Are American-style dive bars in London just movie sets or the real thing?

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“For those of us on a limited salary and [with] an unlimited thirst for alcohol and trouble, there is no better place to find it than in a New York City dive bar,” writes Wendy Mitchell in the introduction to her 2003 guide to the city’s best dives. “For those of us with limited space, your local bar can effectively function as your living room.” Reading Mitchell’s words, written more than two decades ago, I can’t help but think of the twenty- and thirtysomething workers living in my city, London, today. Cash-tight and space-poor, they (by which I mean we) are the loneliest in the country, unable to host in their homes and desperately lacking in third spaces. Could the American dive bar—an unlikely import that is swiftly providing a template for London’s coolest new bars—be an alternative for community and, more importantly, fun?

What Mitchell is selling sounds appealing. A collective craving for algorithm-free interactions grips the air on nights out, a tangible desire to meet people, whether friends or prospective partners, out in the wild. The dive bar seems like the perfect solution. At least, the idealized version we have in our heads does anyway: of a place where the drinks are cheap, strong, and designed to be consumed with your arm around the guy sitting next to you, whom you only just met but are now calling your best friend through slurred speech. It’s an image constructed from Tarantino films and sitcoms and music videos that makes these spaces feel plump with possibility. Gritty dive bars are remarkable in their unremarkableness. You could meet anyone there.

My fellow countrymen might be reading this, scoffing and sarcastically suggesting that we have a casual drinking place to meet new people—it’s called the pub. Outside London, I’d be in agreement. But these fulcrums of British society aren’t conducive to organic interaction like they once were, at least not in the capital. (I’m not entirely sure how, but I do feel as if the arrival of the 8-plus-pound pint is to blame.) Others have felt the shift too. Greg Boyce owns one of the city’s buzziest dive-ish bars, Rasputin’s, and says the sociable pubs back home in Scotland inspired his bar as much as the New York dive scene. “In London, you get your table in the corner of a pub, and that’s kind of your little bit. You don’t really interact with other people,” he says. And often, that’s all you want. But sometimes it isn’t.

Boyce’s bar is a place where those interactions happen. Rasputin’s has the drink-combo deals, the loud sound, and dim lighting we associate with this cheap and cheerful aesthetic. Others share a similar sensibility. But—and here I turn an ear to my grumbling American readers—are they actually dive bars? That’s harder to answer. What happens when they’re separated from their country’s history and transplanted into another city? Stripped of context, are these authentic bars or artfully constructed sets?

London’s new dive-type bars, with their neon lighting and tequila-heavy menus, are very different from long-standing establishments that have been dive-y for decades. For one thing, the older dives don’t shy from that title. For some, it’s even a major selling point. For live music and cheap beers, rock fans have long been flocking to Blondies in Clapton, Helgi’s in Hackney, Aces and Eights in Tufnell Park, Slim Jim’s Liquor Store in Islington. In the other camp, predominantly in central London, you’ll find the sportier “American-themed” dive bars, like BLOODsports and the chain Passyunk Avenue. Dollar bills cover the walls of the latter company’s bars, fluttering somewhat uncannily. It takes a lot of curation to look this lived in, the franchise’s head of culture, Jessi Riley, told the New York Times: “I feel like I purvey more culture in this place than I ever did in any museum I ever worked in.”

Lord knows Britain has a long and complex history around drinking, particularly in pubs. But dive bars aren’t the integral part of our culture—at least not yet—that they are for Americans. To me, those sports bars sound more like theatrical immersive experiences than the casual boozing spots they claim to be. I’m mulling over the authenticity question on a tepid Thursday (“the new Friday” for London’s hybrid workers) as I head out to Hackney, in East London. In the same strip as Helgi’s, two different dive-adjacent bars with similar styling have opened in the past two years.

From the outside, the only thing that connects these establishments is how easily you’d walk past them. Yet peek around the blacked-out windows at Easy 8 and you’ll find another world within: a crammed, bustling bar that seats fewer than 20 people and stimulates all the senses simultaneously. The mise-en-scène is equal parts sleazy (a nude calendar, a Modelo poster signed by the model with the words Especialmente para usted, Vicky), sacred (a framed Jesus portrait, prayer candles), and sentimental (family photos, customer drawings), all draped in rainbow-hued Christmas lights. It’s the exact design I conjure in my mind when I hear the words dive bar. Were it created by a Brit, I would almost call it a pastiche.

