These 10 Oklahoma City bars deserved to make the USA TODAY Bars of the Year list
In fact, the culinarians and masterminds behind the bar programs across Oklahoma City continue to prove that with growing regional and national recognition from multiple outlets from the James Beard Foundation to bon appetit and The New York Times to Southern Living.
So it makes sense that a bar like Good For A Few that I willingly choose to spend time and money at because of the top shelf combination of its atmosphere, drinks and staff would make the 2025 USA TODAY Bars of the Year list.
Owners Tyler Maune and Jordan Harris put director of operations Charlie Alvarado at the helm of the ship — for both Good For A Few and it's sister burger concept next door, New State — and Alvarado focused on one thing: doing it right.
From playing with flavors in crafting knockout drink menus to creating a signature last call experience for weekends, no stone is left unturned when it comes to the vibe and allure of Good For A Few.
Dig in: Inside look at how USA TODAY chose its Restaurants of the Year for 2025
So, yes, USA TODAY absolutely got it right in recognizing Good For A Few. But with the way folks in this city handle bar business, half of the list should be from OKC. After all, it does cover more than 620 square miles, which makes it geographically almost ...10 times larger than some of the other areas represented on the list.
From the dive-y little numbers to the literal (no I mean, actually, how do you find this place?) hidden gems, check out 10 other OKC metro-area bars that easily belong on America's Top 29 list.
Lunar Lounge
The Instagram for Lunar Lounge actually says "Hidden bar somewhere in midtown," so who am I to give away the secrets to finding the door. The moon will guide you, and yes that's probably a hint. With Julia McLish of Barkeep helming the ship, it's no surprise Lunar's cocktails are just as out of this world as its vibes.
Go: 1114 Classen Drive; lunarloungeokc.com/.
Mooney's Pub & Grill
When Mooney's says it's a neighborhood bar, it means the whole neighborhood might just show up. With regular live music events, karaoke, sports aired on the bar's TVs, food and more, everyone is welcome and its sure to be a fun time at Mooney's.
Go: 6221 N Interstate Drive, Norman; Facebook.
The Daley
Inside FRIDA Southwest is an intimate speakeasy-style bar with a carefully curated menu of handcrafted cocktails and a premium whiskey library. Venture inside and let the bartenders treat you to one of their latest creations or help you find the perfect pairing for the items on the FRIDA menu.
Go: 500 NW 28th St.; 405-683-7432, fridasouthwest.com/the-daley/.
Fassler Hall
Whether you've been a Fassler Hall regular for years or more recently joined the party when it became the official headquarters as OKC cheered on the Thunder for watch parties, one thing is for sure about this beer hall, its a guaranteed good time. And while Fassler specializes in beer, it also offers full cocktail service for those looking for something with a little more strength.
Go: 421 NW 10th St.; 405-609-3300, fasslerhall.com/locations/oklahoma-city/.
Bar Sen
Half cocktail bar, half noodle house Bar Sen is the latest arrival from two-time James Beard Finalist for Best Chef: Southwest, Jeff Chanchaleune. The bar program at Bar Sen is just as stellar as the food and even takes some of the restaurants ingredients into consideration and employ in the creation of items on the cocktail menu. Broth back shot, anyone?
Go: 1630 N. Blackwelder Ave. #1; 405-702-1500, barsenokc.com/.
The Study
A little different from the other entries on the list, The Study is an OKC wine bar and the perfect place to go if you want to learn more about wine in a relaxed setting. Plus don't let the lack of a full cocktail service fool you, one of this spot's proprietors, Ian Bennett, earned a 2025 James Beard semifinalist nod for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service.
Go: 701 W. Sheridan Ave., Ste. 100; 405-724-7514, thestudyokc.com/.
LATER, bye
Parties larger than six need not apply at LATER, bye unless planning well in advance or renting out the entire space. The reason? This micro bar seats just 31 people, but while the space is tiny the cocktails are packed full of flavor, as are the food items on the menu.
Go: 301 NW 13th St., Ste 101; 405-768-3208, laterbyeokc.com/.
RADBAR
An artist's haven in the middle of the Plaza District, RADBAR was designed by the art community for everyone. Enjoy everything from bingo to DJs, live shows to artist pop-ups and drag shows, depending on the day while grabbing a drink with friends.
Go: 1715 NW 16th St.; 405-493-9365, radbarokc.com/.
