Pfister Lobby Bar | Milwaukee, WI

I think it’s because hotel bars can charge more, and because of the lack of crowds or the land-locked clientele, they have to or they can.  But the service seems better, more attentive.  The assumption, perhaps, is that you’ve already dropped $200 a night on a room, so the drink you just ordered had better be cold, quick, and delicious.  And since you’re going to just sign it onto the combined bill, what’s price?  $10 is 5%.  Big deal.  So $10 a drink, maybe $20, which keeps the crowds away.  Let them have their Apple-d Bees and Olive-d Gardens.  Give me the hotel bar.

The chairs alone are probably worth it — club chairs, cosy and deep.  The Pfister’s are in the same gentile Britishy fabric that all good lobby bars seem to use.  Add a table, thick napkins and coasters, and some snacks and you wouldn’t even need the entertainment of watching the traveled world go by.  But it is there, in the lobby, the checking in, the meetings, greetings, joys, despairs, and doldrums of travel, and you get to watch from your cocktailed perch.  Maybe that’s what so nice about hotel bars — that for the time being you are not traveling and only with the juxtaposition do you realize that you’re exactly where you want to be.