I was sipping a beer on the patio behind Ten Cat Tavern with my friend Charlie, debating which was the better Chicago bar: the Long Room up the street, or the Ten Cat.

The Long Room was a neighborhood bar that had once been a dive bar. Ten Cat, according to Yelp, is a dive bar now.

This requires explanation. For old-school relics like me, calling a tavern a dive bar has not, historically, been a compliment. When we moved into the neighborhood thirty years ago, the Long Room was Blue Bird Liquors, a Chicago dive bar in the traditional mold — a combination packaged-goods store and neighborhood shot-and-a-beer joint.

Blue Bird Liquors didn’t have the wall of TVs obligatory in modern bars. Considering how dark it was, I’m not 100 percent sure it had electricity. What little I knew about it I got from Tom, the trumpet-playing homeless guy we hired to live in our basement while we gut-rehabbed the upstairs.

Tom would play his trumpet on the streets during the day, and at night spend his earnings in Blue Bird Liquors. Occasionally a fight would break out — to be expected in a dive bar. It wasn’t a place to bring a date.

Time passed and the Blue Bird evolved into the Long Room, which was more respectable. The neighborhood became popular with young professionals, who had no acquaintance with actual dive bars and applied the term ironically.

That explained the Ten Cat. It was a reimagined dive bar, displaying what I’d call curated divey-ness and offering a “Chicago Handshake,” a traditional concoction consisting of an Old Style beer and a shot of Jeppson’s Malört, a bitter liqueur with notes of grapefruit, sweat and gasoline.

I preferred the Long Room, so named because it was, in fact, a long room, having been pared to the essentials: a) a bar, which is necessarily longitudinal; b) a row of bar tables, and c) an aisle leading to the bathroom, addressing a core human need.

The Long Room was reliable in such matters. It had an impressive selection of craft beers. You could get a good hamburger.

It had no TVs, the one thing unchanged from its dive-bar days. Just a few quiet corners for discussing consequential matters.

It provided everything a human being requires — and it was a two-minute walk from my house. I didn’t even need to cross the street. What could possibly beat that?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2024 World edition.

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