Turtles All the Way Down: My favourite dive bar in NYC

Holly Baxter has found the perfect NYC boozer to have a cheap but good drink and admire some local pets

Near and deer: the bar, complete with toy stag’s head (Holly Baxter)

Even though they’re almost all aggressively similar, it’s important in New York City to have a favourite dive bar. A dive bar is a bar, of course, but it’s the kind where you pull up a stained wooden stool and get the happy hour special which is, without fail, a beer and a shot for $5.

One of the most confusing parts about moving to the US for me was trying to parse out what the most obvious equivalent of a British pub was. In Canada, they have pubs that are called pubs and look like pubs and have reassuringly familiar names like The Old Queen’s Head or The Hare and the Haddock but when you walk in and take a seat, a hostess chases after you and tells you, in a tone that suggests you may as well have slaughtered her first-born son, that you have to wait to be seated. That’s confusing enough. In the US, it’s a whole other ball game; in New York alone, there’s a chain of shops called “Bagel Pubs” that sell baked goods and definitely not alcohol.