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Wary of the usual Midtown madhouse that is St. Patrick’s Day, we hopped the L to Williamsburg and landed at my N. 6th go-to Zablozki’s. A favorite of mine for its no-frills, high-ceilinged, open interior and $3 Yuengling drafts at happy hour.

As it turns out the Yuengling is four bucks now, but on this day, so were a bunch of Irish tasties like Smithwick’s and Guinness, so this softened the blow. PBRs were also two bucks a pop. The three of us grabbed our seats at got to the gettin’. The bartender was indifferent but friendly and seemed to appreciate our smiling faces and dollar bills. She was mindful of our empty pints and a second round followed in short order. Tips in cash on the bar – the “rules” were being followed.


Paddy Saint’s day in hipster town? A buyback blessing or a curse? More after the jump…

• Robert Simonson engages in some Polish behavior at Greenpoint's Stone Tavern
• Time Out's got your cheapest happy hours – where better to safely test out your buyback chops?
• St. Paddy's in Midtown? If you must, ML tells you where to “frat”-ernize, including buybackbar Blue Ruin
• My Open Bar runs down everyday boozefests – Enabler!
• W'burg's Trophy Bar has got the Leprechaun on its St. Paddy's day poster – you should go to there.

(photo from A Hamburger Today)

This just in from buybacker “Orso”: SoHo’s diamond in the rough (and by “rough” I mean finely-polished pool of good-looking, affluent other, more expensive diamonds – we’re talking about SoHo here) Fanelli’s Café is still dishing it out old school. Orso braved Hurricane Bloomberg this past Saturday and discovered a bit of a scatterbrained buyback policy in which you buy the first round for your group at full price and get the next round at a significant discount (in this case it was buy one round of 3 drinks, then order another 3, but only pay for 2).

Get it? For those still lost, here is a construct in mathematics and philosophy recently invented by me called an “if-then statement©”, to break it down for you:

IF round 1 = (beer + beer + beer) = $15 + tip ($3)

…THEN, round 2 = (beer + beer + beer) = about $10

For our inaugural “buyback mission”, we decided to take a cue from Midtown Lunch's happy hour guru Mamacita and treat ourselves to a recent Friday night out at a not-so-old yet still very-old-school-feeling dive bar. Located in the most scenic of homeless-ridden, cheap-food sellin', I-can't-believe-I'm-still-kind-of-in-Midtown stretches of Manhattan, Blue Ruin is sandwiched on 9th at 40th between the newish $1 slice joint and a rundown tortilla shack.

Blue Ruin offers 2 for 1 drinks from 5-8 weekdays, so every paid round gets you a ticket for a free one – probably not the ideal time to test for buybacks since we were already getting every other round “free” but what the hell do we know, it's not like this is an exact science or something.

Blah, blah, blah did we get buybacks or not? Find out after the jump... (Read more)