Life advice from a BK dive bar legend: ‘Do everything in sight’

Eater today ran a good long chat with Jeannie Talierco, the daytime face behind the bar at Hank’s Saloon for longer than most of you were in skinny diapers. Hank’s, as you may know, is the bar some of us have an extremely complicated relationship with, but Jeannie is easily the best part of it, a bartender who serves up that kind of raspy warmth that went out of style decades ago. The interview traces the history of the dive back some 40 years when Talierco was slinging drinks for iron workers. And it could mark the beginning of the end for Hank’s, which she says has about a year and a half left before it gets swallowed up by new construction.

From her decades slingin’ suds and watching Brooklyn change first hand, the Greenpoint native drops this advice: 

Where do you live now?
Benson-hoyst. It’s changed, everything’s changed. Everyone’s grown, gone, a lot of people are deceased. People change, you get older. So appreciate being young. Enjoy your life because it goes so quick. If I knew then what I know now, I’d be a real bad person. I’d go out and I’d do everything in sight.

Make sure to read the whole interview here, because Jeannie’s memories are better than a thousand Esquire magazine think pieces about the changing neighborhood combined.

Follow Tim, who hasn’t been kicked out of Hank’s in at least three weeks: @timdonnelly.

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