Victoria B.
Yelp
This has become the "eat, pray, love" of dive bars. Sometime during quarantine (when I wasn't looking), they replaced all the legit dive bar deco with banal sayings on dollar-store plaques in pastel colors. Imagine throw cushions that say "it's wine o'clock somewhere" and pablum like that. (Okay, maybe not cushions, but your maiden uncle would think the place was cute.) That's not how to run a dive bar.
There's a dive bar I know -- a legit one -- that has a shelf tucked in behind another shelf on the back of the bar which is full of random liquors, stuff that nobody drinks, like, maybe, bubblegum vodka or... and there's a handwritten sign on the shelf that says "$4 shots." It's been that way for years. It's known as the four-dollar shot shelf. (And yes, I have. And, no, NOT the bubblegome vodka, for godsakes.) This is what the Corner Pub used to be like but The Corner Pub has gone corporate. They've painted a big mockup of the Green Monster and have a formal fancy board that lists "brown bag shots" and "Mystery Beer." It's just not the same when it's scrubbed. It's like when mom sees that you're collecting beer can labels and decides to help out. Uh, mom.... Up the block there's another legit dive bar that has its wine list on a white board. It says: Red. White. That's it. No meta self-conscious aren't-we-cute stuff. While I was sipping my coors lite, I started to wonder if I'd imagined the earlier Corner Pub and so pulled out pictures. Nope. The Pub has changed, and not for the better.
Oh, you can still get cheap(ish) drinks and stoned bartenders. You can still get corned beef egg rolls (and other weird wonders of the dive world), but not as many, and not as cheap. Okay, I know, Covid forced everyone to streamline. But why wreck the dive vibe?