What is a Dive Bar?

A dive bar is sacred ground. It is a place where time has slowed. It has specific qualities, qualities everyone knows when they see them, but no one can properly enumerate outside the doors of such an institution. You know one when you’re in one.

I met my fellow founder and partner in crime, Pie Hole Willie, at a dive bar in Chicago recently, where we drank good beer, ate take-out Pakistani food, and tried to figure out how to determine when a bar is dive. But we couldn’t come to an agreement, so we wrestled, and I stabbed him in the shoulder with an olive fork. But there’s no reason to fight. The easiest way to determine if a bar is a dive bar is to ask the people who work there.

We were supposed to meet for dinner at Khan barbeque on Devon. For those of you unfamiliar with Devon, it is the North African, Pakistani, Indian corridor of Chicago. Every other store sells glamourous saris and sherwanis, cell phones, or is a restaurant serving a very regionally specific food. The people are dressed in traditional Indian, Pakistani, and North African clothing. Walking east along the sidewalk, one passes through conversations in at least four languages, at least two of them about the adjacent traffic on Devon, which for the twenty or so blocks between McCormick and Ridge is indistinguishable from traffic in Cairo or Mumbai. The only things missing are Tuk Tuks and mules.

Shoved into the dusty storefronts on the Southside of the street is Cary’s Lounge, a bar we didn’t even know about. They’ve been there 50 years, serving booze in a neighborhood where 90% of the residents are forbidden to drink. As soon as I walked in and took my favorite seat at any joint, right on the corner looking straight down the bar, I knew I was in the presence of royalty. I realized Cary’s set the bar for any other establishment to label itself dive. Cary’s is a crown jewel of Dive bars, and I have decreed it the template against which other dive bars shall be judged.

Death by Dive Bar is a place for love letters to those taverns and lounges that capture our hearts for their tenacity as much as for their decor or lack of it. What constitutes a dive bar, as we learned during our evening at Cary’s, is nebulous and undefinable. Some of the artifacts at Cary’s seem mandatory, and some seem to be exactly the right ornamentation to fulfill an idea of a great drinking joint one can just dive right into. The origins of the sobriquet are from the gaslight era and describe cheap and probably illegal basement drinking establishments run out of basement spaces called dives. They were cheap, below street level, and aggressively non-descript. They were out of view. You wouldn’t run into people you know. Unless the people you knew were the people at the bar.

Today, there aren’t a lot of basement bars, and the ones you find (in Chicago: The Library, Streeters, Watershed) are shabby chic and ever so slightly snooty. They are not proper dives. A proper dive is hyper-local. It’s not a destination bar. It’s not listed in Time Out. It’s unknown.

Cary’s offers the perfect set-up: a narrow shotgun bar running from the door to a single pool table in the back. The bathrooms are microscopic. It’s dark. The music is either perfect or fucking awful depending on the bartender on duty. There’s a middle-aged dude in an obscene Hawaiian shirt who seems to know everyone, so he changes stools constantly, moving up and down the bar as the night goes on. There’s a bar cat, Mel, implacable and indifferent, assured in its lordship. Dogs are allowed. They don’t serve food, but you can order out and eat at the bar. Their draft list is impressive. Their spirits list is alright, but it’s mostly Beam and Jack. Mostly Jose and Tito.

The bartender is a ruby-haired, well-inked woman, Donna, who steps into our conversation and takes over–which we’re fine with because she’s hilarious and loud and right. She runs down their list of Malörtica from a Malortarita to Malortopia, a festival celebrating Jepson’s maliciously bitter spirit. African masks line every square inch of wall space that isn’t taken up by a Chicago mural. There’s a game on the TV, but you have to sit close to hear it. If you bring some brats, there’s a grill out back.

I get a sour beer with grapefruit back notes. Pie Hole gets Ninja Unicorn. We settle in. We never leave. Hell, we’re still there now.