As if you needed any more proof that we’re mired in a recession, just check out the top posts from this week: They’re focused on good, old-fashioned drinkin’. Here’s to better times, y’all…

In the meantime, the most-read posts from the week:

1. Women of Craft Beer: A Quick List (*)
2. Paste Names Best 25 American Breweries
3. The Passenger Set to Open Tomorrow
4. D.C. Dish Hall of Fame Leaderboard: Same As It Ever Was
5. Yaku to Close and Turn into a Rock ‘n’ Roll/Sushi Concept

* A certain light-drinking Budweiser beer was, once again, the most-read item, but we’ve stopped counting it.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Take some of D.C.’s best-known cocktail and wine bartenders and you get…a good neighborhood beer bar, obviously.

Well, not quite; I have selective vision that turns pretty much all bars into beer bars. But The Passenger, which opens tonight at 5 p.m., is nay Cork nor Gibson, the wine and cocktail pedestals that the Brown brothers are known for. It’s a relaxed bar with a neighborhood drinking-room feel and some tasty beers, wines, and even cocktails if you ask nice.

The space at 1021 7th St. NW, which was formerly the bar space at the Warehouse and home to Punch Club, still has all its best parts: unfinished walls, old wood floor, and sweet wrought-iron tables. (Disclosure: I organized/bartended a non-beer event there once.) (Disclosure pt. 2: I really, really like this space.) The bar top is bigger and more comfortable, and what was once dead space in the back is being rebuilt to mimic a dining car.

Read More “First Look at The Passenger” »

Unlike what was reported over at Brand X, the Passenger plans to open to the public tomorrow in the former bar/cafe space at the Warehouse Theater on Seventh Street NW, even though some of the bar will not be complete.

Co-owner Derek Brown says that most of the space will be ready and that 90 percent of the wines will be available by 5 p.m. tomorrow, when the Passenger officially opens its doors.  The most prominent opening-day omission will be the “dining-car,” a sort of replica antique train car that will occupy the back part of the space. The dining car should be available by this weekend, says Brown, who’s opening the bar with his older brother, Tom Brown, and business partner Paul Ruppert.

Read More “The Passenger Set to Open Tomorrow” »

If there’s anything that grips Y&H readers, it’s tragedy, and it doesn’t get much more tragic than the homicide of Nori Amaya, the co-owner of Coppi’s Organic on U Street. People were obviously desperate for information on the strangulation. Even our negligible little item was widely visited.

Here’s how the week shook out:

1. Nori Amaya’s Friends and Fans Express Their Grief on Her Facebook Page
2. A Certain Goddamn Budweiser Beer That People Can’t Stop Reading About
   
3. Birch & Barley Opens Today. What’s Inside? (This item is quickly entering Select 55 territory.)
   
4. Tom and Derek Brown to Channel Spirits and Iggy Pop at the Passenger
   
5. D’Acqua Shutters, Ping Pong Dim Sum Set to Open Next Month
   

Tom and Derek Brown have pour, mixed, and stirred drinks at some of the best spots in the District: Komi, Citronelle, Palena, the Gibson, Corduroy, and Cork. But when the brothers decided to open their own joint, The Passenger, they didn’t want anything as formal as their former places of employment.

“I wanted a place where I could drink wine and play Motörhead,” says Derek Brown, the younger of the two siblings who grew up in Olney. “I’ve grown in my tastes. I haven’t grown in my want for a laid-back environment.”

True to their word, the brothers Brown are building a watering hole high on quirkiness — and low on pretension. It begins with the very building in which the Passenger is housed: the former bar/cafe space at the Warehouse at 1021 7th St. NW.  The space, co-owned by Paul Ruppert (who’s also a partner in the Passenger), dates back to 1890 and once was home to Ruppert Hardware, a fixture in D.C. for nearly 100 years.

Read More “Tom and Derek Brown to Channel Spirits and Iggy Pop at the Passenger” »