But Easy 8’s owner knows a thing or two about dives. Raised in Los Angeles, Julian Denis runs another neon-lit spot around the corner, the vegan Sichuan Chinese restaurant Facing Heaven (my personal favorite restaurant in London, for what it’s worth). Denis opened Easy 8 in spring 2023, squishing the bar into the teensy space once occupied by his former restaurant Mao Chow. His only desire had been to re-create the dive bars he “missed most from home” in L.A. and found lacking on the “polished and sterile” London scene. “We literally have local drug dealers brushing shoulders with ambassadors on a regular basis. A dive should be the great equalizer for anyone who walks through the door,” he muses.

Easy 8’s extremely limited capacity means it can’t be a place for everyone, but it is a place that gets people talking due to proximity, if nothing else. That works well with Mitchell’s top tips for “successful diving”: “Always sit at the bar,” and “no matter how many pals you’re with, talk to at least one stranger.” The low prices act as an appropriate and useful leveler. Tacos are just 2 pounds ($2, according to a sign on the wall) and served on paper plates. They’re unreasonably delicious too. To drink, there are well-priced cocktails and the obligatory Pabst Blue Ribbon. Only upon rising to continue our miniature bar crawl do I realize quite how surreptitiously strong the margaritas have been. On a night of dive bar hopping, it’s a feeling I relish.

We turn left out of the door and totter precisely five doors up the road. One year after Easy 8 arrived on the scene, another dive bar (although that title is more hotly contested here) also opened its doors. The latest venture from East London sandwich aficionados Dom’s Subs, Rasputin’s is a more spacious, less brightly lit affair, built where the team’s old prep kitchen was. Customers sit sprawled across low sofas, at high tables, and at the bar, engaged in vigorous conversation with one another.

Like Denis, Boyce built Rasputin’s in the image of the kind of bar he wanted to visit. It should be “low stakes,” a place for him and his friends to hang out, with his favorite artwork on the walls and something “a little bit nostalgic and weird” playing on a small TV above the bar. Today it is the 1988 film She-Wolves of the Wasteland. The bartenders aren’t told what films to put on, Boyce insists, but it does help that “everyone that works there is really into B movies or The X-Files.” There are local beers on tap and Guinness, while you can nab a “mystery shot” for 3 pounds that I, admittedly, have never been brave enough to try. Hackney’s drinking establishments are as easy to stereotype as New York’s—Rasputin’s is a heady amalgamation of both.

Here, the star of the show is the “Reaganomics special,” which offers a crisp, vermouth-heavy five-olive martini and two hot dogs for 13 pounds. Boyce got the idea from Rudy’s, in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, where the hot dogs come free with every drink. That’s the kind of environment Boyce wants to create. When their regulars grumbled about the bar becoming overrun with “normies or whatever” after placing eighth on Time Out London’s Best Bars list, Boyce told them: good. “I want them to be sitting next to some weathered East London hipster guy,” he says. “That’s part of the experience, right? When you go to dive bars in New York or L.A., obviously people go there all the time, and they’re a bit annoyed that you’re there as tourists. But that adds to it. You’ve got to earn being there by people being a bit shady to you.” Believing that suffering is an integral part of the experience—well, there’s nothing more British than that.

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Still, Boyce is reluctant to use the words dive bar when it comes to Rasputin’s. “I get why it’s called a dive bar, I get why it’s called ‘American-themed’ and all this,” he says. “We’re definitely channeling some of the things that’s good about dive bars. But we didn’t …” He trails off. “It’s just a bar … more like Moe’s Tavern [of The Simpsons fame] than trying to be a dive bar.” That Boyce is happy to reference another American establishment (albeit an animated one) tells us a lot. We Brits can mock your enduring enthusiasm and pep—and we regularly do—but, deep down, I think we know that our stiff upper lips are getting in the way of connection. In order to have the organic interactions many of us crave, we might need to set that cynicism aside and be a bit more, well, American. Dive bars, or places that feel different from pubs, allow us that freedom.

Still, I can understand Boyce’s hesitancy to identify as a dive, knowing that doing so would leave Rasputin’s open to accusations of inauthenticity. Clearly, he’s learned that the key to a dive bar keeping its cool is not shouting about it too loudly. The New York dives can serve as inspiration, but Londoners wanting to build a new bar can never loudly declare it if they want their establishment to be seen as a regular bar rather than a novelty. It’s something Denis clearly knows from life experience: The secret to a great dive bar is “equal parts giving a shit and not giving a shit.”

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