Burwood Tap | Lincoln Park, Chicago

I hate this place. I cannot be more clear. I hate it more because it should be great. It should be a neighborhood bar with regulars in overalls and cheap beer and jovial, coarse barmaidens (with ample cleavage). It should be the place where your usual is getting poured as you walk in after work. Instead it’s filled with frat-douche drunks and their skank counterparts. The last one out should be the neighborhood drunk who stumbles home and spends some nights on the side walk. It shouldn’t be a ‘roided-up 20-year-old looking for a fight. That’s just not what it’s supposed to be.

Christ, the place is falling over. It couldn’t be more dive. They have popcorn and a Bugs Bunny poster in the window. It has all the trimmings of a great dive bar, minus the clientele. And the drinks are expensive. If I’m at risk of punching through the floor because of rat-eaten floor joists, I shouldn’t have to pay so much for a beer. The cocktails, however, are appropriately disgusting as they should be in all beer soaked dives. The gin and tonics are somehow rancid, only eclipsed in grossness by the rotting flesh odor emitted by the female ginkgo tree in the front.

And that’s what this place is — a ginkgo tree that seems like a great addition to the neighborhood but really justs emits an unpleasant funk.