The Greatest Coffee Shop in the World series sees caffeine addict John Paul Brammer marrying his two passions of Travel and Giving Himself Heart Palpitations in Cafés to produce colorful field notes that will be especially useful to, one imagines, gay manic-depressives.
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I blew out my flip-flop, stepped on a pop top
Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home
But there's booze in the blender and soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on
— Excerpt from the Sacred Text
Is there a secret island oasis smack-dab in the middle of Times Square, a hidden, coconut-scented haven replete with attentive staff, tropical cocktails, surprisingly decent food, and beachy cabanas mere feet from a rooftop pool, all presented with delightfully campy decor? Is there an undiscovered chamber in the palpitating heart of New York City where urban woes take flight like so many spooked seagulls, leaving you to a private, blissful slice of the Caribbean just a short subway ride from your apartment?
No.
That’s not to say that Margaritaville Resort Times Square is without its delights, delights that are more poetic in nature than they are edible1. I’ll get to them. The poetic, inedible delights. But first, consider the word “resort:” a chlorinated melange of lodging, spa treatments, and fluffy white bathrobes begging to be stolen, the word evolved from the more dire “resortir” of Old French, defined as a place that is turned to2 for solace, aid, refuge. It implies a desperation in the individual. “It was his last resort,” one might say of someone who recently hanged himself.
A resort’s value, then, ought to be judged by its restorative powers. A trip to Margaritaville Resort should give me the strength to soldier on. This it can accomplish without satisfying the brief of transporting me to the Bahamas, which is good news both for me and for Margaritaville Resort Times Square, because, for all its nautical aesthetic efforts, a nesting pigeon would nonetheless find it indistinguishable from any one of the surrounding high-rises. The sonic landscape of Manhattan (ambulances) remains audible over the Benson Boone being piped into the pool deck (I didn’t hear any Jimmy Buffett songs).3
There are some 30 Margaritaville resorts4 on earth. One of them is in Manhattan, which, Margaritaville is keen to remind you, is an island. Margaritaville TSqNYC is no doubt the tallest of its siblings, occupying a series of 32 floors, many of which I became acquainted with shortly after arriving and, somehow, getting lost in the stairwell. This resulted in me being escorted by staff (less in a stern “Excuse me, sir, this area is for hotel guests and employees only” way and more in an avuncular “Let’s go find your mama, big guy” way) to the pool deck where I was supposed to be.
Context: A couple weeks ago, my friend and sometimes-editor Rachel received one of those PR emails offering a comped spa experience in exchange for the possibility of media coverage. I was all too happy to be let in on this, and was shown as one viable option SIXTY LES5, a “vibrant, pulsating (?) location” with “top-tier DJ curated music” as well as "fun" that was characterized as “inescapable at this downtown Manhattan spot.” Aside from the troubling appearance of the word “inescapable” in ad copy, the photos looked luxe, and I figured I might afterward write about my long-standing struggle to relax, about how uncomfortable it makes me to be pampered.
I needn’t have worried about such struggles.
We (Rachel, Kiyana (Rachel’s fiancée), Greg (Greg), and myself) were not going to the fully booked SIXTY LES, but Margaritaville. This took a while to dawn on me. I thought for some reason “Margaritaville” was them speaking euphemistically about some lower-tier spa Rachel had booked since SIXTY LES was unavailable. I didn’t truly understand we were going to actual Margaritaville until the morning of.
“We thought you’d enjoy this more,” Rachel said. This being true didn’t make it less painful to hear.
After pushing past multiple train delays and closures begging me to turn back, I answered the siren’s call and arrived at a sea-foam green tower in Times Square. Signs promised NYC GIFTS & LUGGAGE, MARGARITAVILLE, and, in compact brown letters, a COFFEE SHOP, thus qualifying it for inclusion in this series. A coffee shop inside the Times Square Margaritaville sounded like the spawn point in a video game based on my life, so I had that to look forward to.
I should fess up here that I was giggling about going to Margaritaville before knowing what Margaritaville was, exactly. I hadn’t listened to a single Jimmy Buffett song, even involuntarily. For those not in the know, Margaritaville is themed after the life and work of one man, Mr. Buffett. My understanding is Buffett concocted an eminently marketable brand of country music infused with a syrup distilled from thousands of Aloha shirts that Baby Boomers find altogether intoxicating. Recent listening experience confirms his oeuvre to be the audio equivalent of riding a slow-going horse across the white sands of a Sandals® resort. Only, no, it’s not a Sandals® resort. It’s Margaritaville.
“Margaritaville” sounds like Margaritaville.
I simply couldn’t parse the concept of a resort empire being built off the strength of one song. I know that’s oversimplifying things. It’s a vibe. One can confidently build restaurants, hotels, and theme parks on a vibe! Still, to wrap my brain around Margaritaville, I asked myself if I’d go to a resort themed after my favorite song ever, as in “Sean Paul’s TemperatureTown,” and my answer was an enthusiastic “yes,” so maybe I do get the appeal.
