Latest news with #divebar
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Post Malone's Epic Move at Arizona Dive Bar Leaves Staff Speechless
Post Malone's Epic Move at Arizona Dive Bar Leaves Staff Speechless originally appeared on Parade. There's nothing like the rush of a killer concert, and when you're Post Malone, the good vibes don't stop at the encore. On June 21, 2025, after electrifying State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Post skipped the fancy after-party and headed straight to Gracie's Tax Bar, a no-frills dive in Phoenix. What happened next had the entire staff picking their jaws up off the floor. See what one team member had to say in this Instagram video from @12newsaz on June 29: View this post on Instagram A post shared by 12News 🌵 (@12newsaz) Can you imagine winding down with friends and seeing this superstar stroll in? No big entourage, no flashing cameras, just Post sipping a drink, swapping stories with patrons, and soaking up the laid-back atmosphere. He was right at home, like he'd been going to Gracie's the tab arrived, Post didn't just cover the bill; he left a tip so generous it will keep 15 employees smiling for weeks. 'He tipped enough to cover everyone's bills for a month,' bartender Chris Banks told 12 News AZ. Wow! But the money was only part of it. The 'Pour Me a Drink' singer stayed until 2 a.m., taking photos and chatting with fans, and treating everyone with genuine kindness. 'I was just so impressed at how respectful he was,' owner Grace Perry shared. 'You don't see that every day.' This musician turned a regular night into one that the staff and locals will talk about for years to come. Post Malone's big-hearted gesture proves that kindness always steals the show. But you don't need platinum records to make someone's night. Next time you're at your favorite hangout, toss in a little extra, and you can make someone's day too! Post Malone's Epic Move at Arizona Dive Bar Leaves Staff Speechless first appeared on Parade on Jul 1, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 1, 2025, where it first appeared.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
America's dive bars are disappearing. Montana didn't get the memo
It's been over two decades now, but as I remember it: the floor was sticky with peanut shells and beer. I could feel a crunch underfoot amid the din of garbled conversation as my young, righteous girlfriends and I made our way to a wobbly table at the Haufbrau in Bozeman, Montana. I was there to hear a friend play guitar and sing at open mic night. As it turns out, so was my future spouse. I was emboldened by the emotion of a recent breakup, the energy of a girls night and, perhaps, liquid courage. Maybe it was also the magic of the bar, because when I spotted him across the room, I flicked a peanut at him. Within a matter of hours, we were parting, and he was saying 'I love you.' These days instead of a group of friends, I come with a lot of media equipment – straps, cords, cameras, laptop, and a black paper journal and pen – as I set out to explore dive bar culture in Montana. I begin my reporting at the Filling Station, located on the outskirts of now trendy Bozeman, a few miles from my home. Inside, the walls are covered with vintage license plates, street signs, a large red flying horse at ceiling height, a buffalo mount with a Hawaiian lei and a stuffed deer head ridden by a skeleton. 'That stuff just accumulates,' says Bill Frye, who owns the bar with his mother, Cin, and brother Don. 'I think the skeleton was a Halloween prop that ended up on the deer that was already mounted.' 'The deer is new,' he adds. And by 'new' he means within the last 20 years. 'A regular who is a taxidermist brought that down.' In addition to the deer, many other things on the Filler's walls have been donated by customers, some en route to the city dump down the road. Others were collected by Bill's parents more than 20 years ago. 'The bison head is off the record,' Bill says. But then as the conversation unfolds, he reveals a few scant details: third floor, a lodge near Glacier national park, a rope, taxidermy and a bunch of guys who brought it down here. But, he concludes, thinking out loud, they are all dead now, so it's OK to write about it. The variety of people who come to the Filler (and the Hauf) are as colorful as the decor. You see everything from pressed Oxford shirts to cowboy boots to camouflage pants to 1980s attire to bare feet in Birkenstocks (in cold weather). These days, Bozeman is home to all kinds of fancy bars, from social club to wine to rooftop, yet 'there are no more [dive bars] coming in,' says Bill. Because of the high cost of commercial properties and alcohol licenses, '[it takes] a minimum of several million to open a new bar in Bozeman. When we purchased the Hauf in 1969 the whole thing was under $100,000. It was a lot at the time. But we couldn't afford to sell it now with the high property-gains tax. We are caught in a trap.' Given all the new high-end choices, it's a bit of curiosity that people continue to show up in cultlike fashion at both the Filler and the Hauf. 'People like the fact that they feel at home,' Cin says. 'We [the owners] can drive by one of the bars and know who's in there by the cars outside.' It's a community center where you feel relaxed, Bill and Cin agree. 