Alas, poor Sammy's

I am an unashamed enthusiast for the 'dive' bar rather than the fancy-schmancy yuppy type of bar.

However, in Beijing the great majority of bars fall at the divier end of the spectrum, so one's parameters are re-set somewhat. It is strangely impressive - shocking, perhaps terrifying, but nonetheless impressive - when, against this pervasive background of diviness, one finds a bar that strikes one as a real dive.

One such was the The Sunset Grill. An unpromising name; but as I have already observed in passing (on the sadly neglected Great Bar Names thread), everybody referred to it by the name of its cheery proprietor - Sammy's. A much better name.

If you were looking for an equivalent of Moe's Tavern in Beijing, this was it. Indeed, it was several levels sleazier even than Moe's. It was a huge, bare spare space (an upstairs mezzanine giving it an extremely high ceiling), garishly lit, and with almost no decoration - all plain yellow walls and formica surfaces. The only decorative touch, really, was that the back of the bar was festooned with hand-written notices bearing ribald or downright uncouth 'bon mots'. And there were almost invariably a few tables of slightly sinister-looking individuals of some exotic nationality discussing some nefarious business deal or other. I almost wondered if they had set days for certain countries: Friday, Russian; Saturday, Serbian; Sunday, Liberian....

It offered some large-screen TVs and a satellite feed; so, for a while at the beginning of this year, The Chairman and I were considering it as a new option for watching English Premier League football. Unfortunately, Sammy was none too clear how the remote controls worked (and it was probably a pirated feed anyway, and hence likely to be disrupted by frequent re-encryption), so it was always a bit of a lottery as to whether you'd be able to watch the game you wanted or not. I remember there was one occasion where the best sport option available appeared to be South African schoolboy rugby, and another when the only football match we could get was from the Scottish 1st Division!! It's amazing what gets broadcast on satellite these days - anything but what you actually want to see.

However, the booze was very cheap. Very, very cheap. Suspiciously cheap. And almost certainly poisonously fake. But what the hey, it's still booze. The Choirboy and I were once foolhardy enough to try out Sammy's Long Island Iced Tea - priced at a very tempting 35 or 40 kuai and served in a knickerbocker glory glass! - and struggled to finish it, so strong (and toxic) was the mixture. Sammy then comped us another one, and we knew the evening - and perhaps the next few days as well - had got away from us.

The other major recommendation of the place, beyond its single-minded dedication to getting people falling-down drunk as cheaply as possible, was the geniality of host Sammy. He was so eager to build up his custom that he would generally comp you one in every two or three drinks if you were any kind of a 'regular'; and you were a 'regular' on your second visit. I found this heartiness just a bit overdone, to be frank; and - believe it or not! - I didn't always want the extra drinks (particularly if it was one of those liver-pulverising cocktails). However, Sammy's English was fairly limited, so I was perhaps missing out on much of his charm; the Man In Black, a big fan of the place, assured me that in Chinese Sammy showed himself to be a remarkable character, even something of a polymath, able to hold forth on almost any topic you cared to mention.

To be honest, it was never likely to become a regular haunt of mine. The draft beer wasn't much good; the sports coverage was unreliable; they'd use a DJ late night to pump up the 'atmosphere' (i.e. make it too noisy to have a conversation); and some of the clientele really were just a little bit too scary. Nevertheless, it filled the niche for bare-bones grunge that had been left vacant since the demise of the original Bus Bar a couple of years back; it was a useful option to have available, a 'safe haven' where you could be absolutely sure you'd never run into any of the tiresome cocktail bar crowd.

So, I rather miss it now it's gone. It got closed down just before the Olympics. There were rumours of illegal activities having been uncovered on the premises (drug-dealing and such); but then, that sort of thing goes on, to a greater or lesser extent, in most bars; I don't know that it was any more blatant there, and I doubt if Sammy was personally involved. One suspected that this was just another part of the great pre-Olympic crackdown: he wasn't that far away from the Workers' Stadium, and this was not the sort of place that the authorities would want any tourists to see! Upmarket brothel Maggie's was similarly a victim of this moral purge of the city (and was similarly beset by rumours of possibly terminal trouble with the cops, which seem to have proved unfounded). Maggie's has finally reopened again; I wonder if Sammy's will ever be back.