Last Call with Richard Crouse

Last Call is a podcast on the stories behind the places where everybody knows your name. It's a chance to soak up the ambiance of the world's greatest watering holes without leaving your home.

I’m Richard Crouse. I tended bar for seventeen years everywhere from hot spots to dive bars and I thought I had seen it all.

In my life behind bars I witnessed everything from first dates and marriage proposals to knife fights and a woman who brought a pet monkey in for a drink.

Nothing could surprise me.

Or so I thought.

Then I heard about how a lion who visited Harry’s New York Bar in Paris inspired Ernest Hemingway to write one of his greatest novels. And why there are century old chicken bones hanging above the beer-stained bar at McSorleys in New York City. And how Vincent Sardi refused to do business with the mob during Prohibition, so his famous Broadway Restaurant didn’t serve alcohol until the 21st amendment passed, six year after they first opened.

With the help of the Last Call radio players, music and interviews with cocktail detectives Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller, The Indiana Jones of Tiki, Jeff “Beachbum” Berry and Two and Two: McSorley's, My Dad, and Me author Rafe Bartholomew, I bring these stories, and many more, to life in my podcast Last Call. It’s fact folded in with a sprinkling of fiction, because, well, who doesn’t exaggerate after a few drinks?

So, open that bottle of wine or crack that beer and join me for an intoxicating guided tour of some of the strange stories from some of the world’s best boozers.