'Several customers tell us if we weren't here they would be gone too,' says Bill. When I enter Dusty's Bar in the dry land farming community of Brady, Montana, my first reaction is: 'This is a dive bar? It's so clean.' The polished wooden bar and shiny floors are the result of a renovation during the pandemic in 2020, says owner Kourtney Combs, who purchased Dusty's in 2019. The spotlessness is a good thing, because many people come here to eat. Every Friday, Kourtney's partner, Travis Looney, starts smoking meat – barbecue pork, tri-tip, briquet, sausage, ribs, turkey – at around 3am so it's ready to go by 5pm. By 7pm, it's sold out. In addition to having great food, Dusty's is also a place where customers chip in. 'If I get too busy, people will just get up and start helping,' says Combs. 'They'll take their dishes back. They'll stock the cooler. They'll clear other people's plates. If I have to leave the bar for 20 minutes, it will take care of itself. Customers will get their own drinks. Honor system. We trust them.' When I sit at the bar with locals Gus Winterrowd, a retired farmer; Jeff Farkell, a crop consultant; and Dan Rouns, a retired farmer and previous Dusty's owner, the conversation spans topics as far-ranging as life before technology to soil samples to memories of spinning records in the disco bar upstairs. This is how we landed on the topic of the 'cancer belt'. Winterrowd tells the group he heard the term from his wife's doctor in Seattle when he asked: 'What's the deal with all the cancer in our area?' And the doctor responded: 'It's the cancer belt,' referring to the rate of illness in women in communities across the midwest to northern plains. 'She put up one hell of a fight,' says Rouns about Winterrowd's wife. 'She did anything any person could do.' At this point in the conversation, I realize that a big part of the beauty of the dive bar is that it's a place of connection, a place where real people come to know each othe in real time. Of course, such moments of gravity are balanced with humor: 'We give each other shit. Ninety-ninety percent of the time we all get along. And we don't talk politics unless we're really drunk,' says Farkell. Forty-six miles down the road from Brady on the Missouri River, in the small city of Great Falls, I'm crouched with my camera near a mannequin wearing a repurposed prom dress in a room overflowing with fabrics, threads and sequins. At center is a Singer sewing machine and at the helm, Sandra Thares, seamstress of mermaid costumes and owner of the Sip 'n Dip Lounge, a tiki retro cocktail bar. Yes, mermaid costumes. Sip 'n Dip features windows with underwater views of swimming mermaids. (Currently, there are no mermen.) As part of their employment, each mermaid receives two tails and two tops per tail – all handmade by Thares. In 1996, the first swimming mermaid was a housekeeper dressed in a green plastic tablecloth on New Year's Eve. Over time, the concept became popular and grew into a regular weekend event. It's now a defining aspect of the bar, with mermaids putting on a show six or seven times a week. Mermaid Bingo Night was added in 2024. The evening entails three rounds of bingo in which the mermaids hold up the number cards. It is, as Thares puts it, 'something to do on a cold Montana winter Monday'. Usually, everyone gets a Hawaiian lei. The prizes are not monetary but instead they are 'fabulous' rewards. No matter what is happening on any given evening, Thares says, 'I always tell people that the thing about the Sip 'n Dip is that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are from, what your background is, what your political beliefs are, none of that matters [at] the Sip' n Dip; there's always something to talk about. And no matter who you are, you make new friends.' At each dive bar that I visit, people share the details of other dive bars that I should go to. More than once, people point me in the direction of Sun River and the 'bra bar', more formally known as the Rambling Inn – a place where customers leave their bras behind to hang on the walls in exchange for free drinks. Alas, the bra theme is great fodder for good-natured double entendres regarding 'cups' and a fun starting point for lighthearted conversation. Throughout my dive bar tour, the Helsinki Bar – the last remaining building in Finn Town in the small mining community of Butte – kept calling me back. I was previously there on St Urho's Day, a Finnish holiday celebrating the fictional St Urho, when I met Fiina Heinze. Heinze is of Finnish descent, and I witnessed her crowning as the 2025 Queen of St Urho's Day amid a packed bar, jello shots and premade plastic bags filled with a mysterious mixed drink. According to Heinze, St Urho is celebrated for driving away the grasshoppers that were destroying the grape crops in Finland. The holiday is something of a whimsical Finnish rivalry to St Patrick's Day: 'It's just a day that the Finns decided to have [on] the day before St Patrick's Day. It's not a national holiday.' I think that's the thing about dive bars: in large part, they are about stories. The stories that we listen to and that we share. The stories we experience while we are there. And if you're lucky, it can mark the beginning of a new story with a lifelong partner. All this, I think, is like the dive bar itself: an expression of that imperfect, enduring and sometimes sticky thing called love.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
