Tuesday, June 11, 2013

An Exploration Of The Turkey's Nest

According to my Encarta 1998 CD, Turkey's Nest was already standing fully built and operational, waiting to serve its customers huge beers in styrofoam cups and overly strong margaritas in styrofoam cups, back when the first NYC settlers started venturing across the East River to Brooklyn in the 1700s. Since then the price for beers and margaritas has only risen by $1, which if you calculate for 300 some years of inflation, is pretty damn solid. 

Today, Turkey's Nest isn't in line with the current culture of Williamsburg, which means it isn't hip or expensive or new or faux dirty or dark or anything else that comes with the Williamsburg experience. It is a bar that you could walk into in any town in America. It has a lot of older drunk townies, it has a lot of younger drunk townies, it has a lot of people that aren't looking for a niche to their bar. Unless the niche they're looking for is the bar that completely and utterly doesn't give a shit about who it is attracting in through the door.

And that's why I like it so much. There is no uniformity to who and what is inside the place.  Everyone is there because it's cheap and there aren't any heirs being put on. There is also more than one TV, which helps when you want to watch sports and that sport isn't specifically a goddamn Yankees game.

Some people I know won't step foot inside Turkey's because it's a speck dirty and outdated, which to me almost makes it even more enjoyable, if that's even possible. The place just don't give a fuck, which is something more places need to embrace instead of struggling towards some utopian vision of a bar that attracts people with money and class and some other indefinable characteristics that are only a fleeting thing that you won't be able to bottle up for more than a week or month or two. You can never bottle cool for very long in a town like NYC, because it's a constantly shifting, utterly pointless thing in the first place. Turkey's Nest has the right idea of never ever changing or trying to be something it isn't. It does it and nothing else.