We Love Dive Bars

I started my bender, as the decal on the front door advised, at the Olde Northender.

It wasn’t 8 a.m., when the bar on Burlington’s North Street opens every day. But even 12 hours later, the motto seemed like good advice.

I was on a quest to find a new dive. Mine had always been Esox, the scuzzy Main Street institution that unceremoniously closed in August after almost 50 years.

There, the early-twenties version of me knew enough not to eat from the St. Patrick’s Day buffet that had been out for many hours, though my friends and I did convince a drunk bro that the pickled-egg liquid was green beer. (At our urging, he chugged a pint glass of it and promptly ran outside.)

We’d case the joint for empty pitchers, of which there were never enough, then drink PBR straight out of them like giant cups. Once, local hash smuggler Billy Greer, fresh out of federal prison and sitting at the bar, asked my husband the going rate for an ounce of weed.

I crocheted most of a blanket there one winter, careful not to let it drop on the sticky floor that, six years later, would ruin the bottom of my wedding dress.

Esox was a bar that a lot of people loved and just as many thought was gross.

Dives are like stuffed animals: a source of comfort whose tattiness is easily overlooked when it’s yours. It takes a while to warm up to a new one, but when you do, you don’t mind if it’s missing an eye. I haven’t hung out regularly in dives in about a decade, but even almost-40-year-olds need a bar to call home.

A true dive feels like it’s always been there — ancient the day it opened.

I’m not sure yet if the Olde Northender Pub is my replacement. The night of my crawl, the bar itself seemed to gently nudge me and my non-regular friends to its back deck, past the trophy case that displays the liquor license, the biggest prize of all. Out there, we could still hear the Janis Joplin B-sides blaring, and we could see the stars, but we hadn’t yet become part of the N’Ender universe. These relationships are built on patience and mutual trust.

For a long-ass time, dives have been the unpretentious refuge of all kinds of people. We don’t love them because they’re clean or cool or up-to-date on cocktail trends. Other than needing to be cheap and wet, the drinks are beside the point. So is food. There really shouldn’t be any, beyond the legally required minimum of a bag of chips or a microwavable Velveeta cup. Also, you can’t set out to open a dive. People will see right through it, even if the bathroom is always out of toilet paper. A true dive feels like it’s always been there — ancient the day it opened — and always will be.

It’s easy to say what disqualifies a place as a dive — $15 amaro cocktails, anything called a “small plate,” candles that make the bathroom smell nice. The “essence of a dive,” Joshua David Stein keenly observed in the online drinks publication Punch, “is an absence: absence of shtick and of pretense.” But identifying the tangible and intangible qualities that make a dive bar requires nothing short of a brain trust.

So I enlisted a few colleagues and dragged former Seven Days staffer Sally Pollak out of retirement to define the essential characteristics of a dive bar in Vermont — and then, of course, to go drinking at a few of them in order to figure out which magical confluence of qualities makes them … themselves. (Defining the undefinable is mostly feelings-based work, but that doesn’t mean it’s not rigorous.)

We pondered the physical factors — slightly terrifying bathrooms, the presence of pool tables, pull tabs, at least one guy who never seems to leave — as well as the intangibles; for instance, the way a dive can make a newcomer feel both utterly self-conscious and completely invisible. Then we did the hard but necessary labor of rating them on our very unofficial Dive-O-Meter. (See below.)

To paraphrase former U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, we knew a dive when we saw it. Feels like a dive but serves lobster rolls? Not a dive. (Sorry, Spanked Puppy. Also looking at you, T. Rugg’s, with your natural wine and oyster pop-ups.) Vast, echoey space? Nope. “Dive” and “cavernous” are not words that go together. (CCing: JP’s and Three Needs in Burlington and Gusto’s in Barre, which also has too much food.) We skipped some slam dunks (Last Stop, Winooski; Finnigan’s Pub, Burlington) because we wanted to get outside Chittenden County; some we didn’t include because we couldn’t get everywhere. (Jasper’s Tavern in Newport, the DBAG in Dover — we’ll be back for you.)