Angles
The LGBTQ+ staple offers drinks and dancing in the heart of the 39th Street District, OKC's historically established queer-friendly neighborhood.
Go: 2117 NW 39th St.; anglesokc.com/.
Cookie's
Karaoke every day? Cookie's is known for it and has been doing it for decades. Add to that an "everyone's welcome" attitude and drink specials and you're always in for fun at this OKC dive.
Go: 2304 N. Western Ave.; 405-594-1580, cookiesonwestern.com/.
Thirsty for more? See the entire list of USA TODAY Bars of the Year here.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: 10 Oklahoma City bars that should be on USA TODAY's Bars of the Year list
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Alien: Earth Boss Teases the Show's New Alien Species Designed to ‘Get Into Your Nightmares'
In space, you don't just have xenomorphs to worry about anymore. FX's new series Alien: Earth — premiering Tuesday, Aug. 12 — brings the Alien film franchise to the small screen with a fresh story about a research vessel full of alien specimens that crash-lands on Earth. Yes, the infamous xenomorph from the Alien movies is onboard… but so are a number of new alien species developed for the TV show, including a creepy-crawly centipede that crawls inside your body like the ear bugs from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and a jellyfish-like creature that sucks out your eyeball and takes over your body. Scared yet? More from TVLine Alien: Earth Boss Talks Bringing the Sci-Fi Franchise to TV - and Down to Earth for the First Time Casting News: Olivia Colman and Brie Larson's FX Drama, Jax Taylor Exits The Valley and More Casting News: Alison Brie's FX Pilot, One Tree Hill Vet Joins Emily in Paris and More 'One of the things that you can never reproduce in an audience that has seen an Alien movie is the feeling you had the first time you saw the life cycle of this creature in that first film,' showrunner Noah Hawley told a group of reporters at a recent press screening. 'It's just unreproducible. You know that it's an egg, and it's face huggers, it's chest bursters, all that. So that's where the idea for other creatures came from.' He wants Alien: Earth viewers to feel the same dread that moviegoers felt seeing the xenomorph for the first time: 'I want you to have that feeling, because that feeling is integral to the Alien experience. But I can't do it with these creatures. So let's introduce new creatures where you don't know how they reproduce or what they eat, so that you can have that 'I'm out' feeling multiple times a week.' When it came time to dream up the new creatures, Hawley says, 'some of it is just, 'What's the worst thing I could think of?' And the fun of it is not just: What's the design of the creature? And who do they kill? And what do they eat? But also, then you have the opportunity of, 'Well, how do they reproduce?' And that's going to be gross.' The new aliens are specimens in a space lab, Hawley explains: 'They're in a zoo, basically, but they don't stay in the zoo.' And every aspect of the creatures' design 'all goes to the 'get into your nightmares' part of it. Mostly, my hope is that people who watch the show will never do anything comfortably again. Like, 'Should I eat that? I should probably pick that piece of bread up. Look at what's under it.'' Best of TVLine Summer TV Calendar: Your Guide to 85+ Season and Series Premieres Classic Christmas Movies Guide: Where to Watch It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, Die Hard and Others What's New on Netflix in June
CNET
27 minutes ago
- CNET
I Played Battlefield 6: Hands-On With the Return To Big Battle Warfare
After a few hours playing the upcoming Battlefield 6, it's clear the game is designed to be a mea culpa to fans: Trust us, we're bringing back the Battlefield you remember. At a massive preview event in Los Angeles, I sat down to play a slice of the game's multiplayer mode -- and came off it suitably whelmed with a mix of raucous moments and tedious deaths. Ultimately, it feels like it will deliver the kind of big team battles players have been craving, with technical flourishes that amplify the gleeful chaos of a warzone. Developer DICE has a lot to prove with Battlefield 6. Its predecessors, 2018's World War II-themed Battlefield V and 2021's near-future Battlefield 2042, made unpopular changes to the game's formula, but subsequent updates salvaged some goodwill. So there's a reason the developers emphasized that DICE's newest game drew from the wells of Battlefield 3 and 4, returning to a successful era of big, destructive battles and retreating from some of the more drastic deviations. "We approached [this project] with this idea that not only do we want to draw inspiration from Battlefield 3 and 4, and sort of the best of the best in our series, we wanted to do it with our players," said Christian Grass, vice president and executive producer at DICE's Ripple Effect studios. "That was a big thing early on, get Battlefield Labs stood up, get [the game] out there, get players to play, and then start that conversation with them, listen to the feedback they're giving us and sort of build this game together." With the Battlefield Labs feedback