The Party: It's Good to Drink in God's Green Room!

The Party, (see updates below due to substantial renovation and changes) on Madison Avenue just south of Southport Road, is a great old place-- emphasis on "old."  It's an old Rax Roast Beef restaurant, its patrons tend to be kind of old, and the ambiance is old school bar fly, with neon beer signs, nascar picture mirrors, etc.  It's an understatement to say that you don't go to The Party to hook up, unless you're like 70 years old, but if you just want a comfortable place to drink on a budget, this is your place.  It's a true neighborhood bar, and it's kind of like drinking in someone's living room.  Everyone knows everyone else.  They have pitch-ins on holidays and regular patrons' birthdays, and frequently the regulars bring in DVD's or VHS tapes of their favorite movies and everyone watches them on the 1980's model TV behind the bar.  The juke box is one of the best in town:  it has a little bit of everything, with fairly current stuff you wouldn't expect in a place full of old guys.  Joe the owner is known as something of a cheapskate, but he doesn't skimp on the booze in his drinks, and the standard pub grub is good, plentiful, and cheap.  A good stiff drink here is the Big Jack, named after a beloved six-foot, 400-pound regular who recently passed from God's green room to his Big Show: a beer glass filled mostly with vodka, then just a splash of diet tonic water (Jack was watching his weight, y'know), and a lime wedge just for color. !Salud! (That's Spanglish for "Le's drink, y'all!)

UPDATE, 03/21/12:  The Party has been sold and is being renovated, although it remains open.  Rumour is that Steve Waugh, owner of Big Daddy's (which I'll review when I accumulate the cash I'll need to drink there) is the new owner.  He did a bang-up job of renovating the bar that became Big Daddy's, but I fear what that same kind of expenditure will do to The Party's prices.

UPDATE, 06/05/2012:  The renovation is in full swing, with a large outdoor beer garden under construction, a humongous Crown Royal mirror (something like ten feet by 12 feet) behind the new bar, and one of those new computer juke boxes replacing our beloved old one.  As it is, it's awfully noisy in there at times, and most of the lovable old geezers have fled, so it is hard to tell what the crowd and the ambiance will be like when construction is finished.  On the plus side, they haven't raised the prices yet, so it's still one of the cheapest places to drink on the South Side....

The Gaslight Inn: Haunted (for Real!)

The Gaslight Inn, 2280 S. Meridian Street, is a little boutique bar masquerading as a neighborhood watering hole.  The truth is that only a few of its patrons come from the surrounding neighborhood, which is kind of sketchy.  Most of the folks that go there are businessmen and working stiffs who stop in on the way home from their jobs downtown, or friends of the owners, high-school buddies Art and Joe.  There's nothing fancy about the place, just a clean comfortable bar in an ancient building that supposedly used to house a mortuary-- it's right next to a Catholic cemetery and a Jewish cemetery.  Perhaps that's why the place is supposedly haunted, with customers and employees reportedly having witnessed unexplained phenomena whenever it's really quiet. We saw the door to the basement close all by itself, t'other day, and it wasn't due to gravity or wind currents, not that I could tell, anyway. (See below for some more ghost stories.) Regular beer prices are good, and the pub grub is GREAT!  Steve the cook knows his stuff, and they often have good beer and food specials-- the all you can eat catfish on Fridays is the BOMB!  $4 glasses of decent wine are the norm, as I write this.  As a practicing drunk (I'll get it right one of these days), I'm not a big fan of the rather weak mixed drinks here (though I order 'em all the danged time, anyway!), but they do often have good drink specials as well as specials on buckets o' beer.  As I said, the neighborhood is just a little bit sketchy, so lock your car and take your keys just to be safe.

UPDATE, 04/14/2012:  Steve the chef is no longer at the Gaslight, but the new cook, Scott, is apparently really talented, foodwise anyway (dunno if he can play the piano, sing, or dance).  We recently had a $5.99 lunch shredded-pork burrito and the Famous Reuben Sandwich that were DEEELICIOUS, so I think Scott knows his stuff, too.

