If nostalgia could be found in a bottle, its label would read "The Vienna Inn". Draped in smoke and the smell of chili dogs and beer, the Inn celebrated its 33rd anniversary Monday by selling draught beer for a price befitting the occasion -- 33 cents.
During a break from behind the bar, Philip Abraham, owner Mike Abraham's son, spoke about the family business he has been involved in for the past nine years. Abraham, 30, works full-time managing the bar with his father, 73.
"I don't want to cater to people only once a year," said Abraham. What makes the pub special is its patrons. "Regulars" are more prominent than one-stop shoppers.
"A lot of these guys were at my bar mitzvah," said Abraham with a laugh. He and his wife Marie have two sons, Thomas, 3, and Jonathan, 20 months, whom they occasionally bring into the kitchen and allow to help out any way they can.
The Vienna Inn has a long history in town. In 1925, Mr. and Mrs. Clayton M. Feeser opened an ice cream parlor in the front room of their house on 120 Maple Avenue. It was later purchased by Mildred Coppock, who kept it running as a luncheonette and drug store, also selling candy and gifts.
In the mid-1950s the business was purchased by Fred and Madalin Reeves, with Coppock, now 90 and living in D.C., still holding ownership of the land.
The Reeveses turned the business into a bar named Freddy's Cafe, and ran it for five years. The business portion was again sold, this time in 1960 to Mike Abraham in 1960, who renamed it, what wife Mollie said was only appropriate, The Vienna Inn. The Abrahams now own the land with the building.
Over the years only minor changes to the structure have taken place, leaving the front of the pub nearly identical to its original architecture. "I may fix up a few things -- windows, I put in a new floor -- but I don't want to change the atmosphere," Philip Abraham said, looking at the paneled walls covered with trophies and t-shirts.
Only those who are relaxed and polite can fully enjoy the bar.
"You could sit at a table with strangers and by the end of the night be friends," said Mollie Abraham. "Unless you're uptight. But then you have no business being there."
Philip Abraham, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., spoke of the family tradition associated with the business. "My brother built the freezer I keep my hot dogs in," referring to the cooler in the kitchen.
He paused a moment and then glanced over the table to an older man sipping a beer. "Hey, Henry. When did we put that freezer in?"
Henry Kulesza has been a regular at the bar for "20 some-odd years." The exact number wasn't important, only that fact that he was a regular. Now retired from the refrigeration business, he helped put in the freezer in 1976. Philip Abraham's brother Mark is now a lawyer, and his sister Lynn owns the Calvert Grill in Alexandria.
The history of the establishment hangs in the dimly lit bar like the smoke from Mike Abraham's cigar. As one anonymous patron said when asked what a visitor should know about the Town of Vienna: "You're sittin' in it."
When Meyer H. (Mike) Abraham repaired the leaky ceiling in the Vienna Inn last year, it almost cost him his customers.
"Yeah, everybody got really mad at me and said the old ceiling had class before," he said with a grin. "The only reason I fixed it is because I couldn't nail up strips to patch it anymore. The nails kept falling out."
Not much else has changed at the Vienna Inn since Mike Abraham and his wife Mollie bought the business on Maple Avenue in downtown Vienna 25 years ago: not the beer, not the customers, not the wobbly wooden booths and not even the waitresses, Erma L. Parker and Dolores Knisley, two sisters who have worked there since before the Abrahams moved in.
It is a neighborhood tavern where pretensions and stress are left in the dusty parking lot, where politicians, construction workers and corporate executives drink beer together, eat 75-cent hot dogs and place $1 wagers on weekend football games.
"You can have a tough time just getting a place at the bar on Friday afternoons," said George Kirby, who works for a Reston-based trade association. "It can get four deep up there."
During lunch hours on weekdays, blue- and white-collar workers cram into the small tavern, while the line for it's take-out window near the bar frequently trails out the front door.
The only draft beers are Budweiser and Budweiser Light. The only song played at closing time is The Star Spangled Banner.
The mix of people accounts for much of the Inn's vibrancy.
"You get the older, retired people who come in the morning for breakfast, and business types, locals and blue-collar workers who go in around lunchtime and late afternoon," said Bill Gratz, executive director of a local insurance group and a 20-year veteran of the Inn.
"After work there's a good cross-section of people, and in the evening there's a good mix who play sports."
But beyond the customers, the chili dogs, cold beer and a jukebox filled with Frank Sinatra and Perry Como records, it is the proprietors, Mike and Mollie, who make the Inn click, who treat their employees and longtime patrons like family and who always have time to share some comfort -- and sometimes some money.