program DICE set up, it's clear the studio wants to head off any potentially unpopular changes to the core gameplay people have come to expect from Battlefield. "With [Battlefield] Labs, everything that we're doing and communicating with our community early on, we want to make sure that we are landing it when [Battlefield 6] comes out," said Thomas "Tompen" Andersson, creative director at Ripple Effect. He noted that the team wants to "make sure that we don't have to counter some decisions that the community doesn't agree with." Labs has already provided Battlefield 6's developers with a wealth of data, from weapon pick rates to map movement patterns, that's led developers to tune the guns and different game modes. Their attention zooms down to the level of destructibility in objects, gathering feedback on whether walls are too sturdy or fragile and how that affects the player experience. "OK, maybe no one is using this lane, why aren't they using that? Oh, they feel like it's a kill zone, or there's not enough coverage," Andersson said. "We're taking that internally and testing and seeing if we can make that better." Read more: How to Join the Battlefield 6 Open Beta: Early Access Sign Up and Weekend Dates Balancing old and new Battlefield Battlefield 6 isn't a full rejection of modernity to embrace tradition. For instance, the game offers "closed weapon" modes that only let classes field select weapon categories to reinforce roles, while "open weapon" modes give everyone access to the game's full arsenal. But for the most part, it's a return to the arcade-y modern military shooter days that the community remembers more fondly than DICE's more recent experiments. The result, at least from the few hours of Battlefield 6 multiplayer I played, is a polished shooter with a lot of focus on making skirmishes exciting at any scale. Long-range sniper duels and tank battles felt as intense as close-quarters gunfights, all of which could be happening mere feet from each other on the same map. There are enough modes, guns, tools and play styles to give players whatever experience they crave in a military shooter. Whether that's tight-knit squad fights in alleyways or large-scale clashes between platoons of dozens of players each, you can pick weapons and a kit to customize to your liking -- running and gunning, fixing up armored vehicles, sniping from afar or reviving teammates -- all strategies felt viable. I felt that I contributed to the victory even if I wasn't leading my team in kills, and had the freedom to play out my little medic or tank commander fantasies. The preview didn't include any single-player content, leaving us in the dark about what's in store for the game's globe-trotting story campaign, which pitches a beleaguered NATO against the mysterious private military corporation, Pax Armata. But to be frank, single-player content is a nice extra -- it's far more important to evaluate the game's bones, which feel solid, if teetering on the edge of flooding players with complexity. Maps, classes, kits and guns: Grappling with too many options My Battlefield 6 preview rotated me between four modes, showing off different battle scales, goals and objectives. Conquest is the classic Battlefield experience, big maps split into multiple objective zones to capture, which fragments the fight into small areas with their own quirks and features. Breakthrough is still a big map, but you only play in thin sections of it at a time -- if the attacking team wins control of objective zones, the defenders retreat to the next slice of the map. Domination ditches vehicles for small-scale squad battles that rack up points with captured zones, king-of-the-hill style. Squad Deathmatch is a simple four-squad competition for who reaches the kill limit first. Unsurprisingly, the maps are split according to size. The larger maps in the preview included Liberation Peak, which felt like the platonic ideal of a Battlefield map -- a mountainous desert with small bases to hold, rocky outcrops to perch behind while sniping, buildings to swarm and wide roads to race down with tanks and light armored vehicles, all while helicopters and jets race overhead. The other big map, Siege of Cairo, is an urban battlefield with plenty of wide shooting lanes for vehicles and tight buildings for alleyway combat. The big maps captured my attention, but the smaller ones still held a lot of charm, particularly Iberian Offensive, where I held strong on several rounds of Domination, leaping between and on top of buildings to hold zones. Empire State was also in our rotation, a close-quarters slugfest with too many corners, I found myself getting smoked from behind frequently. While we didn't play them, our guide noted five other maps coming to the game at launch, including Operation Firestorm which is returning from Battlefield 3. Through all this, players deploy with one of four classes: Assault, Engineer, Support and Recon. Each has its unique perks: Assault heals faster and has explosive gadgets like grenade launchers, Engineer has a vehicle-fixing blowtorch and auto-repairs vehicles they ride in, Support has a healing resupply pack they can throw to the ground and uses defibrillators