- Kelly O
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This is not the place that serves picklebacks. This is the London Plane.
It’s Friday night at Bar Sue, and picklebacks are the going concern: That’s a shot of Old Crow chased with a shot of pickle juice. If anything can make your mouth forget a bottom-shelf shot of whiskey, straight pickle juice is it. (Which is not to say you’re necessarily going to like it: If you drink a pickleback without knowing what it is, because everyone at the bar is drinking them, you get what you deserve, like me.) It’s crowded and dark at Capitol Hill’s second “Southern bar.” (Witness, on Broadway, opened first by a nose last month; see “Southern Hospitality.”) The bartender, trussed into an old-fashioned apron with leather straps, seems a little stressed. A guy who shares the fact that he’s the grandson of the former mayor of Shiner, Texas, doesn’t get much in response—down South, he says, his noble heritage always gets him a free beer.
Bar Sue—named after Sue Kerr Hicks, Esq., a man on the wrong side of the Scopes trial and supposedly the inspiration for the song “A Boy Named Sue”—is where the ill-fated Lucky 8’s used to be, around the corner from Chop Suey. The space functions admirably as a neo-shitkicker-roadhouse…