Bar #15: The Raven Grill
time: Saturday 1:30-close
cost (cash-only):
$3- $4.50 beers (PBR, Miller, Yuengling, Magic Hat, Stella, Guinness, etc.)
$4.50 – $5.50 shots, rails, and mixed drinks.
clientele: ironic hipsters, scenesters and libertarians; local degenerates; Mount Pleasant townies.
(disclosure: Gin Kitten occasionally bartends at the Raven).
What is there to say about The Raven Grill? Beloved by many, this Mount Pleasant neighborhood bar is one of the oldest establishments in the District. Rumor has it that they’re operating with liquor license #001, granted shortly after prohibition ended. However, this place is so old-school that they don’t even have a freakin’ website to link to, so I don’t think this rumor has ever been confirmed (here’s a neglected facebook fan page).
Truly, the Raven Grill is the divey-est of dive bars. The interior is dark, the space itself is narrow, tiny, and poorly-ventilated, and their drink selection is abysmal. And don’t be fooled by the name – there’s no grill and no food. What the Raven lacks in… well, everything… it makes up for in character. It is the scrappy, mangy underdog to the more conventionally-attractive establishments like Tonic or Marx Cafe.
The Raven is the kind of bar that you either absolutely love (Cupcakes and I), you absolutely hate (Samedi), or you pretend to absolutely love to impress your cooler-than-thou friends. Seriously. Most of the people who claim to love the Raven are full of shit. Stop kidding yourself – you’re a hipster who fancies himself a hep cat because he drinks PBR at one of DCs most-beloved dive bars. On some weekends, bearded boys donning fedoras and women’s jeans, along with their anorexic, bespectacled girlfriends descend upon the place like vultures, crowding the place so that getting a drink without getting sandwiched by hipster musk is nearly impossible, all of them competing in that age-old scenester pissing contest of who can get the most “indie-cred” or whatever conceptual bullshit they use for social currency. Listen: if you take a bus to get to the Raven, you’ve already lost that contest. But I digress. If you can secure yourself a booth or a spot at the bar among the scenester circus, the Raven can still be an enjoyable experience.
Hipsters aside, the Raven is an ideal lazy, cheap location to drink just for the sake of going to a bar where everyone knows your name (I’ve been christened by a regular as the bar’s version of Shelly Long). Weeknights are the best time to visit. The staff are all interesting, friendly people, and the owner emmigrated from Ethiopia after a fascist government seized all of his property, so you’ve gotta give him some entrepreneurial kudos. The old-school jukebox has a lot of really great, eclectic music, though sometimes it gets dominated by some jackass playing the same six songs. The only thing that the Raven is missing is the thick haze of a smoking bar – thankyouveryMUCH DC city council.
The clientele is really what makes this place such a good time. It’s definitely a mixed bag of degeneracy: the hispanic ADHD guy sporting an Ed Hardy t-shirt and a fauxhawk; the tattooed barback who was once pronounced clinically dead for seven minutes and somehow was spontaneously revived; the long-haired bartender with a savant-like understanding of congressional districts and elections; the rag-tag crew of overeducated libertarian think-tankers; the slew of cokeheads who sometimes steal people’s drinks off the bar; the employees from the bar up the street who know that the Raven is the superior watering hole… it’s all part of the package called The Raven Grill. Indeed, the Raven is a microcosm of an ideal world, a world where people from all walks of life come together to drink in peace and harmony. What unites all these people? Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s their unquenchable thirst for human interaction and the enduring wisdom that alcohol is not only the cause of, but is also the solution to, all of life’s problems.
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