Dave Alpert: I Know Where You’re Going with That

In Boston, last call is at 1:45am.  By 2:00am you are being thrown out of the bar and  onto the curb.  That’s life in this big city.  And then, the question on everyone’s mind is: now what?  Strangely, for a city of its size, Boston offers very few after hours venues–especially if you aren’t into woofing down 4000 calories worth of greasy Chinese food at 3:30am.  One noteworthy beacon of light is… IHOP (The International House of Pancakes).

On almost any night of the week at 2am, the IHOP located on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton, MA becomes a real ingathering of the exiles.  Expelled from bars all around the Boston area and looking for cheap eats, they come–mostly drinking and driving–to this olympic sized restaurant on the outskirts of town.  While Boston is probably one of the most segregated cities North of the Mason-Dixon line, you wouldn’t know it from the IHOP dining room where fratboys rub elbows with Salsa dancers, club DJ’s, hipsters, alterna-kids, minorities and Boston-area townies, all co-existing in peace and harmony (with the help of a few police cruisers parked outside).

On this last Saturday night, I found myself there with my friends Jaron and Sarah.  I think it was the first time I had been there since one of the last times my former band Shake played a cambridge show–probably somewhere around 2001–and it hadn’t changed a bit.  Like almost everyone else there, we were recapping some of the highlights of the night and predicting just how sick we were all going to be after heaping eggs and syrup-drenched pancakes on top of the beer, whiskey and gin we’d just imbibed.  I also thought of the song ‘IHOP’ by one of the most under-rated bands of the last decade–Luna–fronted by Galaxy 5000’s Dean Wareham.  It is the first song of their 1997 release, Pup Tent.  Moreover, I was comforted in knowing that I was participating in a true American drinking ritual being carried out by thousands of fellow patriots across this great nation.  Long live IHOP!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 4:42 pm and is filed under City Life, Friends, Food, Drinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.