Old school Irani with a side of beer

Bar Name - Churchgate Bar and Restaurant

Price of Beer - Rs. 120 for LP

Location – Churchgate near KC College

Size of the Bar – Small

Place Availability – Easy to get a table but this place looks like it could get quickly packed 

Ambience – Quiet and open air. If the weather is nice this place is awesome!

Unique Plus Point – Ridiculously cheap pitchers and proper nice Parsi food

Rating – 4 out of 5 Beers

Old wooden benches and tables, high ceilings with long, low fans, Parsi food and exactly 3 drinks on the menu – all of them beer. That’s Churchgate Bar and Restaurant, a quaint little place located just down the road from Churchgate station near those classic acronyms of education KC and HR.

It’s a place that is as old school as old school can get with everything feeling like it’s straight out of the 1980’s. Thankfully the beer, whether it be from the pitchers or the bottles, is as fresh and cool as any you’ve ever had. And probably the cheapest as well with a bottle of LP burning just a 120 rupee sized hole in your pocket. The food is also great and not unreasonably priced and the ancient Irani feel just makes you want to chill here for hours at a stretch. As such it is my solemn belief that an evening here will leave you feeling better about life, the universe and everything really. Except that is, when you go to the washroom to take a leak. That’s when things go downhill…

It’s indescribable really but I’m going to try, because in all my years of haunting this city’s cheap bars I have never once seen a washroom this odd. Sure some RGV movies have shots of places like these but I assumed that those were sets created by guys who wanted to create a metaphor for the chronic decay of society. I didn’t know they were real.

It’s not the most unhygienic washroom, in that it seems like they clean it, but getting there is an adventure in and of itself. Actually the closest comparison I could find for this washroom is the island from Lost.

Why is the bathroom at Churchgate Bar like the island from Lost:

• First, you walk by the kitchen and then take a turn into what looks like a small dark alley (A proper street inside a restaurant…looooosssssttttt)
• Then you turn and find that this lane is flooded with water. (It isn’t even raining outside and it isn’t washroom overflow…loooooossstttt)
• Then you walk further down this lane and find three different types of mysterious ‘growths’ on the wall. (Dharma initiative running moss and mildew experiments?...loooosssssttttt)
• There are two washrooms. One has a regular light bulb and the other has a freaking black light. (a freaking black light… loooooossstttt)
• There is, I fuck with you not, a metal circular staircase that leads to nowhere (holy motherfucker… loooooossstttt)

To be honest with you the washroom actually adds to the awesomeness of the place and if you can withstand it you’ll never want to drink anywhere else. I highly recommend good old Churchgate to anyone with a hankering for a nice cool beer.

The Miracles of Gin

Bar - Akshay Bar

Location – Parel East. Behind the ITC Hotel and next to the Pet hospital.

Size – Medium sized joint.

Place – You’ll get a place most of the time but Saturday’s are a bit of a wait.

Ambience – Air conditioned and bright with comfortable sofas and great service.

Unique Plus Point – FREE CHEEZLINGS (I cannot emphasize how amazing this is in a world with no free chakna anywhere)

Rating – 4 out of 5 Beers

Yes my drink is Gin. I mix it with soda, squeeze some lime in it and enjoy it for the mildly alcoholic, zero hangover in the morning version of fresh lime soda that it is. You can make fun of me all you want for this over a drinking session, but come the next day you’ll be barfing and holding your head whilst I will hop over for a morning stroll and maybe grab a donut.

Gin is also inexplicably cheap, so cheap in fact that it’s almost always the cheapest drink on the menu and this is always a fantastic thing. You can get a Gin quarter for, at times, 50 bucks cheaper than a Royal Stag and gin tastes a boat load better than any of the cheaper whiskeys. Also you can drink a boat load of it before your tongue starts to taste like fart. Now one of the premier places to have Gin is Akshay Bar, a cozy little spot I discovered thanks to Varun J.

