If New York had a city-wide drink, it might be a martini. Elegant, overpriced, and bitter even though martini drinkers are too proud to admit it. If Raleigh had one, it would be a beer: welcoming, but drink too much and you’ll get sick.
Philadelphia has a city-wide drink, appropriately called The Citywide Special, and it is exactly what you’d expect it to be. The Citywide is cheap, made exclusively from the lowest quality ingredients, and drinking it makes you feel like you are dying (which you probably are, if not from the drink then definitely from that asbestos in your three-story row home).
The ingredients for a city wide are simple:
- 1 can of cheap beer (usually PBR or High Life)
- 1 shot of well whiskey
In Philly, any decent bar will have a Citywide on the menu for less than it costs to order either the beer or the shot individually. That’s about $5 at Bob and Barbara’s. To make a Citywide, simply:
- Prepare the ingredients by ordering or pouring the shot and opening the beer
- I cannot overstate the importance of ordering well whiskey. It should taste like someone has just drained it from a car engine.
- Abandon what little self-respect you still have.
- Drink the shot in one go.
- Sip on the beer.
- Start a fight with the large man with the even larger Eagles tattoo next to you at the bar.
- When you are done drinking, crush the beer can somewhere on your body and insist that you order another around even though nobody else wants one.
And that’s it. Nobody really likes the Citywide, but you feel like a hardened coal miner whenever you drink one.
The first time I had a Citywide, it was at the source: Bob and Barbara’s on South St. and 16th. I had come into town from New Jersey to visit my friend Sean, and went to the bar to see live music. Or, maybe it was a drag show. Either way, I stepped up to the blue padded-leather bar with another friend who ordered us a round. It was, quite possibly, the most disgusting thing I had ever drank. But, doing one with your friends builds the kind of camraderie that I imagine soldiers share when they return home from deployment. And that night - 1am at Bob and Barbara’s, drunk, and listening to someone in drag belt out “I Will Always Love You” to a crowd of rowdy south Philadelphians - my friends and I were in the trenches.
No, the champagne of beers is not too classy for Philadelphia.
Since then, the Citywide Special has been a staple of my diet. My favorite place to drink one is at Pope, a dive bar on Passyunk. We usually sit in the very back of the bar next to the bright neon beer signs and the hole in the floorboard where the mice come out at night. We always order at least one round of Citywides. Starting about a year after I moved here, every week for about two years my friends and I would go to Tattoo’d Moms on South (home of the famous “Ass Basket” - a large basket of french fries, tater tots, popcorn shrimp, chicken tenders, mozzarela sticks, and onion rings) after reading group to throw a few back. I made some of my favorite memories over Citywides at Pope and Tattoo’d Moms.
Pope, left and bottom, and Tattoo’d Moms. Tattoo’d Moms in her prime (but Taylor is clearly not in her prime in this photo)
One of my favorite things about the drink is that if gives you license to talk to other people drinking them at the same time. Here I am, below, with a man named Frank. Frank was visiting from Florida with his wife, who left him at the bar when she couldn’t find parking. Frank was visiting his daughter, who worked at a hospital in town. We met over a Citywide.
An instant conversation starter.
The Citywide is also how I welcome people to our parties. I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly warm welcome. Every party at our house we buy enough supplies for everyone to have at least one (often more) Citywide. And if you think that sounds like a hefty price, remember that we can buy a whole handle of Citywide-grade-whiskey for about $10 at the liquor store. In addition to offering one to all guests, if we’re having a themed party and you don’t show up dressed for the theme, we make you take one immediately (I say “make,” but it’s really just a strong suggestion.)
(Unless we don’t like you. Then we really do make you take one.)
It’s possible to class up the Citywide, though I wouldn’t recommend it. One time, at a lovely Italian place called Fiorella, I ordered a very fine whiskey “neat” and a Peroni.
It wasn’t $5.
Taylor at Fiorella