#8: The Corner Bar

I haven't been to the Corner Bar in a long time, but if you asked me yesterday, today and tomorrow where I felt like spending the evening and eating a crappy burrito, my answer would be the Corner Bar a thousand times over. Then, you'd wrinkle your nose at me and say, seriously?! And then I would shake my head and say, go on now, run along to Cheeseburger in Paradise, I'll catch up with you later. Now, after two or three consecutive years of trying and mostly failing to get people to go to the Corner Bar with me, I would like to make the official, written case for it (that is, of course, if my blog can be construed in any way as "official") in the hopes that just this once, I can make you people understand.

This place is a total hole in the wall. Its parking lot, last I checked, is one ginormous pothole. Inside, it smells partly like cigars and partly like carpet that has been steeping in beer spillage for several decades. The walls are adorned with vintage beer and booze posters -- not the shi-shi Guinness ones that have become de rigeur in Irish-themed pubs these days, but original tin ads for Schlitz and the like. All the tables are covered with wood-patterned melamine. There's an arcade game about bear-hunting. There's also an extensive beer list and a Humidor.

The deli sandwiches are tasty -- they make a mean Reuben -- but the burritos are glorious. There's nothing remotely Mexican-flavored about them, just a big lump of chicken and rice rolled into a flour tortilla and sopped in Pace picante sauce. The service is reliably terrible, just staggeringly awful, but so what? It was at the Corner Bar that I played my first game of Worst Song on the Jukebox on one of those new-fangled digital jukeboxes, where you get several friends to play the worst song they can think of (the object is to get everyone to acknowledge that your song was even worse than the one they chose). Funny, though, the crowd at the Corner Bar didn't seem to mind, or even notice.

The place is 100% unpretentious. There's not a trace of irony or self-referential smirking about it. It's just good beer, good cigars (if you're into that), and passable bar food served -- whenever the waitress remembers she's on the clock -- in a wholly un-flashy environment. The cocktails don't cost eight dollars, nobody has to go skulk outside to smoke, and you can hear yourself think. This is all I could ever ask of a bar. Usually, there's an element of "the only thing I don't like about that place is..." but with the Corner Bar, I can't think of a single thing.