New Bar: Weather Up, in Prospect Heights

Last night I drank at Weather Up, the new unmarked Sasha Petraske bar (opened in February) on 589 Vanderbilt Ave, from the people who brought you The Box, Milk and Honey, and Stanton Social. If it were wise to buy real estate anywhere (real estate-buying calculus being the ever simple and iron-clad math that it is), buy now in Prospect Heights. New stuff growing everywhere, and the brownstones are pretty.

Weather Up: The bartender--Veronica Lodge meets Bettie Page meets a tattooed lady--described it as a "speakeasy meets English pub." It also looks like a romantic and old-fashioned subway station, with a vaulted and white-tiled ceiling, lit low with candles and dim, artsy, boxy onyx light fixtures, burnished brass bar, brick walls, and marble table-tops. Easily the most beautiful place on Vanderbilt.

The focus is on their seven cocktails, each $11, each of which took the bartender a thousand (1,000) hours to make. No, that's an exaggeration, but they probably took at least six minutes to make, which is a ridiculously long time, considering how packed it gets late-night and on the weekends. I was there pretty early, from 7:30 to 9pm, and there were only about five other people there the whole time--fine. But after she spent about 12 minutes lovingly making drinks for a couple sitting next to me, and they asked her what she does when the place is packed, she proudly said, "I take just as long." And the couple immediately murmured something like, Oh yeah, great great, never compromise, mmm these are delicious, MMM. Which was an appropriate knee-jerk reaction at the time, a calm, quiet Wednesday evening, enjoying watching an attractive bartender measure out drams (drams?) of fancy booze, foreign cherries, splashes of bitters, and mystery liquids from a tray of gorgeous glass containers, then pour it all over hand-cracked hunks of ice (that she had, moments ago, cracked in her hand with a rod) and stir it with a fancy steel stick. But it's hard to imagine the appeal when it's crowded.

Oh well. My Old Fashioned--bourbon, bitters, and orange--came with an ostrich-egg-sized hunk of ice draped with a fresh-peeled orange rind and its own metal stick with a circle at the end of it (for stirring? pushing things around?) and it was wonderful. And my second drink was comped (it was wine). Great! The music was cool, and gravelly, jazzy--appropriate for relaxed and swanky. Really just extremely beautiful. And in the summer there's a backyard garden, and cheese and oysters. Good job, Prospect Heights. Pretty soon no one will recognize you, hooray!