The six we chose are a mix of rural and not. From Barton to Rutland, we chatted with regulars, played some pool, watched bartenders quietly command the room and drank a few beers straight from the pitcher. At each of these establishments, the primary mission was to hang out, drink and generally steep in the miasma of humanity. And while these places might seem intimidating, it’s not actually scary to be at any of them. Each operates under a collective, unspoken agreement to maintain the harmony of the place. They’re sometimes rowdy but never at the expense of the bar.

While Seven Days food assignment editor Melissa Pasanen was at the Other Place in Burlington, 35-year OP regular Alan Fish handed her a note. “If you’re going to write about bars,” he said, “you’ve got to read this.” In elegant script, he shared the title and author of a famous New Yorker profile of McSorley’s Old Ale House in Manhattan, written by Joseph Mitchell in 1940.

Since 1854, its clientele included carpenters, bricklayers, teamsters, police officials, politicians, painters — even an anarchist whose politics didn’t align with the bar’s owner. They became friends anyway.

“In McSorley’s, the customers are self-sufficient; they never try to impress each other,” Mitchell wrote. “It is an utterly democratic place.”

That’s what makes dives work, then and now. Regulars at Two Shea’s in Rutland, one of the places we visited, are lawyers, judges, architects, GE workers, teachers, fellow bartenders and restaurant workers, ages “21 to 81,” co-owner Isabel Shea told me.

“There’s no sense of superiority in a dive bar. Everyone is there for the same reason: to have a drink and socialize,” she said. “It’s a really beautiful thing to be in a room filled with people living lives entirely different than your own.”

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A Place to Call Home

I made the rookie move of asking for a glass with my pitcher on my first visit to the OP in almost 35 years. At least I knew to call it the OP rather than the Other Place. Despite my faux pas, I sensed no judgment from the bartender at this locals’ bar in a college town that somehow manages to make everyone feel at home.

At the OP, regulars drink straight from 32-ounce plastic pitchers, like a Big Gulp of beer. During the 46-year-old bar’s early years, owners Tom and Deb Miller had a T-shirt made depicting a figure diving into a pitcher with the caption: “Burlington’s dive bar.”

Coincidentally, surely, “We’ve all fallen down the stairs to the bathroom,” a patron named Will said, with what sounded like a hint of pride. A buzz of barflies was happy to point out a large dent made by someone’s head in the orange wall at the foot of the threadbare carpeted steps. The tumble has never killed anyone, though the urine-saturated, graffiti-decorated john is no soft landing.

We’ve all fallen down the stairs to the bathroom.

will, op Patron

By contrast, the barroom is almost cozy — blue pressed-tin ceiling, worn wood-and-brick floor, more natural light than the average dive thanks to a roll-up glass garage door across the storefront. According to Burlington history buffs, the big window dates back to the 1970s when the bar was the Millard Fillmore, named after the 13th U.S. president.

The OP crew is tight but not closed. A man in his early seventies named Lew said he moved to Burlington from New York a few years ago and soon learned not to wear his Yankees hat into rabid Red Sox territory. Team allegiances aside, he has bonded enough with his newfound drinking buddies that “they’ve walked me home,” he said.

On a Wednesday in early September, Lew was part of the early wave. He left a little after 8 p.m., right before the Patriots’ season kickoff, when the demographic mix shifted with the arrival of several beefy younger lads in football jerseys.

It was the brackish hour at the OP, and an ebbing tide of old-timers mingled with younger Beantown fans. A clutch of twentysomethings claimed the pool table and ignored the game. One was dressed sharply in a tie and wide-shouldered jacket like a 1940s zoot-suiter; another sported an Elmer Fudd hat with earflaps. Many drank from pitchers.

The following Monday afternoon, I was sitting at the bar when the landline rang and 24-year-old bartender Oliver Duncan picked up to find someone asking about a job. Normally, he said, “It’s regulars who want me to name everyone at the bar and what’s on TV.”

Duncan, like many OP employees, frequented the spot before he started working there. He pours a lot of PBR but also no-nonsense drinks: Scotch on the rocks; whiskey and ginger. “We don’t squeeze fruit here or anything,” Duncan said.

