Barmanac is the all-inclusive almanac to satiate your drinking and dining needs, nifty facts and navigational savvy of the Manhattan barscape.
First conceived in January 2011 in the comforting embrace of the West Village’s Otto’s, the idea to create Barmanac was haphazardly stumbled upon after Perri O., founder and Imbiber-in-Chief, downed one too many cosmos with her Prosecco-guzzling friend, Lily V. A forty-something male, sitting in a bar stool caddy corner to the duo, tapped Perri on the shoulder and told her “Sweetheart, you’re going places, I can tell. Just don’t leave Manhattan.” And then he picked up their impressive $248.36 tab. Excepts not. Because that only happens in the movies and thus, the girls were left to conquer El Tabbo armed with their own Visas and Am Exes en tote.
Contemplating the inherent irony of being told “you’re going places,” however, juxtaposed with orders to never leave the city, Perri solidified her desire to, well, “go places” without ever having to step foot onto Bedford Ave. Luckily, good ole New York, New York’s liquor dens and gourmand temples sprinkled throughout its confines gave her no reason to swipe herself onto the L train. However, the impenetrable web of Yelp’s, Metromixes, Menupages and Zagats of the interwebz gave her more of a migraine than a mellifluous comfort and excitement in the plethora of offerings Manhattan had stowed away in its matchless lineup. (Proof: Wen we ask seven friends in Boston “Where’s the place we have to have dinner on Saturday night in town?” and all seven unanimously answer “Top of the Hub.” While the view, food and ambiance (along with the very talented jazz band and adorable older couples taking over the dance floor) are all, in fact, incredible, pose that same question to seven New Yorkers and you can bet the cost of your deposit for New Year’s Eve dinner at Per Se that you’ll get seven (if not forty three) different answers.)
In any event, as the cocktail compatriots stumbled over to the local idenity-crisified Asian cum organic cum barbecue station cum stale bread deli on 9th and University Place-ish for a typical post-booze session helping of what else other than white rice glimmering in its stickiness under harsh white fluorescent ligh from a depressing looking buffett, two packages of Tate’s chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, pretzels, exotically flavored something with something else that doesn’t make sense together potato chips but is incredibly enticing and convincing that it does when drunk, and three plastic knives to carve into juicy,succulent Asian pears for good measure, Perri realized she was typing a really long run on sentence. But moreover, it dawned on her that she needed an organizer, a virtual pocketbook of sorts, to keep tabs on the dining and drinking adventures she was paving into the stomping ground of Manhattan. Fed up with her cumbersome Excel spreadsheet that listed the name, neighborhood, ambiance, music, who she attended the venue with and a catchall column that wound up being a hodge-podge of bartender names, occasional bad decisions rendered, the garnishes in the bloody mary’s, goddamnit why are there no freaking coat hooks under the bar, and other vital details of that nature, she decided she needed a handy app that could keep track of all her edible and imbibable adventures in a functional and fun manner.
When she awoke the next morning curled up on her friend’s couch with season 3 of Sex and the City glowing in the background, the initial excitement of her idea was superseded by a rather brutal hangover. And thus, realizing she had coined an incredibly clever name (“Do you think everybody will get it though? Barmanac? Like an almanac for bars?” she quipped ad nauseum to her slightly insulted friends for months on end) but had none of the technical skills necessary to create this monster of a program, the idea was lamentably couched. Much like her pained and aching head. (She finally got up after making it through the post-it note incident in Season Five, Thanks, Burger.)
Over the next several weeks, Perri noticed a surplus of emails and texts appearing in her inbox. Emails that inquired “Hey, I’ve got this cousin coming in from Evansville, Indiana this weekend who wants to go somewhere that’s a signature New York spot. Where can I take him that won’t make me want to fling myself into a fountain at the place that looks like a glorified urinal?” “Hiya Per, I want to throw a birthday party next weekend. Where’s a place in the West Village that’s good for groups but not too sceney?” or a frantic text that read “PERRI HELP ME I’M GOING ON A DATE WITH THIS CHICK FROM OK CUPID, WHERE CAN I TAKE HER THAT’S CLASSY AND HIP BUT THERE WON’T BE A SHOT IN HELL WE RUN INTO ANYBODY I KNOW?”
Suddenly, Perri realized that she was, in fact, this magical app called Barmanac, excepts a living and breathing person. How easy it would be to plug in a few key traits, “low key” “SoHo” “good for third dates” “has chicken,” and miraculously have a program pull up all the bars and restaurants that she had visited that met this criteria. Instead, she had to rely on her brainpower alone, ability to custom-tailor bars to a person’s need for an evening and sometimes a clunky excel spreadsheet. No bueno.
And how many times has someone asked you for a great sports bar to watch that game or the perfect spot to take the girl on Valentine’s Day, when off the top of your head your mind draws a giant, dismal b-l-a-n-k only to slap yourself a few hours or days later when it is too late but you can now spew off five gems of a pub or three Platt-approved sushi havens to urge your friends to check out? In one simple desktop (and soon to be mobile device!) app, Barmanac can solve all your problems and more. Never again will the clueless bar-goer suffer from “Shoot-what-was-the-name-of-that-bar-on-second-ave-in-the-fifties-i-met-that-hot-girl-at?” syndrome nor will the neurotic oenophile lose track of whether she had been to Babbo last in May or June and what vino she sipped upon on her visit so she can recommend it to her friend.
