On a Great Bar

Last weekend, I celebrated my 33^rd birthday. In the run-up to the big day, I debated if I really wanted to do anything. Thirty-three felt like kind of a nothing year. Sure, at thirty, you can go all out, at thirty-five you might throw what passes for a rager in your mid-thirties, but the years between…well they’re sort of just another trip around the sun. Thankfully, with some patient coaxing from those I love, I decided to invite a few friends to a local bar for some casual drinks. It was the same thing I did last year, however, something about this year’s gathering got me thinking about the wonderful nature of a great local bar.

Living in Silver Lake, I’m blessed with an abundance of local bars. I talked about some of them during the Dodger Bar Crawl piece, but we’re SO blessed here that none of those bars will even factor into today’s essay.

Last year, I had my birthday at the Thirsty Crow. It’s a bar so close to my apartment that I walked over there during a power outage to charge my phone. It’s also the kind of bar I always dreamed of living near, a dark little dive with a horseshoe-shaped bar with an outdoor patio, a generous happy hour, and a stunning lack of deafening music playing for the sake of deafening music. We were able to grab a couple of tables in the back and have a grand old time chatting, laughing, and putting down our fair share of beers.

This year, I wanted to mix it up, so we headed to the Red Lion Tavern, an absolute legend of local spot. The Red Lion has been in Silver Lake for more than 60 years, showing Angelinos how great a German bar can be. They have a huge selection of European beers, great pretzels, and any kind of flattened and breaded meat or sausage you could hope for. It’s a perfect place to catch a soccer match or football game and an even better place to have a few drinks with friends.

Both of these bars remind me of the wonderful time I spent living in London during my senior year in college. During that time, I was introduced to the magic of pub culture. In England (and most of Europe) the pub isn’t just a place to knock back a couple of pints with the lads, it’s a place where you see friends, co-workers, neighbors, and family. It’s something we seem to lack in the United States: community hubs.

American bars are usually trendy, loud, dark, and exclusive. Pubs are places where there are more conversations than DJs and children running around rather than VIP sections. They’re places to socialize and have a bite to eat instead of yet another strobe-filled room where you spend fifteen minutes trying to flag down a bartender. I’m certainly not saying that England and the rest of Europe are bereft of those kinds of establishments, but the past two birthdays have really reminded me of the wonderful community that springs up around a classic local tavern.

Do you have a local spot like the Thirsty Crow or the Red Lion?