When training, he learned to bring two tall wooden chairs out front for a pair of OP customers who have played chess there every Saturday afternoon for 25 years.

One of them, Alan Fish, was on his usual stool listening — though he talks quite a bit, too. That Monday, a next-gen regular, Carl Lawrence, 42, sat beside the 78-year-old Fish. The two reminisced about the OP’s big flour tacos: beef or bean — $3 for two, they thought — discontinued about a decade ago.

“You could live on them,” Fish said.

“I did for a while,” Lawrence agreed.

Among other tales, Fish shared an intergenerational OP gem about his late friend John Blaha, whose photo is framed behind the bar.

“It was closing time, and the bartender couldn’t get the stupid college students to leave,” Fish recounted with relish, “so John stood on the pool table and dropped trou.”

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NEK Neighborhood Bar

The motto of the Lake House Saloon is “Every beer has a story” — and there are some colorful ones kicking around the Barton bar. The saloon occupies a flat-roofed, gray clapboard building lit up by neon beer signs. From the porch, you can see the spire of the Conversion of St. Paul Church rising above the trees across the way. Looking down, you’ll find a place to snuff out a cigarette.

The saloon has existed as a gathering place in one form or another — waystation, dive bar, hotel, steak house — since the 1850s. It’s the only bar in Barton, and its on-and-off history as a dive is documented as far back as 1896. That year, the owner was “chastised in the newspaper for ‘dabbling in beer or liquor, and [letting] a lot of disreputable characters control affairs,’” according to A History of Barton, Vermont by Darlene Young. The proprietor’s wife got fed up and dumped a load of coal on the offending crowd in the basement. (The term “dive bar” comes from the 19th-century practice of subterranean drinking.)

A few decades back, in a lively era of the bar, a regular named Dave drove his boss’ lawn mower about half a mile from Crystal Lake to the saloon, where he parked it on the bottom step of the porch. Dave drank a beer or two and shot some pool before the bartender discovered the lopsided lawn mower and kicked him out.

Regulars at the Lake House are loyal but not exclusive.

“I was back the next Friday night,” said Dave, 63, who declined to give his last name. He’s a retired salesman who, on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, was still laughing it up with pals at the bar. The Lake House Saloon draws back regulars and old-timers as weeks turn to years turn to decades. Folks at the bar welcome rookies, too, with reasonable wariness.

“Gimme that fucking paper,” one man said to me. “Lemme write an article about you.”

Customers — who come from Glover, Irasburg, Newport, Westmore and other Northeast Kingdom towns — don’t necessarily view it as a dive bar. “A dive bar to me is a little sketchy. You go in with your eyes open,” said Walter Sophrin, 67, a retired stagehand from St. Johnsbury. ‘This is like a neighborhood bar.” The Lake House’s rowdier days are in the past, people told me. The place is nothing fancy, they said — just a hangout for working people and “native freaks,” in the words of the lawn mower driver.

The no-frills barroom is anchored by an L-shaped wooden bar. The liquor selection, which shares a shelf with a little U.S. flag, runs heavy on sweet and sticky: whipped vodka, rhubarb gin, wild grape liqueur. But the drinks of choice are $3 bottles of Budweiser and Michelob Ultra.

Lori Sterling, 55, was bartending that Sunday, a part-time gig for the Barton resident. During the week, Sterling is a paraeducator in Glover. Her two clienteles — kids and drinkers — share certain characteristics. Each group sometimes needs guidance, Sterling said. And the jobs require her to be both patient and on the lookout for “unexpected behavior.”

Regulars at the Lake House are loyal but not exclusive. A few people had come straight from Robbie’s Wildlife Refuge in Jeffersonville. One of them put his Robbie’s hat on the bar, next to a cup of beer, spent pull tickets and dollar bills.

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Values Added

From one night to the next, Babes Bar on Main Street in Bethel might be a dance club, a music venue, a karaoke bar or a place to test your skills against the best cribbage players in Windsor County. It was the hub for the fifth annual Bethel Pride Festival in June. It’s where workers from the Nolato plastics factory and Bethel Mills lumberyard belly up after their shifts.

