Photos by Angie Hargot

The Polar Bar

The cool thing about Polar Bar is not the décor. Or the patrons. Or the drinks. It is, actually, all of those things. Just not as an aspiring Beveragist might think.

Especially, it’s the service. With happy hour half price drinks from 4 to 7 p.m., frozen frosty drinks to cool you down, about two dozen bottled beers and enough mixed drink options to satisfy even a professional drinker, it’s often hard to drag the regulars out. The best part? They're always served up with like, zero attitude,

On the corner of Lincoln Road and Michigan Avenue, Polar Bar happens to have one of the best vantage points on South Beach to sit outside and enjoy a cool breeze. And people watch. And let people watch you.

But even when it’s nice out, everyone crams around the sliver of a bar. There’s an entire adjacent room with tables in it, but wedging in between a giggling girl and guy at the bar is so much more, well, South Beach. There are worse places to be than between a glistening porn star and a snarky tattoo artist.

And yes, she is really hot. And the porn star is too.

A couple of drinks down, a professional body piercer ashes his cigarette into an empty lowball glass over which he has expertly stretched a bar napkin, forming a tight little drum. In the center, a coin teeters precariously on a tiny strip of napkin as the ash burns through.

“Whoever’s ash makes it fall, takes a shot,” he explains.

“You mean buys the shots.”

“No, I mean has to drink another shot,” he says, ever-so-slightly swaying.

Two more Blue Moons and three more of bartender Elmira’s shots and its obvious exactly what he was talking about. She pours the brightly-colored concoctions into glasses along the bar. Illuminated, they gleam like a brand new box of crayons, except one has a shot glass at the bottom.

“What’s in it?”

She shrugs.

Right in the thick of a debate with a well-known attorney, a tourist from can’t-remember-where asks what there is to do on South Beach on a weeknight.

“You’re doing it.”

“Jäger,” is all he manages to get out.

So that was the end of that Wednesday. Only one question remained.

“Anyone got a couch to crash on?”

comments@theleadmiamibeach.com