Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore went home braless from Hogs ’n’ Heifers, a blue-collar country-western watering hole in the meatpacking district of Manhattan. This is not the bar’s only brush with Hollywood. Cineastes will recognize its beautiful, scantily clad female bartenders who two-step to honky tonk as the inspiration for the movie Coyote Ugly. Over the summer, among Hogs ’n’ Heifers’ standard line-up of sexy bartenders, cheap beer, celebrity bras and customers with mullets was a decidedly unlikely presence: Jordan R. Berkow ’03, a psychology concentrator in Adams House.
“It’s not about sex, it’s about fun,” declares Berkow of the bar she tended for two months. Still, she doesn’t deny that Hogs ’n’ Heifers is the kind of place that wears its unmentionables on its sleeve. “Every bar is about sex. This bar just puts it out in the open and has fun with it,” she explains.
That philosophy allows patrons and staff alike to circumvent the tired constrictions of conventional barroom etiquette. Berkow says, “Men are always going to stare at people in bars, but at this place, you call them on it.” She, for example, would douse gaze-happy males with lines like: “Stop staring at me. But if you’re gonna keep staring at me, which you inevitably are, you might as well buy me a drink.”
The strategy worked. “It was wild,” says Berkow, who worked day shifts. “I was drinking every day by 11 o’clock [in the morning].” But it was all in a day’s work. Also in a day’s work was performing live two-steps on the counter, called “clogging.”
Female patrons at Hogs ’n’ Heifers are often invited by megaphone-bearing bartenders to get up on the counter and join the clogging action. The striking Berkow herself got such an invitation when she wandered into the bar at the beginning of the summer. After a couple of drinks, she was on the table dancing—and after a couple of dances, she was employed. Before she took her place behind and on top of the Hogs ’n’ Heifers bar, however, she had to enroll in a four-day “intensive training process” to get up to Hogs ’n’ Heifers standards.
Not only can female patrons test their cowgirl legs on the bar, if they’re really lucky—or maybe just, in Berkow’s words, really “shit-canned”—they can offer up a piece of themselves to the wall. Does Berkow’s own lingerie adorn the wall as well? That’s a house secret.