And on Sunday afternoons in the fall, Babes is a sports bar where barflies, queer folks and jersey-clad NFL fans watch football to a soundtrack of Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and Prince.

On September 20, co-owner Owen Daniel-McCarter wore a backwards Green Bay Packers cap and long-sleeve Babes Bar T-shirt he’d tie-dyed green and gold and kept one anxious eye on the small TV in a corner above the bar. The Wisconsin native’s beloved Packers were trailing the lowly New York Jets by 10 in the fourth quarter. With his other eye, the bartender monitored the levels of pint and cocktail glasses along the wooden bar, which propped up a rogues’ gallery of day drinkers taking refuge from a drizzly afternoon to swap tall tales and well-worn jokes — and give Daniel-McCarter good-natured shit about his floundering team.

Meanwhile, Daniel-McCarter’s husband and Babes co-owner, Jesse Plotsky, worked the rest of the room, chatting up regulars and often ducking behind the bar to restock glassware. The couple’s dog, a Chihuahua mix named Tuna, skittered about the floor, sniffing out newcomers and stray popcorn.

As the Pack drove into Jets territory, Daniel-McCarter scooped up the tiny dog. “I know what to do,” he said, slipping a doggy Packers jersey over her wriggling body.

Moments later on the TV, quarterback Jordan Love hit Christian Watson for a Packers touchdown just as, on the stereo, Whitney Houston hit the apex of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” The 20 or so patrons erupted. A wiry older man in a matching camo jacket and hat high-fived a middle-aged woman drinking with her girlfriends. A younger dude in a Philadelphia Eagles jersey clinked glasses with a total stranger on the next stool over. Tuna returned to stalking popcorn.

As the playlist transitioned to Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” a woman complained to her companion, an older man. Neither had taken off their raincoats, despite being several beers into their afternoon.

“God, I hate this music,” she rasped. “Can’t we get some Journey or something?”

“Yeah, well. It is their bar,” the man responded. They both shrugged and sipped their beers.

Babes isn’t a dive in the strictest sense, though in its previous incarnation as the Bethel Depot it was a rather notorious one. Now, its bathrooms — confusingly located upstairs instead of in a subterranean dungeon, like at many dives — are spacious and clean. The second floor offers a cozy, quiet space outfitted with board games and books on gender identity and philosophy.

Still, there’s a busy pool table on the first floor and a covered deck for smokers overlooking the train tracks out back, so dive bar DNA flows through Babes’ veins. Or rather, its vein. You can get cocktails with fun names and choose from a deep bench of canned beer and cider. But there’s just one thing on draft: Miller High Life for $3 a pint.

I wouldn’t order a lobster roll here. It’d just be chopped-up hot dogs and mayonnaise.

Jesse Plotsky

Aside from free popcorn, the only food is a selection of hot dogs and sausages — like the High Life, a nod to the owners’ Midwestern roots, as is a general air of down-home conviviality. Upon learning that another customer was buying his next round, one regular joked, “Give me the lobster roll.” To which Plotsky quipped, “I wouldn’t order a lobster roll here. It’d just be chopped-up hot dogs and mayonnaise.”

Despite rumors that swirled before it opened in 2018, Babes is not a gay bar — nor is it, per other whispers at the time, a strip club. It is explicitly welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community, but it’s just as open to patrons of all backgrounds, orientations, viewpoints, means and, on Sundays, football affiliations.

“Everybody is welcome here, as long as they’re respectful,” Plotsky said.

And they generally are. At Babes, people seem to leave their differences in the parking lot. Next to a Honda Fit bearing stickers for a food co-op and Bernie Sanders loomed a hulking blue pickup whose rear window was plastered with decals and stickers. Among them was one reading LGBT. It stood for “Liberty, Guns, Beer, Trump.”

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Hippies, Rednecks and Rituals

We drove my friend’s Sprinter van to Robbie’s Wildlife Refuge in Jeffersonville on a recent Thursday evening. If the night got long, we were set: BYOB. (Bring your own bed.)

Robbie’s is off Route 15, in a low-slung building with a sprawling parking lot in front and a volleyball court out back. The barroom has a drab rug and a dank (not that kind of dank) smell. Both fade away as you get into the Robbie’s groove.

