Standing Room Only

A mercifully brief history of upright drinking

A few years ago, I was at an izakaya happy hour in Tokyo, standing at a high-top and enjoying a highball while chatting with some companions. I’d been on my feet most of the day, and my lower back began issuing complaints, so I pulled out one of the stools and slid onto it.

Whereupon the bartender swiftly came from behind the bar to berate me in briar-patch Japanese, gestured that I should stand up, and abruptly slid the chair back under the table.

This mystified me — why have seats if you can’t use them?

Call me culturally clueless. I had inadvertently violated a local norm: drinks are discounted at happy hour, but the trade-off is that you can’t sit while drinking. The idea is to encourage quick turnover — have a drink, move on, make room for others. Come back later and pay more if you want to sit and gab.

If you’re a lumper rather than a splitter, there are essentially two types of bars in the world: standing bars and sitting bars. Many are hybrids — some have places to sit and others to stand, and some are mostly standing bars on Saturday nights.

Cultural and geographic factors influence where you find these today. (I later learned that there are Japanese bars called tachinomi — literally “standing drink” — that never have seats and offer cheaper drinks than izakayas.) But you can also find the division if you look at history. In fact, the history of American drinking shows a general evolution from standing bars to sitting bars — and that change has often been as political as it was cultural.

America’s early taverns encouraged sitting and lingering. They were actual “public houses,” where neighbors (virtually all male) met, were served drinks from communal punch bowls, and — in the case of the American colonies — plotted revolution against the Crown. Taverns often doubled as inns, and kept warming fires burning in winter. It made sense that they were designed for gathering and hanging out.

That changed in the 19th century with the rise of saloons. Efficiency became prized: these were places to walk in, knock back a whiskey or two, then walk out. Sitting and lingering was part of the ancien régime, not a modern, industrializing America. Long bars became standard, built at a height that accommodated someone standing. Foot rails made of brass started appearing in the late 19th century, easing the strain on the lower back for those standing while drinking. (If you are one of the three people in the world who find foot rails interesting, I wrote about the history of foot rails in Imbibe six years ago.)

But it was after Repeal in the 1930s that standing and drinking became a hot political topic in city halls — and even in the U.S. Congress.

The goal was to prevent the return of saloons filled with stumblebums rushing in for a quick drink. So laws were crafted making public drinking legal only if done while seated at a legitimate restaurant. In many places, you couldn’t stand at a bar for a drink — even while waiting for a table.

Among these places was Washington, D.C., where how and where one drank was a fraught subject. Recall that for nearly a century, Congress ran D.C.’s local affairs, essentially serving as its city council. (That changed in 1973, when D.C. got home rule and was allowed to do things like elect a mayor.)

Congress didn’t want D.C. to be a drinking town, and its strictures against standing while drinking were among the most rigid. Patrons weren’t even allowed to carry drinks from one table to another — a waiter had to be summoned.

In the 1940s, those restrictions came under fire. Advocates for change argued it was easier to tell if someone had been overserved when standing, since swaying was more obvious than when seated. These efforts went nowhere — because, well, Congress.

In the 1960s, another push was made to allow stand-up drinking, but only during peak restaurant hours, when customers were standing while waiting for a table. Hawk-eyed legislators saw through this ruse: they envisioned a place opening with a 100-foot bar and a single table — technically, everyone would be “waiting.” The idea was tabled.

In 1967, the committee overseeing D.C. clarified that the no-standing rule also applied to private clubs. For three decades, members of the National Press Club had enjoyed drinking upright, under the belief that such clubs were exempt. Wire service columnist Dick West noted the benefit: club members often discussed world issues, and it was “not uncommon for the same problem to be solved three or four times in the course of a single evening.” Requiring reporters to sit while drinking, he claimed, would cause irreparable harm to world order: “The supply of solutions to world problems would immediately shrink, for sit-down drinking is not conducive to modern problem-solving.”

After achieving home rule, Washington, D.C., finally rolled back the law in 1976, when drinking while standing was once again legally permitted — just as it had been before Prohibition.

During the COVID-19 era, many cities — including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia — mandated that patrons be seated while drinking once bars began to reopen. This was intended to discourage close-contact mingling and spit-swapping at the bar. Most of these rules were repealed by late 2022.

One state where the government remains unusually interested in whether you are sitting or standing with a drink is Utah. In a restaurant, you must remain seated if you have a drink. (You must also order food, even if it’s a bag of chips.) If you drink in a bar, however, you can be a free agent — stand, roam, whatever. This helps ensure that prospective saloon keepers don’t open restaurants with the real intent of running a bar, which neighbors might find a nuisance.

Similar seated-while-drinking rules apply in restaurants in other states, such as New Mexico and North Carolina, as well as in some counties in Alabama and parts of Pennsylvania that have beer-only licenses.

In Tokyo, standing to drink is seen as an efficient use of space and time. In parts of America, it remains a moral hazard — with civilization in the balance. Where you stand on this issue, it appears, comes down to where you drink.