This is My Favorite Yelp Review Of The Gate

Photo via www.thousandbars.blogspot.com

Let's get right to it. I love this harshly hilarious Yelp review of neighborhood bar The Gate:

The black, beating heart of Park Slope.  The Gate is notable for its ex(t/p)ensive beer selection, outdoor patio and for its impressive ability to embody everything that is both charming and unpalatable about Park Slope.

On a good day, The Gate is a quiet, cosy spot where you can enjoy a few pints of the good stuff and watch the world go by.  Dogs gaze over at you longingly for a scratch behind the ears, sunlight pours into the patio, and the craft beers flow.

On a bad day, it's a smug, unfriendly den of snobbery.  The service here generally ranges from poor to outright hostile, The Gate is doing you a favour, you just happen to be there.  Babies and toddlers named after medieval tradesmen (Hunter, Cooper, Fletcher etc.) crawl out of and over every nook and cranny, running amok and writhing all over the floor as their owners exchange Bukowski quotes and vegan recipes.  If you have the misfortune of finding yourself at The Gate during football season, you will open the door to a plethora of bearded alterna-dads desperately trying to high five and yell their way back to some distant memory of masculinity that got lost somewhere between a double wide stroller and an organic soy milk latté.

I do not hate children, nor is this a forum to express opinions on Park Slope's questionable brand of liberal, laissez faire parenting, but I will say this - a bar is not an appropriate environment for your child.  Nobody wants to see a baby at the bar, your baby doesn't want
to be at the bar, and if you think about it, you don't really want your baby to be at the bar either.

Bottom line - The Gate is a great space, it has good beers (if a little overpriced), but the staff and clientele (all dogs considered) consistently let the place down.

I don't share all the sentiments, though I've never gone during football season, though when a houseguest once asked me to take her to a bar with "gluten-free whiskey and aging hipsters," The Gate did come right to mind. Whateves, I'll still still go here for the HUGE patio by Brooklyn standards; where else am I gonna smoke my American Spirits?

[You can also read Thomas's Top Ten Excerpts of Yelp Reviews from jackie's 5th amendment]