suburbia. Mmm, success never smelled better. Hold on while I impale my eyeballs with these pencils, kay?
So in addition to all the adorable surroundings and the three customers in the bar, for some reason there's a table full of Chinese takeout. Apparently this is a buffet of some sort or something? I'm not really sure and I didn't have the balls (naturally) to ask the bartender why there was a table of open Chinese takeout in the middle of this place supposedly known for the best Coney Island dogs in town? I'm so fucking confused by this place, I just want to order a Coney dog and beer to get my mind right.
I ordered the Coney dog with the works. That means you get shredded cheese in addition the regular (toasted bun, hot dog, sauce, and onions). I don't know if all Coney dogs are like this, I have no experience in this fine ouvre, but this is a tiny little dog. Like grocery store, standard issue size dog. What the hell? Oh well, let's eat. So what can I say, this was really disappointing. I couldn't detect any flavor in the Coney sauce, maybe a little ketchup and sawdust, that's about it. Three bites and it's gone. This is it? What the fuck is going on? I could have my 4-year-old create a better hot dog than this crap. Toast a bun, boil a hot dog, a little sauce, a little frozen shredded cheese and some sprinkles of onion shards. Deeply underwhelming. I give this sad little hell-hole zero tines.
Now get the funk out!
Drew:
Now get the funk out!
Drew:
I played golf with Curtis at Columbia. We finished right around noon and I was hungry. Right across the street was Chimborazo, the Ecuadorian place these assholes reviewed without me a couple months ago (see below). They all loved it, so I wanted to give it a try. This is my review of Chimborazo (‘cause Gopher Bar isn't worth reviewing…don’t go there).
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a food service snob. I’ve worked in the industry before, so I feel I can make a somewhat valid claim. Nothing drives me more insane than waitstaff, who feel like they are doing you a favor by waiting on you. The humble, subservient demeanor necessary to be a good server is almost completely gone in America. I don’t know where it went. Does it have something to do with the increasingly fragile American ego, and our expanding feelings of economic entitlement? I don't know, but it sucks donkey balls.
The evolution of the tip is the emblematic of this change. The concept of a tip as an “extra” financial incentive to be a good server is long gone. It is now expected and often added to bills automatically. In a brilliant coup for restaurant and bar owners everywhere, they successfully convinced their employees to get mad at customers, not them, if their pay is not sufficient. It's an employer's wet dream! Not only do they NOT have to deal with labor unions, if their employees are upset, they blame someone else! Along with the loss of gratuity's meaning, the decline of good service has slid along with it.
My angry-nostalgic-old-guy digression above is to point out that gratitude for your patronage DOES still exist in the Twin Cities. This was the startling case at Chimborazo. From the moment I darkened the entryway of cute and clean restaurant, to my exiting the door an hour later, I felt as though the establishment was truly appreciative that I was there. My server was attentive, helpful, and genuinely happy to be serving me. I didn't feel like I was being pressured to turn the table over for him. I didn't feel like if I didn't order enough, I would get a hidden eye roll. And, by the way, the food was great! The churrasco was flavorful as hell, and the empanada was crisp and delicious.
Folks, don’t give your money to business owners or their staffs who don’t value your hard-earned money. Who cares how cool, trendy, or popular a place is? With each dollar you spend you are making a vote for what kind of people you support, and what kind of service you receive. I say, vote for Chimborazo!
I recommend Chimborzao for fat-fingered Wall Street traders, and anyone that hasn't used the terms "snowpocalypse" or "snowmageddon" in the last 8 months. (4 tines)
I recommend Chimborzao for fat-fingered Wall Street traders, and anyone that hasn't used the terms "snowpocalypse" or "snowmageddon" in the last 8 months. (4 tines)
Trick:
If you love you country, then you won’t want to eat at the Gopher Bar. Sure, they display a “We Support Our Troops” sign on the side of their building for all the world to see, but if you actually go inside, you quickly find that the guys running the joint are America haters and traitors and, apparently, too dim-witted to realize it. To start with, there are the caricatures of President Obama as a terrorist, one poster even melding his famous campaign poster with an image of Osama bin Laden. Never mind that this execrable smear is directed against the commander in chief of the troops the bar’s owners claim to support. And let’s also forget that in Afghanistan, the very place where bin Laden planned the 9/11 attacks, President Obama has doubled our troop commitment and that in Pakistan, the very place where bin Laden is almost certainly hiding today, President Obama has tripled the number of drone attacks. Facts don’t matter. If you are uncomfortable with Obama’s domestic agenda—a discomfort which in some measure I share—then let’s just characterize him as a murderous sociopath. (It also makes it easier if you’re uncomfortable with his skin color. But more on the race thing below.)
There are also the snarky little bumper stickers comparing the present-day United States to the U.S.S.R. (replacing the stars of the U.S. flag with a hammer and sickle is a particularly affecting flourish). Do these reflect real political views, or are they merely an idiot’s hyperbole? Either way, it’s odd that the bar owners see no incongruity between them and their professed support of our troops. Would a person presenting himself as an American patriot really support an army that is fighting in defense of a communist tyranny?
Then there are the Confederate battle flags. When you first walk in, you see one or two and figure that it is just your standard honky-tonk kitsch. But as you scan your surroundings, you realize that they’re everywhere. There are big ones and small ones. Some are emblazoned on souvenirs; others adorn bumper stickers. One accompanies a “League of the South” emblem (whatever the hell that is); another accompanies a banner proclaiming “Southern pride.” But the real humdingers are the ones on the walls, which are as large as blankets and bright as bunting. There is even one colored in the maroon and gold, a tip of the hat to the bar’s namesake.
