ONEFORTHEROAD

DAN the BarMan

The Journey of 1,000 Bars Began With a Single Sip

    "You put a good bartender in a Place, and they will make it a really great place. The bartender, I would say 80 percent of the time, is what makes a good bar. The true pros that know what they are doing, and they will treat you great," says Dan Freeman, a retired designer for insurance company systems.This is the sage advice from a man who now could be considered by many to be a top-qualified, self-taught expert on what makes the heart of a bar beat. No, Freeman is not a bartender or owner. He has not spent his life devoted to the art of being a sommelier or even a critic. Freeman simply could not turn away from a dare. Visiting 1,000 bars in one year was the challenge, and Freeman not only completed the task, but he gleaned a fair amount of valuable knowledge along the road.

Bars and Blogs
    When Dan Freeman sat down at Big Mike's in Pelham, N.Y., on New Year's Day, 2005, it was the first bar of what would become a major news story across the country. It also was the first stop of an adventure that proved to capture the American attention span without any sort of marketing or gimmick -- a feat close to impossible in this generation. How did he do it? The Internet. It was Freeman's blog that continued to grow, and as it did, the popularity of his quest swelled."I basically kept it low key," Freeman says. "I didn't do anything to attract attention to myself." He recorded the atmosphere of each bar, the quality of the service, the drink he consumed and any particular points of interest on the front and back of a recipe card while inside each establishment. The cards, he says, were the perfect size for the blog paragraph that he would later upload. The first moment of realization of the following that had begun was never even evident until the 500 mark at The Gate bar in Brooklyn, N.Y. His Web site registered 35,000 hits that weekend alone, and the Associated Press picked up on the story. Freeman began receiving phone calls from people wanting to have a drink with him at his next bar. One man even noticed from his blog photos that he enjoyed Hawaiian shirts and sent him one in the mail. Throughout it all, however, Freeman remained true to the grassroots aspect of his quest, and the names of future bars he planned to visit never were revealed.

The Finish Line
    When December 30th dawned on 2005, Freeman set out for his last bar of the challenge: Pioneer, located on the Bowery in New York City. At the finish line with him were five or six eager film crews and hordes of happy readers from along the way."You have to realize," Freeman says to bar owners and bartenders everywhere, "that the Internet is so all-pervasive. If someone is putting out a shoddy product, it is only going to be so long before someone knows about it," he says. When asked if he had any regrets, Freeman said he had only one."I think there is an over-emphasis on moving into these fancy cocktail lounges with drinks with seven ingredients in them," he says. "I don't want to go to a place to lay down $14 for a guava jelly cocktail Martini. You are serving a cocktail in a Martini glass, but it is not a Martini. I would have liked to have done this 15 years ago. The old-time, classic bars are going away, slated for construction. Man, today it is nothing like you used to find." NCB