We took seats at the end of the bar and ordered a Switchback and a Tanqueray and tonic. With a bag of Wise Ridgies, the total was $12.50. Customers a few stools away told us that they never go to Burlington; if you’re looking for a bar, why would you? Robbie’s has stained-glass panels above the bar that cast a glow on its cheap drinks, a white-tailed deer rump mounted on the wall and Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” at karaoke on Friday nights.

Soon after we arrived, Ethan Palker thoughtfully turned me on to the “Robbie’s Ritual.” Palker, 25, is a carpenter from Fletcher who plays volleyball for Balls in Your Face, a team that competes in a league hosted by Robbie’s. After the team celebrated a win with a round of shots, Palker led me to a wooden box affixed to the wall in the pool room. He opened it to reveal a tree branch in the shape and posture of a penis. Balls in my face.

I returned to my barstool and encountered a second surprise: a replenished, sparkling G&T in place of the half-drunk one I’d left on the bar. Bartender Emily Wesson had spotted a possible “floatie” in my drink — maybe a fruit fly, maybe nothing — and replaced my drink with a fresh one. “I wouldn’t serve a customer anything I wouldn’t drink,” Wesson, 33, of Morrisville, told me.

In fact, Wesson — the mother of two young kids with a full-time day job — doesn’t drink. She’s one of five female bartenders who work at the woman-owned bar. (Their tenures range from three to 40 years.) In addition to serving drinks — including hard seltzers favored by “30- to 40-year-old blondes” — Wesson sells $1 pull tickets. On a busy night, Robbie’s drains two boxes of tickets; each holds 3,000.

“Cardboard crack,” a regular commented.

A bunch of hippies and a bunch of rednecks. And we all get along.

trevor cary

The night we hung at Robbie’s, the action was on the volleyball court. A cheerful crowd watched the games. “A bunch of hippies and a bunch of rednecks,” said Trevor Cary, 28, an excavator and sugar maker from Fletcher. “And we all get along.”

Sitting on the deck drinking a $3 bottle of Coors Light was Wiley Gutchell, 37, a handyman who lives next door. Robbie’s is a “community center,” he said, a place that feels like home. He’d mowed a path from his house, clearing the way from one refuge to another.

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‘O’ Is For Original

There may be no dive bar in Vermont that can match the history — or tenacity — of Charlie-O’s World Famous, central Vermont’s rough-and-ready gem, whose awning proclaims it “A Dive for Nice People.” The establishment recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, but under different names it’s been serving up cheap beer since at least 1861. It’s survived floods, fires, Prohibition and pandemics, kept alive by generations of Capital City drinkers.

I’d walked through Charlie-O’s plenty of times, including recent pop-ins to see an Iron Maiden cover band and another one playing sea shanties for Talk Like a Pirate Day. This time, I’d come on a night when the regulars rule. I took a seat near the requisite (defunct) TouchTunes machine and joined an eclectic crew of late-day drinkers and early evening arrivals. The pool tables were busy. Several people huddled near the bar discussed J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion while Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” played over the speakers.

“The No. 1 rule of Charlie-O’s is basically: As long as you’re not an asshole, come on by,” bartender Brian Franz, 33, said.

A typical crowd at Charlie-O’s includes older barflies who have been holding down a stool for decades, middle-aged professionals coming by after work and people searching out live music. On top of being Montpelier’s only dive bar, Charlie-O’s is the busiest venue in town, with three nights of live music every week. The acts tuck into the back of the pub, between the pinball machines and some high-top tables.

With walls lined with framed pictures of half a century of regulars, Charlie-O’s can feel like a rowdy museum to the community. A sign on a ceiling beam advertises Madame St. Laveau’s Psychic Tarot Readings, a memory of the time, decades ago, when one of the bartenders routinely offered her psychic services while slinging suds.

“A dive bar is like a castle or an estate house in England,” said Abby Jenne, 52, the bar’s office manager, who has worked various jobs at Charlie-O’s for 20 years. “You inherit the problems — the leaking roof, the insurance, all the problems. But if you believe in keeping that legacy alive, you’ll put blood, sweat and tears into it.”