UPDATE 06/11/2012:  They've repainted the interior a bright blue with deep blue trim, which makes the place look bigger, for some reason. ...Turns out Scott used to be the restaurant and catering manager for the American Legion post in Greenwood, IN, which is a pretty big operation.  The story I heard is that he was fired from there for conflict of interest after some family members asked him for part-time help with their restaurant.  I dunno if that's true, but the Greenwood post's loss is certainly the Gaslight's gain!  I had some New-Potato Salad catered from his kitchen there at a recent function, and it was incredibly scrumptious, depending how you like your potato salads:  It even had bacon and little slices of Spanish olives in it,as well as some delicious seasoning I couldn't decipher.  Wow!

UPDATE 02/11/13:  Some recent Gaslight ghost stories:  

1) Tom, a 6'6" regular patron, was sitting at the rather isolated far end of the bar Friday 02/07/13, and had been expounding upon how the stories about the Gaslight being haunted were a lot of horse sh*t, and John (the name they've given the ghost, who is supposedly a former owner of the building) was just a figment of everyone's imagination.  A few minutes later  Tom suddenly said "Ow!" and hopped off the bar stool. He said something had just bit or slapped him on the back of the neck.  When they looked at his neck there were three strip-like welts there like he had been scratched with fingernails.  My Little Woman came in the bar just after this happened and she witnessed the welts.  I later talked to Tom personally he said the story is true-- he said the pain happened all at once, like a from a whip rather than a scratch.  Tom said he still doesn't believe in ghosts, but he admitted he could find no explanation for what happened, as there was no one sitting anywhere close to him.

2)  Tim, brother of one of the owners, said he was the first customer in the place at 11:00 a.m.on a recent Saturday and went in the restroom prior to sitting at the bar.  He went over to the urinal and while he was um, in the middle of his business, the automatic towel dispenser rolled out a paper towel.  The dispenser has a motion sensor on the bottom at which you have wave your hand to get it to activate, and Tim was alone some 12 feet away from it. Before Tim finished up, the dispenser activated two more times!  No one's seen the dispenser do that before or since....   

3)  Joe, one of the owners, came in to open up the bar on Monday 02/11/13 and went upstairs to get something from storage.  The rest of the upstairs has seating but is used for special occasions; so it has speakers connected to the juke box, but they are almost always turned off and Joe hadn't yet turned on the juke box, anyway (see where this is going?)  Suddenly the upstairs speakers started blaring some sort of punk rock song (I didn't know that genre still existed!)  Joe went downstairs to turn off the juke box and saw the "now playing" screen indicated that it was a song from the band named "Gaslight Anthem"!  Cue the TWILIGHT ZONE theme song, boys!

The Mucky Duck: Drink Don't EAT!

Now, I went to the Mucky Duck about a month ago, so maybe things have changed since then, but I doubt it because things haven't changed too much since it opened.  This place used to be Bobby Joe's Beef & Brew, which was primarily an upscale restaurant that had a good bar, but after Bobby Joe passed away and the place became the Mucky Duck, it has sort of flip-flopped:  It's a GREAT bar that has something vaguely resembling restaurant food.  The best thing I can say about MD's food is that the drink prices are very reasonable....  I've eaten there like 4 times, and it has been BLAH or BLEAH every time.  I had french onion soup that had been made with RED onions, and they asked me what kind of cheese I wanted because they were out of Swiss and Provolone.  The fried pickles were giant wedges that resembled marital aids, and they weren't fried enough-- the center was just lukewarm pickle. A grilled tenderloin sandwich had the blandest, least-seasoned meat I've ever had.  The lackluster food quality is strange considering that the Mucky Duck is owned by the same people who own nearby JT Johnston's restaurant, which has great food!

The good news, though, is the Mucky Duck is a great place to drink-- the drink prices are really quite reasonable, the comfortable corporate boardroom-style decor of the old Bobby Joe's remains, and the Duck has expanded on BJ's original outdoor patio and tiki bar which overlooks a fairly large man-made lake.  The staff, too, is really friendly and their service is EXCELLENT!  Except for the cook, of course.
Price: $$     Service: *****   Food: **    Overall: ****

UPDATE: 09/08/12-- Went for drinks out on the covered patio because the weather was so nice.  The special was $3.50 for a 32 oz. draft Coors Light, which I thought was a pretty good deal.   I ordered the Pub Fries for $6.75-- waffle fries in a baking dish, covered with melted cheese and chives, sour cream on the side. The quantity of food was very good, but it could've used just a little seasoning, even just salt & pepper.  Still, it was passable.