An Apple Martini For The Teacher

If you strike out in Chelsea with inebriated underage suburban girls you can always troll Moe’s in Fort Greene for inebriated 30-something schoolteachers:

Just after 4:30 p.m. on a sunny Friday, Matt Barnes and his friends were impatiently waiting for someone to let them into Moe’s, a neighborhood bar at Lafayette and Portland Avenues in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Mr. Barnes and his companions, however, were hardly the shiftless types some might associate with afternoon drinking. They are public school teachers, and in late afternoons, especially on Fridays, Moe’s is a place where pedagogues go to party.

“Female teachers are the wildest girls,” said Mr. Barnes, a 35-year-old with a shaved head and thick arms covered with tattoos that surely impress the young delinquents that he teaches at Passages Academy, a public school program that operates in detention centers.

Among those who spend their days at the chalkboard, Moe’s is known as a teacher bar, one of many spots around the city where instructors drink, flirt and gossip about their students after school lets out.

Veronica York, a bartender at Moe’s, takes this distinction seriously. She has marked the last day of school, which this year is Wednesday, on her calendar, to remind her to tell the bar staff to come in early. “We love teachers,” she said the other day, filling a pint glass with beer. “We get them ripped.”

. . .

Among the earliest arrivals at Moe’s this Friday was a clique of young women from the Community Partnership Charter School, a few blocks from the bar. They sat around a low table drinking pints of Hoegaarden, a Belgian white beer, and grumbling about colleagues who brag about their students’ standardized test scores.

Mr. Barnes ambled over, and within a few minutes, he sidled up to Nicole Gunther, a 30-year-old kindergarten teacher wearing a zebra-print top and a chili pepper pendant on a gold chain around her neck. Taking out a digital camera, Ms. Gunther showed off a photograph of some of her kindergartners gathered around a handsome, broad-shouldered man.

“That’s one of the dads,” she said as Mr. Barnes leaned in for a better look. “Hot dad,” she added dryly.