Adams Mill Bar & Grill
202-332-9577
1813 Adams Mill Rd. NW, Washington, DC 20009
As anyone who has ever lived in New York knows, every weekend is oversaturated with birthday parties, work gatherings, and any other sort of excuse to get together with friends and acquaintainces and get unreasonably drunk. New Yorkers are especially fond of the flat fee open bar party. I suspect this is a commentary on the lack of space in New York and the limited ability for its residents to have house parties, so bars allow you to rope off a space, take a floor of the bar and replicate a private party at your own home.
However, due to the fact that most bars in the city offer such a service, open bar parties are constantly being thrown, and they usually aren’t cheap. Unless it’s a good friend, in which case you would likely plan on spending the entire evening at the party, it rarely is worth the $50+ fee for a few watered down vodka & sodas.
Enter Adams Mill. In my quest to find a fun birthday spot for a party I was throwing for my boyfriend, I wanted to find a place that made the event as simple as possible. When you are throwing a party for a dude, you must keep only a few things in mind: booze, music, more booze and proximity to late night pizza. After unsuccesfully discussing a potential party with many locations, I found most places had a high barrier to entry, such as a high room rental fee, expensive bar tab minimums and an unusual clause in which I was asked to give my firstborn child to the bar.
Adams Mill is a dive bar in Adams Morgan and has two upstairs floors available for private parties. We didn’t have to pay a room fee, so the only charge was $25 open bar for 3 hours, from 10pm-1am. We had the entire upstairs floor and the place was dive-y enough not to care when we pulled a table into the middle of the room and started playing flip cup. Warning: BRING YOUR IPOD. I am an equal opportunity music lover, so when they told me I could bring my own playlist, I got lazy and figured I would leave it up to the deejay downstairs. Oh wow. Mistake. Above the deafening noise of screamo, I could at one point hear a friend saying “They are playing Marilyn Manson at Hadley’s birthday party?” Luckily I was able to plug my iPhone into the speakers and play something a little more…jovial to liven the spirits of the party. Like, you know, a song that didn’t describe murdering puppies in gruesome detail. Save that for my holiday party…
The bartenders were awesome and accommodating, we had our own private space to hang out, everyone seemed to have a great time and the location turned out to be accesible to other bars after the fiesta had ended. If you are looking for a no frills, drinking equivalent to the pancake buffet at IHOP for your birthday party, Adams Mill it is.
Big Apple To The Beltway 