If you stumble across this website, you’ll notice that we use categorize bars based upon what we think.   This handy tool lets you know what we mean when we say it’s an “Old Man bar,” or a “Faux Dive.”

Classic Dive:  The best kind of dive. No bullshit, just cheap booze slung in settings that time seems to have forgotten.

Faux Dive:  The worst kind of dive.  All bullshit but with the advantage of cheap booze served in settings that have come straight out of Rachel Ray’s “Create your own bar modeled after a 70’s basement.”

Financial District Dive:  Downtown ain’t just for the  high-rollers at Goldman.  Countless, semi-disreputable watering holes exist for those downtown workers who’s ideal night out doesn’t mean nursing an Amstel Light for three hours.

Hipster Dive:  Variation on faux dive, this type of “dive” — we use that term loosely — serves cheap swill to the indie rock set in settings straight out of Crafster.

Irish Pub Dive:  The five boroughs are filled with shitty lookalike Irish pubs, upscale yuppified Irish pubs, and the real thing.  We’re going to try to find the real thing.  Even if it means taking a shillelagh upside the head to do so.

Neighborhood Bar:  Not a dive per se but a worn tavern where neighbors who know neighbors who know neighbors who have lived in this neighborhood since the Dutch arrived in New York City drink.

Old Man Dive:  Bar where most of the clientele either fought in the Spanish-American War or look like they did because of a lifetime throwing down cheap liquor at this watering hole.

Outer Borough Dive:  Neighborhood bars so deep in the boroughs, Magellan wouldn’t have been able to find them with the help of Sir Edmund Hillary, Lewis and Clark, and a fucking GPS.  Must’ve been the smell of cheap whiskey that helped us find them.

Scary Dives:  It ain’t the bad old days anymore, where The Warriors had to bop their way back to Coney Island or people carried around “mugger cash” but New York City remains a place with some downright dangerous nabes.  A scary dive is the kind of bar that exists in a gentrifying hood but has yet to reflect that or just gives off the vibe of danger lurking.