to quickly revive teammates and Recon can call UAVs and use motion sensor gadgets. Each class has an active skill that I honestly forgot about in the heat of battle -- including Assault's ability to see outlines of enemies through walls if they're making enough noise. EA DICE You can sit with the pre-made weapon-and-gear loadouts and dive into the game or customize them. I found it satisfying to get just the right attachments on my guns, but that's as far as I took it. Gadgets, explosives, grenades and sidearms stack up so many options that I didn't bother with much beyond my main weapon. Perhaps I could've gotten a better edge with all those extras, and Andersson described some truly novel gadgets coming in the main game like a sniper decoy that distracts enemies from far away and up close and personal laser devices that act as sniping rangefinders. But the quick time-to-kill made it feel like any moment I wasn't ready to snap my assault rifle to someone popping out of a corner would be a duel I'd lose. I did okay -- heck, in a couple matches I was even near the top of the scoreboards -- but I never dominated. At the best moments, I was in tune with my squad, often using the new anyone-can-revive feature to put my teammates back on their feet (Support class does this faster). In the worst moments, I got shot in the back over and over as enemies seemingly came out of nowhere, with no time to shoot back. High highs and low lows abound. It wasn't that the game felt unfair or that there was a skill cap I wasn't close to reaching (though obviously there were plenty of players even in my preview who had no trouble taking me down). It felt like it walked a tightrope balancing lethality, movement and slight tactical choices. That refinement feels like the result of all the aforementioned player feedback DICE is getting with Battlefield Labs -- including how to blow buildings up just right. EA DICE Nailing the right flavor of Battlefield-style map destruction A staple of Battlefield games is environmental destruction -- how much of the map crumbles and explodes as it's peppered with tank shells and grenades over the course of a match. As I played these maps over and over again, I saw how certain high-traffic zones would get obliterated by the time the match ended, with buildings reduced to rubble and areas around objectives flattened. It's technically impressive, and if I believe what the developers say, potentially useful. This is Battlefield's so-called Tactical Destruction, it's the idea that you can blow holes in walls or take out sniper nests to change the terrain. Through testing, the game's developers honed the destruction to reliably operate the same way every time -- something players can depend on to give them options in firefights. "We know that people love when things blow up, but there needs to be substance to all of these things that you're doing, right? So that's why it's so central to me that it's deterministic -- that you can rely on 'if I nail this rocket right here in this house, then exactly this is going to happen'," Andersson said. While DICE included visual language to communicate conditions to the players -- like cracks in the walls that are ready to shatter on the next explosion -- they don't expect folks to take advantage of Tactical Destruction at first. That comes from map knowledge gained over time, and players could eventually start seeing the logic in paving the way toward objectives with explosives. Then they can combine this with other items like the assault ladder gadget, which Andersson notes could give squads second-floor access to surprise enemies. In my preview, I didn't even get close to destroying the environment to my advantage. But the explosions were impressively immersive. While hunkered down in a building in the Siege of Cairo map, tank shells and rockets turned our shelter into rubble as the roof caved in around us, flooding the room in dust and blinding us as we rushed out. Occasionally overwhelming and often distracting me from firefights, the game's destruction tech put me more firmly in my soldier's boots, escalating the chaos and locking me into skirmishes that ratcheted up in tension, with each boom echoing in my headphones. In this, I felt DICE looking to recapture the controlled chaos that makes Battlefield games unique among the military shooters of today -- namely Call of Duty. But returning to the successful Battlefield titles from a decade ago means, hopefully, giving players a chance to recreate moments they loved. In that, it's looking like Battlefield 6 could be what those nostalgic gamers are waiting for. "If you start with Battlefield 3 and 4 that we know is loved and [say] let's execute on those staples and pillars, I feel like this is almost like a cheat code -- this is what Battlefield should be," Andersson said. Battlefield 6 launches on Oct. 10 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Free open beta weekends will run on Aug. 9-10 and Aug. 14-16.
Fox News
28 minutes ago
- Fox News
Martial arts expert teaches top self-defense moves you need to know
Empower Martial Arts & Self-Defense's Jennifer Burke shows off her top self-defense moves on 'Fox & Friends Weekend.'
