Serious Drinks Picks Chicago's Best Dive Bars

By Anthony Todd in Food on Jul 31, 2013 4:20PM

The L&L Tavern made both ours and Serious Drinks lists.

With all the talk lately about craft cocktails, tiki drinks, crazy infusions and celebrity mixologists, sometimes we long for a good dive bar. What makes a dive bar great? Where can you find awesome dive bars in Chicago? We took a stab at figuring all that out back in January with our (somewhat contentious) list of Chicago's Best Dive Bars. Serious Drinks put together their list and came to some different conclusions.

Amy Cavanaugh (now of Time Out) rounded up her favorite Dive Bars for Serious Drinks yesterday. At the same time, she came up with a pretty darn good set of qualifications for dive bars.

While I love places to get great cocktails, I also love places where I can only get PBR and where I won't even venture into the bathroom unless it's a dire emergency. The latter are dives. Dives also tend to be populated by old men, and the more old men in an establishment, the better things are going to be. A few more rules: if the bar even has a website, it should look like it was made in 1995. Dives have to be cheap—charging $6 for a can of cheap beer is putting on airs. There should be nothing remotely pretentious about a dive bar, and if I walk in wearing a sundress and ballet flats, I should feel overdressed.

Amy's picks include 5-6 of the ones on our list, but also some new entries: Club Foot, The Bob Inn and Carol's Pub. Check out the whole list here.