If you’re looking for somewhere to take it easy after a rough divorce, layoff or grim diagnosis—Recessions is probably your bar. While the beer selection is okay, what you would really come here for is a $3.50 Miller Lite in a beer mug the size of an Octoberfest growler. Recessions is the ugly redheaded stepchild to its shining, honor-student neighbor “Mackeys” – a plastic paddy sports bar plastered in red paint so thick that it’s practically the Times Square of L Street. Recessions, on the other hand, you would completely miss if you didn’t notice the random door next to its big, sexy and popular neighbor.

Recessions is generally home to local street volunteers, poor interns, non-profit research assistants and vampires. Completely underground, Recessions has the smell of your grandmother’s moldy basement and opens into a dimly lit pool room with stone walls, a vast and elevated rectangular bar area and two greasy pool tables. If you didn’t feel like you were grilling at your uncle’s Pennsylvania townhouse there are industrial garage fans spread throughout the bar to supplement the building’s air conditioning.

The big selling point for a place like this is the 1980s gaming system that includes the family favorite “Nudey photo hunt” where patrons are challenged to point out the differences between two seemingly identical nude photos of pornstars and models now old enough to be your great aunt. On a Tuesday night, Recessions is virtually abandoned with the exception of a few tables and some lonely regulars and suits playing a quick post-work game of darts. Music? In an hour I heard James Taylor, Billy Joel, Van Morrison and Bob Marley.

My vote? Worth checking out for a game of pool and a beer with a few friends. But really? Recessions is home to those who typically like to drink alone.

Yesterday I started a french bread dough and decided to make rolls filled with ham, aged swiss and a poppyseed mustard sauce. Pretty basic ingredients:

• 6 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 packages active dry yeast
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 cups Samuel Adams Honey Porter (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder

• 1.5 pounds Gruyère Special Reserve Aged 1 Year
• 1.5 pounds black forest ham

Mustard Sauce:

• one part grated onion
• one part Worcestershire sauce
• two parts yellow mustard
• three parts poppy-seed
• An ungodly amount of butter

A bit of background. As far as the ingredients are concerned, I went with the aged Gruyère– which is a really earthy, musty Swiss cheese and melted it over cured German “black forest” ham (which is equally as bold). Seeing as how we’re adding mustard to this, I didn’t want the flavor of the ingredients eclipsed by the sauce so they had to stand out.

Using the porter in place of water was experimental and just added a little more body to the dough. Warmed the porter, added the yeast in a small bowl until it started budding and then mixed in flour, salt, olive oil and garlic powder. After kneading for about 8-10 minutes I coated the dough in olive oil, placed a damp, warm kitchen towel over the bowl and placed it in the oven on “warm.” After an hour, I kneaded and let it rise again for another hour to get that good elasticity (during which time I watched the movie “Wall Street” for the first time 24 years after its initial release… good Machiavellian movie. I’d love to see Charlie Sheen do more dramas like this one. When the dough was done, I then subdivided into 16 small pieces.

Now for the fun part. I started the classic mustard mix by dissolving the grated onions and melting down two sticks of butter in a small pan– eventually adding the Worchestershire sauce and mustard.

Rolling one of my 1/16 dough pieces into a circle I started laying down the ham and pieces of cheese over top. The mustard poppyseed sauce I added last (so that it would cook on the bottom and prevent any volcanoes from erupting given the amount of cheese and butter in these guys).

Final product? Warm French rolls filled with delicious ham and cheese and lathered in a mustard poppyseed sauce from my childhood.

The following was inspired by the 11th Century Latin Poem, “In Taberna” and part of the Carmina Burna.

Painting "Carmina Burana" by Dan Earle

When we are in the tavern, we are unmindful of our graves. Beads of sweat fall sporadically and unnoticed onto the gaming tables as men crowd around like dogs fighting for scraps of food. We are desensitized to the rotting, humid smell of basement mold, spilled ale and body odor. I take a heavy drink from my dark, bitter, unfiltered ale and let it slide down an open throat into an empty stomach; though I can no longer gage my level of intoxication I can suffer the weight of my coin purse slowly trickling away like sand in an hourglass. Some gamble, others drink. Some do both simultaneously to their own detriment. The fortune of gambling shifts like the stages of the moon, ever waxing and waning like clockwork, where some men sit cold and devoid of their own garments others bear the sackcloth and silk of the defeated and gloat in self-satisfaction and over-indulgence. The men in this tavern, regardless of their fortune, no longer fear death; we are the living damned, the excommunicated; sentenced to hell by the same church that brought about the Crusades and the same God who brought us the Black Death. Men throw dice and ask for the blessing of Bacchus, the only pagan god who would frequent these halls, the god of wine and intoxication himself.

Those devoid of all morality, the libertines are the first to drink. We drink to the captives and the living. We drink to the Christians who still have their souls, and we do so without bitterness or hatred; our souls have long since died so we carefully look after the flesh. We drink to the faithful of Elysium and Heaven alike, the women so married to God himself, the soldiers and martyrs, the navigators of the great seas, the unfortunate, the penitent. We drink to the Pope. We drink to the King. We will live by the drink and die by the drink, we will fill our beds with prostitutes and we will curse the world no longer.

There are those who would judge us, further condemn the condemned. But everybody who is living consumes, whether they realize this Truth or not. The mistress drinks, the master drinks, the solider and the clergy drink, the servant drinks—the maid drinks, the apathetic and the ambitious drink, the white man drinks, the black man drinks, the fool drinks, the scholar drinks, the repellant drink, the bishop and the deacon drink, the sister and the brother—the father and the mother, all drink. We all find comfort in the drink—hundreds of thousands who partake of what has been delightfully fermented. The Lord himself turned water into wine to quench the dry and shaken thirst around him.

What started as six-hundred coins is scarcely enough to finance this kind of aimless and intemperate indulgence of the intoxicating. May you hypocrites who would throw the first stone and judge us unfairly never be counted about the blessed; may your names never be carved as Pure and Just. This is a ship without a steersman. We float aimlessly in the paths of the air like a light, hovering bird. No chain could hold me. No key shall imprison me. I search for others like me and join the wretches.