Cash bar

For those of you still lacking for New Year’s Eve plans, I give you the following: The Applebee’s at 50th and Broadway has a New Year’s package which offers, for the sensible price of $150 a head, a three course meal (including choice of entree: “Honey Grilled Chicken, House Sirloin or Delicious Salmon”) and open bar from 8 to 11pm.     A DJ will be spinning festive music (although hopefully none so adventurous as may distract anyone from enjoying their Delicious Salmon) from 8pm to 1am.  And, my favorite part, ”Cash bar available from 11pm until . . . ?”  That’s right, Applebee’s is cheekily suggesting that its patrons will be so uproarious in welcoming 2008 that it would be unwise to set limits on how late they can stay and continue to pay for their drinks.  This is not a night for boundaries; this is a night when Mixed Grill Vegetables and Mashed Potatoes, normally $1.50 a la carte, will be flung wantonly in front of Applebee’s guests as part of an all-inclusive bacchanal.  At the same time, I can’t help supposing that the silencing of the DJ at 1am might serve as a guidepost for when Ma Applebee’s gotham regent will send the revelers packing, turning them over to the care of the bar in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis, just a few blocks south.  It must be quite misfortunate to have to work the New Year’s Eve shift at Applebee’s, and perhaps the refusal of the manager to commit to a specific last call time represents a bedraggled, Gethsemanean wish that the House Sirloin and vodka tonics his partiers consume will leave them so besotted and worn out that by 12:35 he can start vacuuming the carpet.  That would certainly be my hope.              And if that’s not enough, you can return, starting at 8am the next morning, to toss off your hangover at the Applebee’s New Year’s Day Brunch.  This one will only set you back $30 a person, a price which makes them considerably, albeit understandingly, more stingy with the alcohol: each attendee is entitled to “One Complimentary Bloody Mary, Mimosa or Champagne.”  It is true that describing this one drink as “complimentary” invites the inquiry of whether in the cosmic scheme of things you’re actually paying $30 for a plate of eggs while Applebee’s is simultaneously throwing in some OJ and Mum’s on the house.  But there is an echo of the previous night’s recklessness in the promise that the meal will be “[s]erved with unlimited coffee, tea, and juice.” (emphasis mine).  That sentence strikes me rather ominously, and conjures tortuous images of being waterboarded with coffee by a maniacally chipper waitress.  In any event, the brunch is a buffet, and it does go until 3 in the afternoon, so although you’re stuck with one drink, if you walk out of there unsatisfied it will be your own fault.