Charlie-O’s has demanded at least two of the three in recent years. The flood of 2023 all but destroyed the bar. Regular customers helped employees rebuild within months, only for a fire next door to inflict a second round of damage.

“We rebuilt it and put the bar back together,” Jenne said. “Again, the whole community did their part. Matt over there rebuilt the floor himself.” She pointed to the bar, where a man was drinking with a dog perched on his shoulder.

We haven’t accepted cards since, uh, they existed.

brian Franz

In the 1980s, Charlie-O’s was famously a biker hangout, where patrons were known to ride their motorcycles through the bar.

“We found a scrapbook from then, and it was mostly bikes and boobs,” Jenne quipped.

Bikers left, she said, after Vermont got tougher on drunk driving — and the bar raised the price of Coors Light. But though Charlie-O’s has lost some of its outlaw ways, it still ticks all the dive-bar boxes. The bathrooms, legendarily gnarly even for a dive and clearly built to suit the dimensions of the average 19th-century person, have inscriptions on the doors that read “HEAVEN” on the women’s room and “HELL” on the men’s. No one’s there to watch sports, there are no drink specials, and trying to pay with a credit card will get you a dubious look from the bartender.

“I always get people, usually out-of-towners, who come up to me and say, ‘I used to drink here all the time,’ and then try to hand me a card,” Franz said.

“I’m like, ‘Did you? Because we haven’t accepted cards since, uh, they existed.’”

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Carving a Place

Roni and Tim Shea sold their downtown Rutland dive four years ago, but the name remains accurate, if not quite grammatically correct.

“It’s still two Sheas,” 30-year regular turned bartender Nick Ronfeld said, directing me to the patio, where customers go to smoke and carve their thoughts into the tabletops. “One’s outside.”

There, Isabel Shea sat at a graffiti-marked table, puzzling over where in the bar to put a new ATM without disturbing any of the signs, trophies or car grills that have hung since it opened in 1990.

Shea, 32, and her brother, Michael, 38, bought Two Shea’s from their parents in 2022. They run it together, doing their best to follow the advice of their folks and longtime dive owners everywhere, who know that what worked 37 years ago still works today: Don’t change a damn thing.

“The regulars get upset if you move a lamp,” Shea said. “Just open the doors and put the beer in the cooler, and everything will be fine.”

The regulars get upset if you move a lamp.

Isabel shea

The siblings did replace the wobbly tables outside, which was not fine with the regulars. They immediately got to work on the new ones, carving only a few obscenities. One of the old tabletops hangs on the patio wall, every inch inscribed by hand, although the words “the Geezer Table” look like they were etched by a machine.

Back indoors, I found Clayton Anderson, a former Rutland resident visiting from Seattle. Two Shea’s was his first stop.

“I started coming here as soon as I could start drinking” more than two decades ago, Anderson said.

Ronfeld, 59, provided him with a beer and the same reassurance he’d offered me: “It’s still two Sheas.”

On my first visit, a Sunday afternoon, I’d asked two Rutland friends to accompany me through Two Shea’s maroon metal fortress of a front door. One of them chatted with Sunday bartender Jack Mangan, 68, whose son he knew from high school.

Halfway through shaking out the appropriate amount of Angostura for a bitters and soda, Mangan put the bottle down and started digging through the fridge.

“We’ve got things in here I didn’t even know we had,” he said. What he didn’t have was enough Angostura. “Orange bitters OK for the rest?”

With three ingredients, we agreed that it counted as a cocktail.

That’s about as fancy as the drinks get at Two Shea’s, though you’ll hear daytime regulars ask for a Hooper. (It’s code for a shot of Jim Beam, a Red Sox reference that matches the memorabilia covering a front wall.)

As we settled up, a pair of women sat down nearby.

“I’ll have a whiskey sour, please, sir,” the first said.

“How do you make your whiskey sours?” asked the second, a couple decades her junior.

Mangan, already grabbing bottles, said, “With whiskey. And sour.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “We (Heart) Dives | An uncomprehensive, unscientific guide to some of Vermont’s dankest, dingiest, most beloved bars”

This article appears in September 30 • 2026.

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