The Ugly Mug

The Establishment

"The Ugly Mug" pub is located in the Eastern Market area, in the Capitol Hill district, right in the American capital. Although I have already told you about Eastern Market in a previous post, I didn't tell you about this pub which deserves its own post.

The place inside is quite big and is divided in two, one with the bar which has a lot of spaces and tall tables and the other half has sofas, chairs and low tables. The walls are a reddish colour and they have different posters hanging up, some advertising future events or special menus and others have funny sayings on them which refer to when you drink too much in a bar, it seems original and entertaining to me.

There are various TV's all over the place, more than 6, and they don't all show the same thing. When there are important sporting events, you can come to watch them in the bar, they even have a special menu for when the NBA is on. On the other side, on one of the screens they were showing women's free fighting which didn't seem nice at all to me, there was also a screen just opposite and another one on one of the sides that had the same position.

Food and drinks menu

We chose this bar because it serves the mythical green beer on Saint Patrick's day but we only ordered one per person since the point was to have at least one green beer in our lives, but then we ordered other drinks and fries. They have a large variety of beers, cocktails and mixed drinks.

They also had food - you don't understand how thankful we were for the well-cooked fries after drinking the beers. The food menu offers the following dishes:

• Entrées: There are all sorts of entrées, from nachos and jalapeños, to fries, chicken wings and fried calamari, fried mozzarella sticks and other things I didn't understand because the menu was in English.
• Soups and salads
• Hamburgers: they have 8 types of hamburgers which all look really good and come with fries. But, if you prefer something else to accompany your burger, for an additional 2$ you can change the fries for a Caesar salad or sweet potato fries. (I just stuck with normal fries).
• Pizzas: they have a large variety of pizzas, more than 15 kinds in total. Amongst them, I managed to find Margarita, pepperoni, vegetarian, cheeseburger pizza... I didn't order any of them, but next time I will because I really wanted to.
• Sandwiches: they have 10 types of sandwich, from vegetarian ones to chicken, etc. That's normal in the United States.

Live music and Karaoke

The live music was, of course, the icing on the cake. At first, I thought they were just playing a CD, they sounded like adapted Taylor Swift songs, they were slower. When we left the table, we saw that it wasn't a CD being played, but there were people who were performing the whole time. I really loved it, I listened to two different duets and they were both great. They were playing the same sort of music that is usually played during road-trips in films. We clapped like crazy and when we left, the musicians said goodbye to us.

Every Thursday evening there is karaoke and my friends said that we have to go sometime soon because the atmosphere is so good and people sing all around the bar and the pub.

Service and prices

Service in the bar is good in general, the two waiters who had served me were friendly and they were waiting to see if we wanted anything else. They asked for my ID card to check that I was older than 21 (the legal drinking age in the United States); I don't know if them asking me was a compliment or an insult. We didn't have to pay as soon as we ordered, but we wanted to change table and they told us that we had to pay the bill first, which seemed bad to me seeing as you have to tip them, in my opinion, if I have to tip them, the least they could do is trust me and make things as easy as possible. The tipping situation really annoyed me because being the nice Spanish girl that I am, I understand tipping in a restaurant or place which has really good service, but not because they brought over my beer or fries to the table...

I have contradictory feelings towards the prices... In general, the prices are normal for drinks, somewhat expensive if you're Spanish and therefore used to beers for 1. 50€, however, since we were in Washington D. C., the prices are normal. A toasted Guinness costs 7$, the small green draft beer costs 4$, but during one of our visits, we had the great idea of having a tequila shot, thinking that it would be one of the cheapest things until we got the bill... When I saw 22$ for the tequila shots... you can imagine the look on my face. Even though it's not a pleasant drink to swallow, it would normally cost 3€ or 4€, and with not much more, you could buy the bottle (in the following photo you can see they are normal tequila shots, no gold flakes or anything special). I'm never going to trust my judgement in prices and thinking that just because they have drinks for normal prices that everything else will be normally priced too.

As for the prices of food, they were expensive which I think is normal since we were in Washington D. C. and it wasn't McDonald's. Hamburgers cost around 12$, the entrées were between 8$-12$, the pizzas were between 10$-12$, the soups and salads were between 7$-10$ and the sandwiches were 12$.

Opening hours and how to get there

the opening hours in The Ugly Mug are from Sunday to Thursday from 11am-2am and on Fridays and Saturdays they are open longer from 11am-3am.

To get there, the best thing to do is catch the metro and get off at the stop called "Eastern Market". The lines which go to this stop are the orange line, the silver line and the blue line; when you leave the metro, you have to turn to the right and go halfway down 8th street. You'll find it a few meters away from the Irish pub "Molly Malone's". I hope that you enjoyed this post, just don't order the tequila and have fun at the karaoke. Cheers!