BOTTOMS UP!

Alex Neth

UNQUALIFIED
@
THE STADIUM INN

1909 Blake Street, Denver, Colorado
303-295-7974

Bar Review

There is a certain breed of bar in Denver. These are the neighborhood hangouts-- places like the Casual Lounge, A-Rap's, The Stadium Inn. What differentiates them from their booze-slinging brethren, apart from a general lack of give-a-shit, is obvious Quality.

Now, make no mistake. I believe the lack of Quality to be an attractive attribute in a bar. The sleazier the better, I say; bring on the Bud posters, broken benches and half-priced pitchers on Sunday morning. Give me a room full of 50-year-old women in jean shorts smoking Capris. I'll take that any day over a swanky joint full of the beautiful folk, so full of money, self-esteem and themselves. Quality. Who needs it?

A bar like The Stadium Inn, for instance, does just fine without. Located at the corner of Evans and Franklin, the Stadium has been ladling hooch to college kids and daytime drunks for, hell, about 40 or so years. The guy there last Thursday in the satin jacket wasn't looking for a martini, I can assure you. His lady friend wasn't carrying a Kate Spade bag. This is the kind of place where a college student who has been rolling for three days on a mixture of Dexedrine, Special K and Heineken can sleep in the afternoon, the kind of place where an out-of-work mechanic might find solace in an after-noon game of billiards. This is where mom goes to swill gin when the family isn't lookin'.

In short, this is the kind of bar I like. There are specials flying out of the wazoo, wherever that may be located-- free pool Monday through Friday from 5 to 8 pm, $4.50 pitchers, $1.75 vodka tonics. You aren't going to pay any LoDo craziness here, no $4.75 beers or $6.50 cocktails. They want you to drink cheap here. They know.

The folks who work at The Stadium understand you are here for a reason. They realize that, if you had a few more bucks in your pocket, you wouldn't be here. So they make it easy. How can you possibly dislike that? If you, like me, are hopelessly in love with the liquid friendliness, then this is as close to Mother Teresa in Calcutta as you are likely to get.

Shannon Rearrick knows, or is starting to. She started tending bar at the Stadium two weeks ago.

"This is my first bartending job," Rearrick said. "I used to work in hotel catering. It's pretty slow here during the day, but at night, I hear they make really good money."

The night, naturally, is when Rearrick wants to work.

"During the day, it's hard sometimes, because it's just a bunch of drunk, grumpy old men."

Ah. Grumpy drunks. Young Rearrick has hit the nail, shall we say, on the ol' head.

Grumpy drunks are what places like this-- neighborhood places-- are all about. Grumpy drunks mean grumpiness and drunkenness, and those elements preclude the presence of Quality. Quality means never having to say that you don't know where your pants are.

The absence of Quality has become a sales point. No less a crappiness expert than 5280 Magazine named the Stadium one of their "Best Dive Bars in Denver."

This is undoubtedly true.

The Stadium Inn could give lessons on being a dive. There is filth here that hasn't even been looked at since the Ford Administration, industrial carpet that wears the spew of a thousand bibulous evenings, customers who might actually be dead. There are mental institutions and school cafeterias that use the same color of interior paint-- pool water blue-- and prisons with more beers on tap (they generously offer Bud, Bud Light, and Avalanche, the last merely to appease the nighttime college crowd). There are rats who won't live in places like this without an owner-carries agreement, and roaches who would rather be crushed under a heel. But still we come. Because the alternative, the horrible alternative, is to find yourself at a place where the bartender has better things to do than serve you a drink, where the wait staff are all awaiting calls from their agents, and where the owner makes regular appearances in The Denver Newspaper. The alternative is to find oneself surrounded by obvious Quality. And who needs that?

Quality is nothing but a sharp needle in the eardrum. Give me lowered expectations, beer prices and sperm counts; the bars that keep our country sane are the bars that cater to the only denominator that matters. The Stadium Inn is a good place to drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon in a bottle on a rainy afternoon in August.

B