The Best Bar in the World

Before it was the best bar in the world, I hear it was as rough-and-tumble as it gets. It was called Dizzy Issie's and was one of two hundred interchangeable corner bars in this town. Dollar drafts paid for from piles of singles stacked neat on the bar and no food unless potato chips count, a pool table upstairs, plenty of fights, smoking a click shy of mandatory. Eventually, they got rid of the pool table, added a kitchen, and now they put out a good bacon-and-blue-cheese burger, solid wings, two kinds of jalapeño poppers.

Now it's called The Dizz, and I hope it never changes, stays open until the sun swallows Remington, Baltimore, the earth. The Dizz is, and I've been around at least a little, the kind of neighborhood bar that almost anyone would want, cozy in an end-unit row house that, no matter where you live in town, feels like it's just up the street.

It does happen to be just up the street from where I live. The Dizz is, like its city, somewhere in the middle. The Dizz is an old baseball glove. The Dizz is an old Ford pickup that runs great. The Dizz is to Applebee's as a New York slice is to Sbarro's. It's the real deal, its own thing, an originator rather than a facsimile. Of course, you've got your own best bar in the world and I'm sure it's wonderful, so long as you're wonderful, and I'm hoping that you are. But, for right now, The Dizz holds the title because I say so. Maybe I can convince you.

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The best bar in the world does not have a specialty cocktail menu and thank god for that, though it does have a machine that turns ice into frozen drinks. The dinner specials at the best bar in the world are hand-written and photocopied. The high-end dinner is a crab cake, and I suppose they have fish and steaks. I am reasonably sure if you are a vegetarian that they will serve you something hot to eat.

What the best bar in the world does have is a Kelly, a Robyn, a Rico. It's gray-haired ladies sitting down to a side salad, a bowl of Maryland crab soup, the pork chop special with two vegetables. It's post-shift bus drivers drinking ten-dollar bottles of wine, Johns Hopkins poets ordering another pitcher of Miller Light, dreadlocked white boys drinking something a little nicer. It's Indian graduate students, older round-the-corner men eating late breakfasts, young parents hurrying through early dinners. At the best bar in the world, I've met firefighters, doctors, novelists, community organizers, cops, dudes from Sweden, weed dealers, a current United States senator. It's older black couples on dates. It's young gay boys and girls on dates. It's walking canes hung on rails. It's Baltimore accents for days. In a city that can feel awfully segregated, everyone hangs out there.

The game will be on and when there's no game the jukebox isn't bad. There are clear-plastic tablecloths, bunches of fake grapes, naughty old matchbooks along the bar's back mirror. There's a fireplace that burns actual wood. The walls are given over to fallen heroes: Michael Jackson, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, David Bowie, Prince. There's a dessert case, within which slowly revolve towering slices of cake. If you have to wait for the bathroom, you dance with the servers rushing into and out of the kitchen. If the City Paper, when it was still around, had awarded Most Colorful Cursing, Rico, the server, would have won every year and it wouldn't have been close.

It's not that The Dizz is stuck in 1970 or 1980, but it's not sprinting, exhausted, overpriced, toward 2020, either. If I had to pick I'd say The Dizz is somewhere around, let's say, 1994 or...