From Miller Lite to ... mojitos
Once upon a time, $2 beers were everywhere in Somerville. Today some devotees worry, is it dive bars' last call?
- |
As Somerville's fortunes have gone up, its dive bars seem to have taken a dive.
In the '70s and '80s, recalled East Somerville bar owner Michael Philpot, Davis Square was so down and out it didn't even have a
In Union Square not even a decade ago, a bar called Tabs had cots in the basement for the regulars; now the cleaned-up space features live blues music as Sally O'Brien's. Bargoers who smoked cigarettes and watched VHS movies at Irish Eyes around the corner might not recognize what the place has become - Cantina La Mexicana, decorated with buttery gold paint and serving up Italian liqueurs. The Abbey Lounge off Inman Square turned into a music venue about 10 years ago; this month it has been running benefit shows to try to stay afloat. Even the stalwart Mt. Vernon at Sullivan Square has microbrews on tap.
But though some dives may be fading away like foam on beer, a pair of recent bar crawls showed that they haven't all gone the way of Whitey Bulger. Some old places have a new appeal, and some new places have a classic neighborhood feel . . . for the neighborhood's new demographic.
"There are bad dives and there are good dives," said Doberman, at 41 the youngest man in the room. "They're just no-frills bars where the point is drinking."
Cheap drinking.
"You can go in with a twenty, have a couple of drinks, and have enough change to take the bus home," Doberman said.
True, fancier beers such as Stella Artois and UFO Hefeweizen have become standard in dives, according to Doberman. Twenty years ago, "you would pretty much have Bud or Michelob, you would have
Back then, Doberman recalled, when he asked for Jim Beam at Olde Magoun's on Medford Street, the bartender responded, "What is this, the yuppie bar?"
A musician and former rock club manager, Doberman could spin a story about any bar in the city - including those cots in the Tabs basement, which "had obviously been recently slept in." He occasionally goes on bar crawls with his group, the Boston Knuckleheads.
He's a little wistful for old Davis Square.
"I miss the old Rosebud, pre-Rosebud Diner, in Davis Square a lot. I mean, that was great. You could basically have your hangover breakfast and a couple of screwdrivers for like seven bucks."
But Doberman doesn't miss the Cadillac Lounge down the block - now the classy restaurant
"It was a coke den," he said.
The Red Line T station, which arrived at Davis Square in 1984, changed the landscape. Not so much for Broadway in mainly working-class East Somerville on the Orange Line. That street is ground zero for bars, including the Mt. Vernon, that retain their old character and clientele.
In cool and cavernous Khoury's State Spa, the next stop on our tour, five men drank in front of the Sci-Fi Channel, NBC, Keno, and racks of chips.
"For the young lady?" the bartender asked. The Bud, Miller Lite, and shot of Jim that Doberman and I ordered cost about $8.
In general a dive can stay in business because someone's always there, Doberman said. Almost all open by noon to serve patrons who work the third shift - in Somerville's industrial Inner Belt area, for example.
"The real people come here," said Philpot, who has co-owned Casey's since 1994 (on a handshake deal, he said) and insisted on providing his famous steak tips.
He paused to mock a regular, who had sent two beers down to the visitors. Philpot continued, "Everybody comes in; everybody knows everybody."
Maria Taesil Hudson, 35, there for the first time, loved it: "Really nice vibe, food is awesome." She said she thought East Somerville, where she lives, "needs a place like Highland Kitchen because I think there are a lot of young professionals there. I'm all about East Somerville. . . . I love it. It's a great mix of people."
None of the patrons interviewed at Highland had come to the restaurant's predecessors, Virgie's Rendezvous Café and Devlin's. Ankur Ghosh, 29, said he thought they were dark and dirty. He added, "It was always full of people but they were, like, all old men."
But despite its more upscale appearance and menu, Highland Kitchen shared some traits with the East Somerville dives. No suits and ties here, and the clientele mostly come from the neighborhood, Ghosh said: "It's the same people you see over and over again."
For Erik Heffernan, 27, who usually sits at the bar, the restaurant simply met the basics. "Good food, good drinks, jukebox - what more could you ask for?"
Then there are bars that look the same but attract a wider crowd than in days of old. Down the hill from Highland Kitchen, a handful of people watched the Sox rack up runs from the wood-paneled environs of Razzy's, drinking fizzy beers and munching on free popcorn.
Amanda Sweet, 37, of Somerville, said she loves Highland Kitchen. "At the same time I love places like this," she said of Razzy's. "It's inviting."
"You don't want to dress up all the time," said her companion, Michael Pratt, 38, who works in advertising.
The stereotypical patrons of this bar might be the four big guys sitting at a table.
"For us, this is our place - we grew up around the corner," said Richard Jose, 23. But he said he liked the wider range of patrons, especially the Friday-night karaoke crowd. "It's better because you can meet new people."
In contrast, when his friend Richard Cali, 23, goes to Tavern on the Hill in Magoun Square, "it's like a high school reunion."
"Look at it - it's the only bar where every sort of person is here," Cali said, looking around Razzy's. "It's cool."
When he sold it about seven years ago - the no-smoking rule hurt business, he said, and no one in the family wanted to take the bar over - it became Li'l Vinny's, an Italian restaurant. Now 65 (or, as he put it, "older than paint") he works Mondays at Casey's.
"The neighborhoods are not the same, you know," he said. "No more factories are here, where people used to drink in the morning."
Danny's opened at 8 a.m., he said; at 11 a.m. on a September Monday, Casey's had only one patron.
Especially in "cosmopolitan" Davis, patrons want food, entertainment, sports. Some of the five bars that used to be in Magoun "didn't have TVs in them . . . it was all conversation," said Iandoli.
"The neighborhood bar . . . I'm sure is just a thing of the past," he said.
But maybe it's still there in a slightly different guise. Coleman's, between Casey's and Khoury's on East Broadway, appeared to be a casualty of new demographics - becoming Fasika, an Ethiopian restaurant.
First impressions were misleading, though. Inside, the left side of the space looked like an Ethiopian restaurant. The other side looked like Coleman's, with a mirrored Michelob sign and boxes of Franzia on the wall.
"Not all demographic shifts are upscale," Doberman said. "As the neighborhood has changed, so has this place."
Doberman said he got a kick out of the transition: "Everybody is coexisting here. It's great."
Showing, perhaps, that the more things change, the more they remain the same, and that all Somervillians - Ethiopians, young professionals, Italian old-timers - want pretty much the same thing.
"It would be a shame if it got completely taken off the table, this option," Doberman said. "Friendly service, cheap drinks."