Mike Abraham has lent hundreds of dollars to friends on a handshake, and regularly donates food and money to local service organizations.
Abraham, 65, who keeps his round belly tucked behind wide suspenders, is called "a real friend" and "a fixture in Vienna" by those who have experienced his generosity.
Marie Kisner, Vienna town government spokeswoman, said that Mike is known for issuing blank checks for payment of his business license fees, Kisner said that he just tells the person in charge to fill in the proper amount.
"If you can't trust town hall, who can you trust?" Mike Abraham reasoned.
While some refer to Mike as a "prince", others see Mollie as the "joker" and affectionately call her the Donna Rickles of Vienna, after the caustic comedian Don Rickles.
Mollie, 59, keeps customers in line with an unyielding stare and razor-sharp wit.
Tom Miller, a local engineer who has stopped by the Inn for 15 years, said Mollie provides the free entertainment for the lunchtime crowds.
It's all in fun...I think," Miller said.
"Do you sit that way at home?" she once called to a burly beer drinker lounging with his work boots on the seat of a worn and chipped booth. "Do you put your feet on the furniture at home? Get them down!"
The man moved his feet.
"I like kibitzing with the customers," Mollie said. "I don't care who it is, every person is treated the same way in here. You don't have to be in the south to feel like it's down home."
When she is not shouting wisecracks at the customers in the bar, Mollie is calling shots as an umpire for the United States Tennis Association. "I've always been very active and really do love interacting with people," she explained.
Beyond the tavern and the tennis courts, Mollie's stage presence stretches to Alexandria politics: She is a member of the city's Democratic committee and serves as an auctioneer at fund-raisers for the Americans for Democratic Action, a nationwide lobbying group.
Mollie also served as a Washington-area delegate to the recent National Organization for Women convention in New Orleans.
"I'm not the ordinary person," she said.
Last year the Abrahams hired their 23-year-old son Philip as chef after he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY.
"He won't put out anything he wouldn't eat himself," said Mike Abraham, a compact man with soft, glistening eyes and a wide smile.
Mollie Abraham said her son's home-style cooking has helped the Inn survive in a competitive commercial district filled with fast-food franchises, lounges and diners.
"Philip came to work because we needed some help in the kitchen," she said. "Competition is keener than it's ever been...we're very lucky to have people come to us all the time. In business, there is no dedication -- nobody owes you a damn thing."
The inside of the Vienna Inn reflects the Abraham's relaxed, "glad-to-know-you" style. Its rough-hewn wooden walls are jammed with shelves of old beer cans, trophies won by the neighborhood sports teams that the Vienna Inn sponsors and hastily written cardboard signs for food and drink.
Parker, 53, and Knisley, 55, are the no-nonsense waitresses who, after more than 25 years at their trade, have made a science of serving chili dogs and beer to customers.
The two sisters, who have 10 children between, work fast and furiously, taking orders, spooning chili, pouring beer, working the cash register and dodging elbows and flippant remarks from wiseacres at the bar.
"Have I ever thought about leaving? Not really. I've had other job offers before but the Abrahams have been very good to me...we treat each other like family," said Parker.
Besides, she said, "There's a pretty good crowd in here most of the time. If someone bothers me, I just walk away cussing to myself and ignore it."
The outside of the tavern, built in 1925 as an ice cream parlor and sandwich shop, is deceptively delicate looking, with dainty begonias, periwinkles, impatiens and marigolds clustering outside.
The Inn looks like a quiet place for a cup of tea, until you open the door. "Usually people come to the door, stick their head in, and walk out," Kisner said. "If you didn't know it was a nice restaurant, you'd think it was a little rough."
Mike Abraham bought the Inn during a job as a used car salesman in the District. He said he thought that the bar business would be a better way to support his wife and three children.
Twenty-five years later, he still works 15-hour days, seven days a week. He closes the Inn for certain Jewish holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother's Day and Father's Day.
The "Vienna Inn Corner Club," a diverse group of men who claim one corner of the bar as their own every weekday afternoon, says the tavern's main attraction is its owners.
"The best thing about the Vienna Inn is the Abrahams...Mike is just a friend to everybody," said one club member.
But Mike Abraham shrugged at the mention of his philanthropy.
"This is just a crummy beer joint," he insisted. "People here find they can talk to the man alongside of them with no trouble, that's all."