Here’s everything I knew about Jimmy Buffett before walking into Margaritaville:
As a child, I had a shirt featuring a macaw parrot and a speech bubble saying “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere!” which I took at the time not as a call to drink, but as a bird issuing a fun fact (fun fact: the claim of it being 5 O’clock somewhere inspires rigorous debate, see a sample here).
Jimmy Buffett is not related to bajillionaire Warren Buffett (see the DNA test here).
Jimmy Buffett is deceased (see the obituary here).
Et fin.
Here are things I knew about Jimmy Buffett after walking out of Margaritaville, mostly picked up from Google searches on my phone while sitting sweatily in our cabana6:
There’s another song called “Cheeseburger in Paradise” that rivals “Margaritaville” in popularity and, just like “Margaritaville,” lends itself to cheeky menu items, such to the extent one wonders if Buffett were, in a 4D chess move, sowing the seeds of a future franchise in his discography.
He has a song called “Please Take Your Drunken 15 Year Old Girlfriend Home” with lyrics one shouldn’t look up while sitting at the License to Chill Bar.
Finding this song online is a fraught exercise and I do worry I’ve been put on a list. There’s only one recording of it on YouTube with a decent number of views. One of the comments reads, “Sad for me. My darling sister played this over and over when she obtained the record. We lived together at the time in the early 80's, and it was her fave. Always brings a tear, because she died of Crohn's disease in 2008.”
I now know what Jimmy Buffett looked like at various stages in his life.
He’s one of those “good billionaires,” or, in other words, he, you know, donated to some “good causes” and wasn’t “a Republican.” Hem. Haw. Etc.
His fans are called Parrot Heads.
Et (shark) fin.
To get it out of the way, it really is the least interesting part, here’s some service journalism for any who for some reason want to visit Margaritaville in the hopes of encountering quality food, drinks, and amenities:
I ordered the Perfect Margarita that, the menu cautioned, was for “margarita aficionados only.” I wanted it in a souvenir cup, but was told it was too boozy (too powerful!) to be served in one. I acquiesced, and received a large plastic marg glass full of what tasted like lukewarm seawater, not the azureous blue Caribbean kind, but of the color I’d dub “Gowanus Canal Green.” I do think if you’re going to be [Thing]ville, you should be remarkably good at [Thing], and Margaritaville, at least on the day I went, was remarkably bad at making a margarita.
I ordered the salmon for lunch. The salmon I ate was so dry. It was astonishing that something born in the ocean could achieve such dryness. The salmon was so dry it had me contemplating the fish’s life, and my own.
I was told over Instagram by someone to order the wings because “the wings slap,” and when they arrived everyone in the cabana (plied by complimentary Red Bulls, I believe) seemed to agree that “the wings slapped.” As for me, I didn’t even feel poked, though this could be because the Perfect Margarita had carpetbombed my tastebuds with salt.
The deck around the pool can get hot. The deck at the pool can get so hot in the midday sun it will scorch your feet if you stand on it for one second too long. I was straight-up injured by the hot pool deck at Margaritaville. This isn’t a joke. My feet still hurt. Margaritaville would do well to note my benevolence and my sloth (traits that don’t beget litigiousness) and fix their deck. My feet are definitely worse off, perhaps permanently, because of the Margaritaville pool deck.
The other cocktail I ordered at the License to Chill Bar was much better than the Classic Margarita I ordered at the cabana, though it was regrettably titled “‘In my Lemon Era,’” the only menu item in quotes. Attributable to whom? I don’t know. Some poet lost to time.
“Can I get the ‘In My Lemon Era?’” I asked the waiter, sheepishly.
“Sorry, what?”
“The ‘In My Lemon Era.’”
“‘In My Lemon Era,’ got it.”
I hated him for this. For doing this to me!
The views of Manhattan are impressive. I can only imagine them at night. Honestly, if all you want is an okayish cocktail, great views of the city, and a naughty giggle for being at Margaritaville, then fire away.
It smelled pretty good! No small feat in Times Square.
On whether or not I actually felt like I was in the Caribbean, it’s my belief that the sun has different personalities in different places, and this was not a Caribbean sun but without a doubt that familiar, ambivalent NYC sun that oversees daily throngs of people on the absolute brink of melee combat and that doesn’t care if I live, die, or move to rural Idaho, and so the transportive powers of hammocks, palm fronds, and surfboards were limited.
There’s a cool, and immense, Statue of Liberty in the restaurant that you can actually eat inside of and who, in lieu of a torch, holds up a giant margarita glass, and I felt a flicker of patriotism as a citizen of Margaritaville when looking at it.
