Finding a Speakeasy in Yangon
Finding a Speakeasy in Yangon
In Yangon, drinking mostly goes down in two very different camps. There are streetside “beer stations” serving cheap mugs of Myanmar Beer with plates of roasted nuts, and then there are hotel happy hours in bars named after Rudyard Kipling, with cocktails bearing cutesy names such as “Mandalay Sour.” Nothing against Myanmar Beer (which, compared with country-themed brews in the region tastes a little better than Cambodia’s Angkor but is not up there with Beer Laos), and nothing against hotel happy hours (which can offer a respite from the April heat), but both can get a little old.
Enter Blind Tiger. Actually, enter a number of upmarket bars in the past year that aren’t as cool as Blind Tiger, for the sole reason that they aren’t located in an apartment with soundproof walls. Marketing itself as Yangon’s first speakeasy, Blind Tiger (the name, like blind pig, used to be code for a bar during prohibition in the US), is on the first floor of an unremarkable building near the downtown area. In typical speakeasy fashion, there are no signs on the outside, with only a painted tiger paw on the wall just within the entrance’s gate. I’d been trying to go to the bar for weeks, but there was one problem. I kept showing up when it was closed. It strictly shuts at around 10pm, letting no one in through its locked gate. Who wants to go to a speakeasy before 10?
But I finally made it one night around sunset. We walked up the building and went to the back of the first floor, led by a security guard. He knocked on the door and a slat opened, where I half-expected to be asked the secret password. After a moment, the waters parted and we were in. When I was a kid, the scene that stuck with me most from the C.S. Lewis novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was when the protagonist passes through the drab dresser and enters another world. Yeah, you and 10,000 other kids buddy. I know. But I can think of no other way to describe how it felt to cross the threshold from sultry apartment block hallway in Yangon, with the humming of air conditioning units as the only sounds, to an enormous room with a long bar, seats upholstered in black and red leather, and speakers playing period music from the 1930s. You know it’s music from the 1930s when one of the song lyrics goes something like this: “The dumber they come, the better I like’em, cause the dumb ones know how to make lovvvvve!” Prohibition must have driven people a little insane.
The speakeasy plays up the speakeasy vibe. In the bathroom stalls, miniature speakers give little lessons about prohibition. The room is dimly lit and slightly nefarious. There’s no cellphone service. But there is wi-fi, and guess what the password is? Speakeasy, of course. One thing that quickly becomes apparent is that Blind Tiger isn’t really a speakeasy. In fact, much of it comes off as depressingly legal and law-abiding. Also, there are “tapas.” Oh well. I went looking for bathtub gin Myanmar style and found a mango tango margarita for $5. But there’s nothing like Blind Tiger in Yangon, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s in Yangon, which is okay, because the city is still close by, just on the other side of the wardrobe.