Anyone who spends time in Clarendon knows that there is a severe shortage of places to grab a drink at a reasonable price and not be surrounded by douchebags. Usually, by process of elimination, we end up at Summers which really isn’t much of a bar.
However, this weekend I was able to experience the magic of Hunan Number One. I had read that this was a good place to grab cheap beer, and that the food really isn’t the focus here. We were trying to find a place to grab a beer that wasn’t packed to capacity (Saturday night college football makes that difficult.) We tried the new Mad Rose Tavern, which was totally packed and looked like a sea of pastel colored polos. We tried Hard Times, which was also packed to capacity with people watching college football. This is the moment we decided on Hunan Number One.
This place has many things going for it. We walked in and immediately grabbed a booth that comfortably sat six people. We were unsure if you were supposed to seat yourself or wait for a host to seat you. The waitress brought out a drink menu for us, and our eyes immediately lit up. They had a decent selection of beers and they were CHEAP. I ordered a 32oz of Flying Dog (no specific beer was listed, but I rolled the dice) for $6.50. Most of the beers were between $5-6.50, but weirdly Sierra Nevada was $10 and Guinness was $12. At any rate, that is still an amazing price.
The crowd was mid 20-ish, comprised mostly of tables of people with huge mugs of beer and not much eating going on. We decided to order a couple of appetizers to snack on. We tried the crab rangoon, steak fries, and vegetable tempura. The crab rangoon were clearly something out of a box, and didn’t taste all that great. The steak fries were…steak fries (delicious.) And the vegetable tempura was fried and good, although we couldn’t really tell what the vegetables actually were.
Overall, this is one of my new favorite places in Clarendon. The atmosphere is a lot of fun. The music is loud, the lights were dark, and the beer was cheap. I’ll be back.
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