Unfortunately, this memory-jogging and idea-generating revolutionary machine would be a lot more complicated to build than the wheels of Perri’s overly-confident and C#-lacking brain envisioned. And thus, the ever-evolving and ambitious Barmanac continued to live on the back burner of her amygdala, or whatever region of the brain it is that thinks up genius ideas, only to resurface as laughing-fodder with friends over mojitos at Rosa Mexicano or Pimm’s Cups’ at Wilfie & Nell’s as Perri continued to spell out the ever-growing intricacies and capabilities of this mysterious and could be life-altering invention.
And then, on a warm September evening in 2011, the sort of night where the autumnal breeze doesn’t necessitate so much as a sweater, Perri met Jake V. at Cornerstone Tavern over “second base on the beaches” (“It’s like sex on the beach without the OJ!”) and his critic’s pick of a signature bland grilled chicken sandwich (For the record, he maintains it was pretty crummy by bland grilled chicken sandwich standards) at the decidedly un-hip and laid-back Irish-ish pub. Hoping this dashing young gentleman would be her future boyfriend, her drunken spreadsheet input from the night exclaimed “OH MY GOD JAKE IS SO HOT AND SMART AND NICE AND FUNNY. WHY DID I HAVE TO GET TOO DRUNK AND RUIN ANY CHANCE I MIGHT HAVE PROBABLY NOT HAD WITH HIM?” (the author’s intoxicated typos have been edited out for clarity). Relinquishing herself to the reality that she would never hear from this dreamboat again, Perri was shocked when two days later, he asked to meet up. Overwhelmed by the surplus of dining and drinking options in Manhattan, barmanac-lessly distraught, and unable to settle on a restaurant or bar, she instead invited him to her friend Bret’s apartment to watch a live stream of a DMB concert at the Gorge in Washington State. For whatever strange reason, he consented to this odd second date idea and the couple cozied up on the couch (oh wait, that part didn’t happen, he ignored her and sat alone in an easy chair in the corner) to sit back, relax and enjoy the show.
Happily, the relationship blossomed into a whirlwind of a late-summer romance and Perri all but forgot about the necessity of getting barmanac up on its two Manolos, erm, feet. Three months later, however, when the reality of a girlfriend needing to nag her boyfriend to complete an insurmountable task for said girlfriend settled in, Perri realized that given Jake’s demonstrated genius as a software developer, Barmanac would provide the perfect outlet for her to get on his case about something.
Admirably, Jake took on this endeavor with his typically incredible intensity of focus and gusto, and a few short days later, Barmanac Beta was born. Jake even included functions Perri never would have dreamed of (Such as a ratings scale to calculate your overall take of the venue and a drink review field so you never forget the name of that gin-infused libation again, well, until you’re drunk off of it at 620 Loft & Garden but by then you’ll have Barmanac to jog your memory) to turn Barmanac into the ultimate personal timestamped clipboard of your drinking and dining history (And future! Add bars to your wishlist to take the guesswork out of “Where the hell do I take her to celebrate her graduation dinner?” game). Following Barmanac’s birth, Perri was overcome with joy and happiness that a project that was years in the making finally had a home on her desktop in a nifty little app (Jake even made the program’s icon, fittingly, a Cosmo glass). Overwhelmed, however, by the prospect of manually inputting hundreds of bars and restaurants from her Excel spreadsheet, she not-so-subtly hinted that it would be great to have a program that could automatically do it for her. And thus, the Wondrous Transfer Perri’s Neurotic Spreadsheet into Barmanac Converter was swiftly produced by the software engineering virtuoso along with some incredible tools Perri never dreamed of, such as automatic field population and picture input with the data pulled from NYMag.com. Her beautiful yet somewhat primitive machine had now metamorphosed into a full-throttle personalized search engine and database for people (her) to track, share and organize their after hours epicurean hideaways and drinking dens. eCheers!
Perri would like to thank her dear friends for their (almost) always open ears (excepts when she would go on twenty minute tangents) for when she just had to explain the latest new imaginary feature of Barmanac (Especially but not limited to Lily, Su, Shallon, Adina and Alex) ; Jake, co-founder, boyfriend extraordinaire, and Chief Technical Officer of whatever ridiculous task Perri requested for the site, for his arduous work, innovative ideas for Barmanac Version 500.0 and his constant willingness to happily oblige to Perri’s dining and drinking whims (even if it means forking down a rather absurd deposit for a dinner reservation two months in advance for Valentine’s Day dinner at One if by Land); vodka for his unwavering support and comfort; the countless drunk strangers and friends alike to whom Perri described her plan for Barmanac to in great depth for not stealing it; and last but certainly not least, Manhattan’s bars and restaurants, for never failing to provide an endless series of “Did that really happen?” (Yes, yes, it did) moments. Oh, and Dave Matthews. Because she just has to.
“As every imbibing New Yorker knows, it’s the chance encounters that make life here really interesting.” - New York Magazine
So get on, go out and start keeping tabs on your tabs. Welcome to Barmanac!
Perri@Barmanac.com
Founder, CEO, and Drinker-in-Chief