The COFFEE SHOP is kind of in Margaritaville, kind of not. It’s physically in the NYC GIFTS & LUGGAGE souvenir shop where tourists pick up tchotchkes for their relatives. It’s called the Margaritaville Coffee Shop.7 I ordered a cold brew (after managing to drag my entire entourage, literally, down with me) with subterranean expectations and was shocked to discover it was actually good.
Really good. I’m thrilled to declare the Margaritaville Coffee Shop the greatest coffee shop in MvTSqNYC, making it to date the Greatest Coffee Shop in the World, it having to compete only with a rather limp showing from Casa Del Caffè in Monaco. Long may it reign.
The Key lime pie was also good.
Maybe this will surprise you, maybe it won’t, but Margaritaville typically enjoys stellar ratings from its clientele. I think it’s difficult to be outright disappointed by Margaritaville if you’re a camp enthusiast, and quite easy to be charmed by Margaritaville if you’re an earnest appreciator of Jimmy Buffett.
The worst-rated Margaritaville experience is far and away the Margaritaville Cruise. I imagine there’s a host of reasons. There are logistics involved in a cruise that enterprises on terra firma need not consider. Way more can go wrong. The wiles of Margaritaville, such as they are, would probably take on an air of malice if they were quite literally inescapable. I think I’d be one of the many people who annually jump overboard were I on a Margaritaville Cruise for longer than a day.
But the romantic in me likes to imagine another source of this dissatisfaction: there’s just something unfulfilling about a Margaritaville experience at sea, the sea being Margaritaville’s muse. What makes Buffett’s body of work so appealing to people working office jobs in Ohio or wherever8 is that it joins them in their ocean dreams, and elaborates on them. It gifts those dreams shape, heft, and texture.
The song “Margaritaville” is actually about a day on the beach that kind of sucks. The man is limping home on a broken shoe and a bloody foot to make himself a margarita that will restore his will to live. But what Buffett is doing here is illustrating the exotic category of concerns that might await Joe Schmoe if he, too, were to drop everything, tell his boss to go fuck himself, and take up residence in Key West. “Another goddamn day in the office, am I right?” is what “Margaritaville” asks, but the office is a thatch hut on the beach.
It’s somehow a relatable song about being a beach bum. It emphasizes the distance between Mr. Schmoe and Key West by presenting a quotidian scene9 that echoes Mr. Schmoe’s daily ordinaries to depict a foreign and more desirable “normal.” This distance is not an obstacle to pleasure, but its essence. The siren’s call is music all the way up until you jump into the sea and crash up against the rocks.
As such, Margaritaville Times Square NYC is probably one of the purest Margaritaville experiences out there. All the things that don’t work about it are charming in their failure. They are, after all, reaching for something unreachable, and so become tributes to yearning itself; that silly, clumsy, doomed endeavor that, no matter how many books or poems we read, we’ve yet to outsmart.
It’s with all this in mind that I join Margaritaville’s immense replica of the Statue of Liberty in raising my glass high. My feet were burnt. Mediocre-to-bad10 food and sugary cocktails were sloshing around in my gut. But I nonetheless left Margaritaville, and returned myself to my sweltering concrete island, feeling restored.
“I enjoyed myself on a metaphysical level but not a physical one” is probably not what most resorts are really going for, but there it is.
And re-turned to, but, also, an exit. See sortie.
I’m sure they were lurking around somewhere, probably in the elevator bank, but, like the ambulances below, they, too, were outcompeted by Benson Boone, the male cover of “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, and “Soul Sister” by Train, a song only out-sinistered by the tune that immediately greeted me, “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke.
Resorts, hotels, restaurants, and shops, all added together, yield a different number.
SIXTY LES, if you’re reading this, get in touch.
I was disappointed that Margaritaville didn’t have Jimmy Buffett propaganda everywhere. I didn’t get a culty vibe from Margaritaville, really. I was kind of hoping to see statues of Jimmy Buffett, to see him venerated like a steppe warlord.
Really? Not even an attempt at theming? What about, like, The Bean Hut or something? A shack of sorts? The Coffee Shack, maybe? Can someone show up to work at HQ?
If it matters, reader, my chosen examples for “generic landlocked location in the USA” has inspired some reflection on my prejudices.
As well as a recognizable, only half-ironic sentiment of “one day I might really end it all, but not today,” that’s common enough in the American public that it’s as relatable as shitty, complimentary coffee in the office.
Actually, just “bad,” no?
My coworker and I stayed in Margaritaville San Diego for a conference last year and I forwarded this to her and we both scream laughed at our desks. But one of my favorite mysteries of the experience was seeing the phrase "Fins Up" everywhere and we were like "what does that mean? Is it like...a surfboard thing or...sharks...or what..." and then we googled it and ParrotHeads are not even clear on what it means exactly, just like a general expression of good vibes.
This reminds me of David Foster Wallace's essay about the hell of having fun on a cruise ship, except more concise and playful. Keep up this series!