It’s premier because it really looks like a spot that should be way more expensive than it actually is and has service and comfortable sofas the likes of which I’m not even accustomed to at home. And it’s the gin hub because a quarter costs Rs.150. Yes, a quarter of gin in an air conditioned place with free chakna and great service and an LCD costs 40 bucks more than it would cost you in a wine shop.

When I first heard this I did a backflip. I didn’t even know I could do a backflip and as such I credit Akshay as a place that also gives you superpowers that you were previously unaware of. Upon arrival I was greeted by a most friendly German Shepard (a dog, not an actual German sheep herder of some sort) and the sort of service usually associated with four figure bills.

This place however, is ridiculously light on the pocket for the sort of spot that it is. For example, a beer will set you back 170 and a Royal Stag will cut about 210 out of your wallet. And the crowd is pretty decent as well, I mean once in a while you’ll find a group of advertisers in there, but that’s about as bad as the situation gets. Not too sure about bringing a girl in though but I’ve seen more than a few agency chicks spending their Friday night at this fine establishment.

All in all a hell of a place and a great spot to knock down some cheap booze.

No Bandra, you didn’t beat me!

Bar – Yacht

Location – Hill Road, Bandra

Size – Medium sized and quite a few tables.

Place – You may have to wait a bit on a Saturday night.

Ambience – Stay away from the AC section and you’ll like this place just fine.

Unique Plus Point – The bar serves London Pilsner. God Bless!

Rating – 3 out of 5 Beers.

I don’t have much against Bandra, not on most days or in most moods. But when it’s Saturday night and I’m in the mood for a cheap beer, I fucking hate the place. In fact I’m starting to feel like Bandra has it out for me and it’s trying to slowly destroy me. This has been going on ever since I started turning people towards Colaba and its many alcoholic wonders. This, it seems has offended Bandra and caused it a great deal of sorrow and pain, not to mention a small dent in its business. And much like the ex who kicked you in the balls, Bandra is hitting me where it hurts, my drinking.

Ever since I shifted my primary drinking focus to the south, getting a drink in Bandra, on the few occasions that I was dragged there, had become almost impossible and that is no exaggeration, it is absolute fact. I once haunted Bandra and spent a lot of time at its respectable establishments, but then it seemed like they all just changed on me. Here’s a list of bars that I once frequented but now can’t even stand the sight of.

Janata – It’s always packed when I go in there and I can almost never get a table.

Temptations - Seems to get louder every time and the last time I walked in they were happily playing Bieber.

Toto’s – Call me weird but I just dislike having 4 billion people within 2 inches of me.

MTC - Well fuck 200 bucks for a beer.

I figured that drinking in Bandra was all but done for me, but then one day as we drove aimlessly in that dark demonic excuse for a western suburb, we found Yacht. We all believed at first that it was a mirage as we saw a giant Budweiser sign glittering in the distance. But as we got close, conveniently found parking and walked right in to find tables aplenty, we realized that it was real.

It was a bar in Bandra where there were tables, actual tables with chairs that weren’t just for show. You could actually sit your ass down on one of these “tables” and people wouldn’t look at you like you were some kind of alien. There was beer, glorious, cold beer for under a hundred bucks. And there wasn’t a single son of a bitch in there with a fucking guitar. It was a small piece of heaven, encased in an overly holy, constantly traffucked, bakery loving, Globus shopping hellhole. And thank god for it.

Sure it’s kinda dingy, but if you sit in the normal section, which is the one with tube lights and classic ‘baakdaa’ seating then you’re in for a typical cheap bar experience, better than most I reckon. However, if you should walk into the section with red lights and sofa seats, then I’m afraid you’re life and soul are forfeit. Just stay away from the red, sit yourself down on one of those white tables and order yourself some London Pilsner (Yes! They serve glorious LP). If you’re a smoker, don’t get up because you can smoke all you like and the waiter will bring you some, just to add to the convenience. And at the end of the night when you’re significantly high on any beer or hard liquor you’ve chosen to hammer down in copious quantities, the bill won’t even bother the loose change you have on you.

And for all those reasons and a couple more, Yacht is one of my all time favourite bars. Now if only I could find a forklift big enough to pick the place up and bring it to Wadala…