fern bars emerged in the mid-1960s, when the women’s movement and the environmental movement converged to transform barrooms from smoky, dimly lit male preserves to bright, cheery greenhouses where both sexes could mingle on equal terms. Although many fern bars were categorized—not unfairly—as pickup joints, they can take credit for bringing America’s saloon culture back from the dead by attracting a new generation of young urban professionals who had largely forsaken recreational drinking for recreational drugs.
This new leaf was turned over not only by feminists and ecologists but by nostalgists: fern bars reflected the swinging sixties obsession with retro camp by hanging their houseplants in rooms decorated like gay ’90s parlors, complete with Tiffany lamps, brass fittings, and striped awnings, while bar names referenced barber shop quartets and old-timey soda fountains (Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration, Shenanigans, Rosie O’Grady’s Good Time Emporium).
Fern-bar flirting and networking was fueled largely by Chablis and imported beer. Cocktails, when patrons did order them, tended toward simple constructs like the Tequila Sunrise, Kamikaze, or Harvey Wallbanger. See Tequila Sunrise; Kamikaze; and Harvey Wallbanger. When fern bars hit their hedonistic peak in the 1970s, frozen “disco drinks” also became popular serves, from Strawberry Daiquiris and Piña Coladas to alcoholic milkshakes with names like Screaming Banana Banshee or Big Fat Schooner of Love, whose calories were meant to be burned off on the dance floor.
While one of the original fern bars, TGI Friday’s, is now an international chain, most of them died on the vine in the Reagan era, victims of the AIDS crisis and the yuppie shift from happy hour to nouvelle cuisine. See
Playboy Clubs International, ed. Benson and Hedges 100’s Presents Drink Recipes from 100 of the Greatest Bars. N.P.: Philip Morris Incorporated, 1979.
Walker, Judy. “Tales of the Cocktail ‘Fern Bars’ Seminar is a Trip Down memory Lane.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 22, 2010.
By: Jeff Berry
A fern bar at its ferniest, San Francisco (Lehr’s Greenhouse was on Sutter Street and lasted from 1972 to 1987). Source: Courtesy of Jeff Berry.