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 Cuisine - Life Behind Bars Incomplete Guide to Sports Bars, Part I
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In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that I’m not usually a big fan of sports bars. In my experience (particularly in major cities) they tend to be overblown in almost every conceivable way. They’re too big, too noisy, too chaotic and almost always way too expensive. During a trip to Atlanta last spring we met friends out at a sports bar roughly the size of Turner Field only with fewer bathrooms. We proceeded to spend a relaxing evening screaming trivia answers across the table at one another surrounded by giant banks of video monitors, attended by servers in the usual skimpy pseudo-referee uniforms. How original.
Jocks owner, John Dempsey, grew up a die-hard Steelers fan in Morgantown, West Virginia. So, as you might expect there’s just a hint of the black and gold in his Bluffton bar, although it’s discretely mixed among an enormous collection of professional and collegiate pennants, posters, banners and logos. “Majority rules here,” says Dempsey. “It doesn’t matter who you’re pulling for. The team with the most fans gets the biggest screen.”
The first time I sat down in the upstairs bar at Capt. Woody’s new Bluffton location the skies opened up in Biblical fashion and Mr. Brooks declared the episode “a rain in.” No rain in on this gloriously crisp fall day. In fact, the day’s so gorgeous it’s practically a sin to sit inside a dingy bar watching football. Which is why we are here.
Rosie’s owner, Michael Pressley. Like John Dempsey, Mike and his wife, Leslie, bought the bar after nearly three nomadic decades in the hotel business in places like the Doral Country Club and the Sheraton Music City. “I've done sous chef, executive chef, food and beverage director – everything,” he says. Now Pressley puts that experience to use in his own kitchen where he cooks at least four times a week and makes just about everything – including all of his own sauces – from scratch. His habenero sauce is legendarily lethal in certain circles. I still break out in a sweat just thinking about a batch of Mike’s hot wings I tangled with more than a year ago. As I recall it was the third wing that nearly did me in. “You've gotta watch that third wing,” he says. “The third one always gets you.”
Pressley’s half-pound burgers are thought by some to be among the best in the Lowcountry. He won’t argue. “We have a very fun menu with the best burgers in town,” he writes in a recent email update. “We have 4 to 5 specials all the time.”
The moment you clear the threshold there is no doubt that this is the work of serious sports fans. The walls are lined with pennants and memorabilia representing just about every college and pro sports affiliation imaginable – some have faded into the mists of sports history. Word has it that a few big names on the PGA tour can be spotted on a regular basis, checking out the competition on one of the bar’s 20 plasma TVs.
to cheer on their teams. As we’ve previously noted here the place has a palpable Cheers vibe to it, only with a spectacular view of the river and a pet-friendly deck. It’s also brimming with semper fi, the Marine Corps motto which – come to think of it – translates to what I like to call the Regular’s Creed: Always Faithful. And the regulars are indeed faithful. World famous motorcycle daredevil Robbie Knievel is a patron. A bunch of the Luther’s staff and faithful recently road-tripped to see Knievel jump a lake at an amusement park in the wilds of South Georgia (chronicled in the Backyard Tourist by Richard Brooks and yours truly).
I’m on record as saying this is Beaufort’s living room and I’ll stand by that – except when there’s a game on. Then it’s more like a big den with bartenders. The adjacent restaurant is one of Beaufort’s long time favorites for fine dining, and the room reflects that. The actual bar is a beautiful piece of antique art deco wood owner Tommy Winburn found on E-bay (ask him to tell the story). There’s not a lot of bar crap here – nothing in the way of the usual sports bar trappings. This is a class joint except of course when there’s a partisan crowd watching their team take the gas (cough-Gamecocks at Kentucky – cough!). In situations like this some of Beaufort’s finest, most upstanding and well-behaved citizens have been known to scream epithets of such a fowl nature as to cause extreme unease among tourists in horse-drawn carriages for several blocks around.Site Designed and Maintained by Vision Technology Management
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Site Designed and Maintained by Vision Technology Management
Site Designed and Maintained by Vision Technology Management