A Tender Evening in JR Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar”

By Jennifer Locke

The local bar: it’s a place both mythologized and longed-for, a place Americans with packed schedules and commuter lifestyles dream of in the same way that they pine for bygone eras. The place where everybody knows your name. The place where nine-to-fivers come to unwind. The place where the bartender knows your drink, where friends gather and worries melt away.

Does such a place still exist? In JR Moehringer’s marvelous 2005 memoir The Tender Bar, the local bar is alive, well, and treated with the nostalgia many reserve for their childhood homes or a favorite vacation ...