Observations From a Dive Bar

If you subscribe to my weekly newsletter, you saw a vignette I posted last week about a visit to Kay’s, a neighborhood bar and Portland institution. Like any good dive bar, it has a long history written in human lives, from the resident ghost to the regulars who included former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts. It is a fantastic place that oozes history.

You have to subscribe to catch pieces like that, but here’s how it started:

Our target was Kay’s, one of three dive bars within fifty feet of each other in downtown Sellwood. Denizens of Sellwood sort themselves by bar. Some are fans of the Limelight across the street, which has a larger food menu and attached restaurant, or the Cosmo Lounge next door, which serves no food at all. Kay’s however, is the only place with a $7 burger, and a taplist that would shame some of the beer bars in town.

I’ve been spending more time in dive bars this year than I have in ages. Portland has a premier selection, which would be surprising if you didn’t know the city’s history. You’d think the price of a square foot of land here combined with the competition of breweries, taprooms, beer bars, cocktail bars, sake bars (there are several) would squeeze out the old taverns. Fortunately, a whole lot of them have survived the decades thanks to innovative city planning starting in the 1960s, so they’re paid off and still standing. That plus Portland’s well-established affection for the gritty and characterful has seen them through thick and thin times.

My professional need to visit breweries has cut into dive bar time, but for some reason, this year I’ve been hitting them more often, mostly because of the same emotional need that drives me to watch reruns of The Rockford Files on Amazon. And the main thing I’ve learned is: I’m not alone. Brewery taprooms may be struggling, but dive bars are as lively as ever.

They start filling up before five and buzz with the chatter of conversation, the clack of cue balls, and the clink of glassware until long after my bed time. Breweries and brewery taprooms have had it tough since Covid, by contrast, and have a hard time filling up even on weekend nights. Dive bars are open until 2am; most breweries close at 9pm.

Dive bars have certain advantages that are more evident in 2024 than they were 2018. They appeal to younger drinkers, in part because the liquor is cheaper there. (Beer isn’t, for the most part, or not by a lot.) the food is often a lot cheaper. Kay’s offers a $7 burger, which ensured they were cheek to jowl when I arrived at 6:08pm last week. They also attract older drinkers, but typically figures who, in my youth, we used to call “colorful”—the kind of people who only seem to exist within dive bars.*

Craft breweries seem to attract a more transient audience, whereas the bread and butter of the neighborhood dive bar is its regulars. That creates a certain homey vibe that complements the worn Naugahyde booths and barstools. Everything and everyone is comfortably worn in a dive bar.

(This is almost certainly specific to Portland/Oregon, but the taplists are at worst meh and often world-class. You have to squint to read Kay’s offerings, but they include a barrel-aged porter, beers by Breakside and Great Notion, and Sierra Nevada Celebration. Just a regular Wednesday night.)

When I first started my drinking life in the dive bars of the 1980s, they were the same (literally, the same bars), but also different. Because they’re so self-sufficient as businesses, requiring no advertising or even Instagram accounts, they often fall into disrepair. From the late ‘70s into the early ‘90s, Oregon’s economy was pretty bad. The old bars had slowly moldered, becoming ever more saturated with cigarette smoke.

Today’s dive bars are in better shape. A duo in town, Warren Boothby and Marcus Archambeault, have been buying of classic old dive bars and restoring them in all the ways you can’t see—fixing the plumbing and joists, replacing those squashy, beer-soaked floor boards and suspect draft lines—but leaving them intact in the ways you can. All the old tchotchkes and art are preserved, the feeling of continuity, but without the layer of dust. They’re not the only ones fixing up these places—Kay’s, which dates to 1934, was neat as a pin with newly reupholstered horseshoe booths.

I think there’s something in these old places that craft breweries might seek to emulate. It’s impossible to create decades of history, but a lived-in feel can be manufactured. Seating can be comfortable and welcoming rather than hard and off-putting. It was great when brewpubs reintroduced windows to drinking, but they seem to have overshot that impulse and are now too brightly lit. The clutter and closeness of the dive bar somehow keeps the din at acceptable levels; the taproom ethos seems to favor cavernous spaces with hard surfaces that reflect sound.

I love breweries, as I think you all know. I Still spend most of my drinking time in them. My current fantasy, however, is combing the dive bar and brewery experience. If I were going to start a brewery, I’d figure out how to make the brewing space as cheap as possible, and look for an old neighborhood pub to buy as the drinking space. This is certainly not a universal solution, but it’s a pleasant daydream.

But more seriously, I think breweries should visit a few dive bars and remind themselves of why they work so well. Cozy, comfortable, a little dim, and full of character goes a long way.

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* Lest you think this is a pejorative description, let me assure you it’s not. I have been practicing my whole life for the role of colorful barfly, a graduation from this tiresome working life of semi-respectability.