So let me get this right: the same business that is so ostentatious about standing up for America goes out of its way to glorify an armed rebellion against a duly elected American government and the one period in the our history when the Union was truly in jeopardy? It doesn’t make much sense, does it? Worse still, let’s remember what that rebellion was really all about: slavery.
Wait a minute, you say. Wasn’t slavery kind of an afterthought of the Civil War? Wasn’t the Confederacy really fighting against overweening government and in defense of such good old American value as states’ rights and individual liberty? Don’t believe it. This is one of the great historical frauds perpetrated on the American people, perhaps a useful one as the country was trying to reconcile in the aftermath of the war but one that it’s long past time to dispel. Beyond the gloss of lofty rhetoric, the Confederacy was, at its core, fighting to preserve slavery (somehow, given their anti-Obama vitriol, I think the Gopher Bar’s owners instinctively know this). To the extent that the fight was about states’ or individual rights, it was about the right to buy, sell, own, and transport slaves.
But don’t take my word for it (I’m just a friggin’ blogger after all). Just take the word of the Confederacy’s own leaders. It’s all right there in their Declarations of Causes of Secession, which, to mirror the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the seceding states issued as public justifications of their break. Let’s start with excerpts from South Carolina’s, since that was the first and served as a model for others. Among the many nuggets:
- The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals.
These “fugitives” are runaway slaves, of course. The “service or labor claimed” from them is invoked as blithely as an employment contract, while the concept of interstate transit is used as it might be for mules, lumber, or coal.
Here are a few more of South Carolina’s complaints:
- Those States [of the North] have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property [of holding slaves]…; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.
- A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
- This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States [of the North] by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens.
Texas being Texas, its Declaration of Causes was even plainer about the preservation of slavery and the proper place of black Americans:
- She [Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
- In all the non-slave-holding States…the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party…based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
Did you get that? Slavery is a “beneficent” system, and the doctrine of equality of all men is “debasing.” But my favorite excerpt comes from Mississippi’s declaration, whose authors, apparently sensing that it would be tough to justify slavery on moral grounds, decided to go with the melanin angle:
- Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
Wow, nature really is imperious! Anyway, you get the idea. You can find plenty more excerpts like this on your own if you have the time (Georgia’s declaration is especially fun).
So there you have it. The owners of the Gopher Bar are seditionists and racists who malign the commander in chief during a time of war and unwittingly promote communist dictatorship. But hey, don’t worry, they have a “We Support Our Troops” sign.
And oh yeah, in case you willing to overlook all these faults for the sake of a good Coney dog, don’t bother. The Gopher Bar’s Coneys are moderately tasty (the toasted buns are a nice touch), but not much better than the hot dogs any bachelor could cook up at home and not nearly as good as the Schweigerts you’ll get a Twins game. If you have a hankering for a good dog and can’t get to a game (or into my pants), go to the Wienery.
Score: 0 tines
Vin:
The Gopher Bar is like the driver of a conversion van with a busty leather-clad vixen carrying an axe and riding a dragon airbrushed on the side. At first you think this person is going to be quirky and fun, kind of like a relative who played too much D+D. Then you see their moustache and hear them talk and watch them a little before realizing they are annoying and creepy. Soon you grab your family and flee before being made into a lampshade or a hot dog.
I love dive bars and anyplace that has a sign that reads “Hey! How about an ice cold bottle of shut the fuck up?” instantly starts earning points with me. I thought that the Gopher Bar might be a blast as a result. The Gopher Bar is well known for their Coney Dogs. I ordered one without cheese to better taste what makes this different from a chili dog. Evidently, a Coney Dog doesn’t have beans in their sauce. It arrived before me in an instant and it was a disappointment on many levels. The hot dog was plain, the sauce tasteless, and the onions bland. About the only thing interesting and warm was the bun because it was toasted and buttered. Overall, there was more taste in my Grain Belt than the food.
Then I started to look around the place. It is entertaining on first glance. Their allegiance to the Gopher Hockey Team and the Confederate Flag (!) is legion. Um, they only take cash. The collection of offensive bumper stickers is impressive, but then you start talking to the folks who work there and connect the dots. They really mean it. They are a bunch of Confederate, anti-immigrant, large testiciled, hockey playing, Obama-hating, creditless, jockstrap wearing bigots. The thing is, they are not even funny. Character and attitude is one thing, but this place is a shithole staffed by assholes. Avoid it. -Vin
½ tine
I love dive bars and anyplace that has a sign that reads “Hey! How about an ice cold bottle of shut the fuck up?” instantly starts earning points with me. I thought that the Gopher Bar might be a blast as a result. The Gopher Bar is well known for their Coney Dogs. I ordered one without cheese to better taste what makes this different from a chili dog. Evidently, a Coney Dog doesn’t have beans in their sauce. It arrived before me in an instant and it was a disappointment on many levels. The hot dog was plain, the sauce tasteless, and the onions bland. About the only thing interesting and warm was the bun because it was toasted and buttered. Overall, there was more taste in my Grain Belt than the food.
Then I started to look around the place. It is entertaining on first glance. Their allegiance to the Gopher Hockey Team and the Confederate Flag (!) is legion. Um, they only take cash. The collection of offensive bumper stickers is impressive, but then you start talking to the folks who work there and connect the dots. They really mean it. They are a bunch of Confederate, anti-immigrant, large testiciled, hockey playing, Obama-hating, creditless, jockstrap wearing bigots. The thing is, they are not even funny. Character and attitude is one thing, but this place is a shithole staffed by assholes. Avoid it. -Vin
½ tine
