Author by : D.C. Copeland

It’s Wednesday night and I’m sitting in Churchill’s Pub on N.E. 2nd Avenue and 55th Street in Miami. It’s ran by Dave Daniels, a Brit expatriate and everything about it is British– including its interior which looks like something left over from the London bombings of World War II. Daniels describes the place on the outside wall as “sort of an English pub.” It’s got the Union Jack and a silhouette of Churchill painted on the walls just to confuse you. And let’s not forget the two derelict double-decker busses sitting in the unpaved, rock strewn parking lot. The menu includes the expected pub fare of shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash, but what brings me and my buds back week after week (besides Alex and Brooklyn the gorgeous tattooed barmaids) is Wednesday Curry Night. Done “London style,” it is the consensus of curry eating connoisseurs who join me that it is the hottest curry known to man.

I consider the regulars in my group members of the “Curry Eaters Club.” Only the worthy can sit with us at one of the plastic lounge tables scattered on the opposite side of the dark bar. On any given Wednesday night you can find the face of Miami in this bar: Haitian, Cuban, some variety of South American, WASP, and Jew. And the young and old too. If you’re not there to make your eyes water and your nose run from the curry, you’re there to drink, shoot pool, hang out with your friends at the bar, watch soccer on the TVs and, later, listen to live rock music (or jazz on Monday’s) around 10 pm. In fact, Churchill’s is one of the few places left in Miami where you can hear live rock and has become legendary for championing new bands. Many are young kid slammers and screamers who seem to be working out their anger management issues on the pub’s minimalist stage. Still, you never know what kind of band will play that night.

I remember a couple of weeks ago, a young Alabama girl carrying an acoustic guitar almost as big as she was, got up and sang songs she had written that were eerily reminiscent of folkie stuff from the fifties. If it hadn’t been for the crowd sitting around the bar cheering on some obscure soccer team’s goal on TV, I would have sworn I had been transported back to Greenwich Village at the height of the folk music era half-a-century ago (not that I was actually there, I only read about it). Of course, members of the Curry Eaters Club, could care less who’s playing as long as the music and the entourage that follows the bands don’t interfere with our mission and very little, even a drunken rowdy crashing into our table will cause us to pause from the club’s agenda. Oh, yeah, you’re more than welcome to join us at the table, but crybabies need not apply.

[tags]Miami,Florida,restaurant,pub,curry,live entertainment,local dive,live rock,jazz,unique experience[/tags]

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