Apotheke: Very pricey and decidedly dicey

The Green Door by O. Henry is one of my favorite short stories. It is about the spirt of romance and adventure. O. Henry writes:

In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain–and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.

Going to Apotheke made me feel like the central character in the Green Door. Located in a narrow alleyway in Chinatown (called the “bloody angle” as former Chinese gangs used to duke it out here) one is suddenly confronted with a sign that says “Gold Flower Restaurant.” As you walk closer to the sign, you see a nondescript door that begs to be opened. You open the door and enter a cavernous dimly lit space that used to be an opium den but is now a high-end bar inspired by Feudal French apothecaries and resembling my high-school chemistry lab!

Drinks are organized by “what ails you” —  Aphrodisiacs, pain killers, stress relievers. Really cool spot but I left feeling like what ailed me most was the $75 tab and they did not seem to have a drink to cure this pain. Financial elixirs come with a price too!