Brooklyn Bar Lures Drunks With Prizes

What with Pacific Standard’s North Slope location, their blog, their robot blog, and their faux-formal alternative title (Jon & John's House of Starchy Living and Temperance Den), the Fourth Avenue watering hole seems determined to become the McSweeney’s of bars. Now they’ve taken their clever eccentricity one step further with a Frequent Drinker Card Program, which gives patrons something in return for their consumption beyond inflated self-worth and unwanted pregnancies.

Each patron who joins pays $10 and gets their own membership card; for each dollar spent at the bar, the member is allotted one “yard”. Save up enough yards and cash in for such fabulous prizes as:

• All-Expenses-Paid Trip to Williamsburg. Pacific Standard will pay for a subway ride to glorious Williamsburg, a $20 bar tab at Barcade, and $50 towards dinner at the amazing Fette Sau. 1400 yards.

• BAM Membership. A year-long membership to BAM, which includes many exclusive benefits like special events and advance ticket-buying opportunities. 1500 yards.
  
• Pacific Standard Tattoo. It’s part of your stomach – now make Pacific Standard part of your skin! Pacific Standard will pay a local tattoo parlor to place a gorgeous Pacific Standard tattoo on your body. Yards TBD, but likely around 3000.

• Growler of Runoff Bucket. Some of you may know that all the beer that falls down our drain goes into a bucket in our refrigerator. What sweet nepenthe must that be, the combination of all the ethereal brews we serve? It’s our most modest “reward” at 10 yards.

Though a liver transplant is not yet on the long list of rewards, membership also features such privileges as Priority Boarding: “If Members are waiting with others to enter the bar, the bartender shall allow the Member to board the bar first, administering, if need be, physical violence upon the offending Non-Member in order to ensure that proper societal rank is maintained.” On a Friday night in Manhattan, that privilege would be worth at least ten bucks; but has it come to that on Fourth Ave in Brooklyn?

Via Zagat Buzz. Photo by Graydon Wintour.