Our required Tribune and Sun-Times and Reader reading aside, we are pretty huge fans of the New York Times. We have many a fond memory of sitting in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, pen in hand, attempting to fill in as much as we could of the crossword puzzle (our mother would always fill in the 85% we’d left blank within, oh, four minutes of us wandering away in frustration). We never actually read the news, of course, but we love love loved the dining, style, and metro sections, with their peeks into the impossibly glamorous lives of the New York elite.
Ahem. New York Elite indeed. We were struck mightily by the special T magazine Travel issue, which highlighted — could it be? — Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap (1172 E. 55th St., 773 643 5516). The Times was interested because Jimmy’s, proximate as it is to the University of Chicago, attracts a slightly more intellectual crowd than your average dive bar, with patrons ranging from the just-turned-21 college juniors, to the ghost of Saul Bellow.
As for the accompanying photo slide show of the Hyde Park haunt’s regulars, we half-expected to see it populated entirely by our former coworkers at the Seminar Co-op. That wasn’t to be, but we’re pleased (if a little miffed, in the way one is miffed when a wonderful secret goes public) that Jimmy’s is getting its due.
A Heady Brew [New York Times]
[Photo: the outside of Jimmy’s, via Kylio’s Flickr]
