Best Dive Bars

Los Angeles might be the capital of conspicuous consumption, but the other cliché about 'La La Land'-that it's a cultural wasteland-couldn't be further from the truth. For every 'Extreme Makeover-Club Edition' (in which would-be impresarios continually swankify their establishments in a relentless quest to be 'the' hot spot du jour), there is a well-worn drinking hole full of history, serving up a far more elusive and seductive mix of stiff drinks, loose atmosphere and keep-it-real regulars. In Los Angeles' Best Dive Bars, you'll get the scoop and the poop on the city's liveliest, lowlife n' liquor-soaked landmarks. This essential booze bible has the lowdown on which bars serve free food, which have great-and not so great-karaoke, bars that appear in your favorite movies and much, much more. Whether you're looking for a friendly spot where 'everybody knows your name,' a filthy blackened cave where nobody ever will, a gently-gentrified hole specked with dive-obsessed hipsters or a dusty relic full of hip-replacements, you're sure to find a spot to soak up-and get soaked in-here in these pages.

Philadelphia's Best Dive Bars reviews the grittiest drinking establishments in the city of brotherly love. If you want to avoid the tourist traps listed in those other bar guides and find out where to get wasted after visiting the Liberty Bell, then this book is required reading.

Seattle's Best Dive Bars offers opinionated reviews of one hundred of the grittiest and grungiest drinking establishments in the Emerald City. If you want to avoid the tourist traps listed in those 'other' bar guides and find out where the anti-globalization, anti-Starbucks, anti-Microsoft crowd goes to get wasted, then Seattle's Best Dive Bars, like its predecessors from New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, is your guide to the delightfully filthy underside of Seattle bar life.

Houston, that sun-drenched, humidity-steamed subtropical megapolis, might not be the first place you think of when you rattle off great American drinking towns. When most outsiders think of the city at all, images of cowboys, astronauts and oilmen come to mind. And truth be told, many natives wrestle with the concept of a dive bar, thinking that any gin mill that lacks a velvet rope, bottle service and a valet parking service is a dive. In Houston's Best Dive Bars, award-winning journalist (and third-generation Houstonian) John Nova Lomax sets the record straight on what exactly a dive is (and isn't) in the Bayou City. From Korean houses of ill repute on Telephone Road to bluesy Third Ward juke joints, from Galveston County bayside gang haunts to Spring Branch redneck redoubts, from famous old Inner Loop standbys like the Lone Star Saloon and the West Alabama Ice House to obscure gems like the D&W Inn and the Sundown Saloon, Lomax drank, and with this book as evidence, lived to tell the dive-y tales. The result is the first of its kind and the only guidebook to drinking and diving in Houston you will ever need.

Boston's Best Dive Bars features opinionated reviews of 100 of the grungiest and grittiest drinking establishments in Beantown. If you want to avoid the tourist traps listed in those "other" bar guides and find out where real Bostonians do their drinking, then this is the book for you.

Sick of gentrification, $15 cosmopolitans, and clean bathrooms? Then this revised edition of the best-selling New York City's Best Dive Bars is the guide for you. Featuring all new reviews of one hundred of the best dive bars in the five boroughs of New York City and surrounding cities such as Jersey City and Hoboken, this book takes you where other bar guides fear to tread. Broken urinals and $2 PBRs? Yes!