Since playing a game dedicated to guessing the bar/restaurant based on an easily searchable bad review isn’t gonna work, I figure why not post some of the best-worst reviews in the Baltimore area and enjoy them for their obtuseness! This one comes to us courtesy of Yelp, wherein a guy from New York says a bunch of stuff about The Wire and somehow manages to work trustafarians into his review of everyone’s favorite generically named bar, BAR (corner of Lancaster and S. Regester, Fells Point):
Bar. The name says it all. That’s all it is. It’s a bar. They serve booze. But it’s not just a bar. It’s a dive bar. But not the kitschy funny haha kind of dive bar that trustafarian hipster art school types like to go to in order to prove how “authentic” and “down with the people” they are. No. This is a real dive bar. A scary kind of place. An old Baltimore kind of dive bar. A David Simon type of dive bar. The kind of place where you’d expect roaches, rats & spiders to crawl up your pant leg while sitting at the bar. The kind of bar where a bunch of thugs could run in at any moment, guns drawn, and rob everyone in the joint. The kind of place where you could unknowingly insult someone’s mother, and wind up dismembered in several duffle bags dumped by the side of the road in Timonium. This place is a shit hole. And if that all wasn’t bad enough, the owner is a Republican.
For the record, that last line is hilarious, and the owner Carol is awesome. If this guys thinks BAR is scary, he should probably check out some of those 3rd shift joints out in the industrial areas and rethink his definition (which brings to mind: what are Baltimore’s scariest bars?). I realize he’s trying very hard to be literary in his description but come on, BAR isn’t that bad, they’ve got a new wood floor and everything now!
The old china room might be one of the scariest. I saw a 30 person brawl spill out of there once, and have heard stories about hiding behind the bar to not get hit with flying furniture. I’ve heard they are trying to keep the riff raff out now though.
Yeah that’s an important distinction; thug scary vs. old creepy redneck scary – there was a bar we went through on the Dundalk bar crawl last summer that was pretty frigging uneasy like that, but no furniture was thrown.
There have been a few Fort Ave bar crawls where i’m pretty sure everyone in the bar wanted us to die horribly.
This review couldn’t be more spot on. My friends and I stop in every once in a while b/c the shots are dirt cheap. One of the highlights, in my opinion is that they don’t have a soda gun, just 2 liter’s of coke a pepsi for mixers. And to top it all off, I was in there one night and it was about week 5 of the NFL season and I said to my buddy during a casual NFL conversation that I felt like Pittsburgh would win the division and Baltimore would win the title. Well this personally offended the bar-tender and he started yelling about how crazy I was. Classic Baltimore homerism.