America's dive bars are disappearing. Montana didn't get the memo
It's been over two decades now, but as I remember it: the floor was sticky with peanut shells and beer. I could feel a crunch underfoot amid the din of garbled conversation as my young, righteous girlfriends and I made our way to a wobbly table at the Haufbrau in Bozeman, Montana. I was there to hear a friend play guitar and sing at open mic night. As it turns out, so was my future spouse. I was emboldened by the emotion of a recent breakup, the energy of a girls night and, perhaps, liquid courage. Maybe it was also the magic of the bar, because when I spotted him across the room, I flicked a peanut at him. Within a matter of hours, we were parting, and he was saying 'I love you.' These days instead of a group of friends, I come with a lot of media equipment – straps, cords, cameras, laptop, and a black paper journal and pen – as I set out to explore dive bar culture in Montana. I begin my reporting at the Filling Station, located on the outskirts of now trendy Bozeman, a few miles from my home. Inside, the walls are covered with vintage license plates, street signs, a large red flying horse at ceiling height, a buffalo mount with a Hawaiian lei and a stuffed deer head ridden by a skeleton. 'That stuff just accumulates,' says Bill Frye, who owns the bar with his mother, Cin, and brother Don. 'I think the skeleton was a Halloween prop that ended up on the deer that was already mounted.' 'The deer is new,' he adds. And by 'new' he means within the last 20 years. 'A regular who is a taxidermist brought that down.' In addition to the deer, many other things on the Filler's walls have been donated by customers, some en route to the city dump down the road. Others were collected by Bill's parents more than 20 years ago. 'The bison head is off the record,' Bill says. But then as the conversation unfolds, he reveals a few scant details: third floor, a lodge near Glacier national park, a rope, taxidermy and a bunch of guys who brought it down here. But, he concludes, thinking out loud, they are all dead now, so it's OK to write about it. The variety of people who come to the Filler (and the Hauf) are as colorful as the decor. You see everything from pressed Oxford shirts to cowboy boots to camouflage pants to 1980s attire to bare feet in Birkenstocks (in cold weather). These days, Bozeman is home to all kinds of fancy bars, from social club to wine to rooftop, yet 'there are no more [dive bars] coming in,' says Bill. Because of the high cost of commercial properties and alcohol licenses, '[it takes] a minimum of several million to open a new bar in Bozeman. When we purchased the Hauf in 1969 the whole thing was under $100,000. It was a lot at the time. But we couldn't afford to sell it now with the high property-gains tax. We are caught in a trap.' Given all the new high-end choices, it's a bit of curiosity that people continue to show up in cultlike fashion at both the Filler and the Hauf. 'People like the fact that they feel at home,' Cin says. 'We [the owners] can drive by one of the bars and know who's in there by the cars outside.' It's a community center where you feel relaxed, Bill and Cin agree. 'Several customers tell us if we weren't here they would be gone too,' says Bill. When I enter Dusty's Bar in the dry land farming community of Brady, Montana, my first reaction is: 'This is a dive bar? It's so clean.' The polished wooden bar and shiny floors are the result of a renovation during the pandemic in 2020, says owner Kourtney Combs, who purchased Dusty's in 2019. The spotlessness is a good thing, because many people come here to eat. Every Friday, Kourtney's partner, Travis Looney, starts smoking meat – barbecue pork, tri-tip, briquet, sausage, ribs, turkey – at around 3am so it's ready to go by 5pm. By 7pm, it's sold out. In addition to having great food, Dusty's is also a place where customers chip in. 'If I get too busy, people will just get up and start helping,' says Combs. 'They'll take their dishes back. They'll stock the cooler. They'll clear other people's plates. If I have to leave the bar for 20 minutes, it will take care of itself. Customers will get their own drinks. Honor system. We trust them.' When I sit at the bar with locals Gus Winterrowd, a retired farmer; Jeff Farkell, a crop consultant; and Dan Rouns, a retired farmer and previous Dusty's owner, the conversation spans topics as far-ranging as life before technology to soil samples to memories of spinning records in the disco bar upstairs. This is how we landed on the topic of the 'cancer belt'. Winterrowd tells the group he heard the term from his wife's doctor in Seattle when he asked: 'What's the deal with all the cancer in our area?' And the doctor responded: 'It's the cancer belt,' referring to the rate of illness in women in communities across the midwest to northern plains. 'She put up one hell of a fight,' says Rouns about Winterrowd's wife. 'She did anything any person could do.' At this point in the conversation, I realize that a big part of the beauty of the dive bar is that it's a place of connection, a place where real people come to know each othe in real time. Of course, such moments of gravity are balanced with humor: 'We give each other shit. Ninety-ninety percent of the time we all get along. And we don't talk politics unless we're really drunk,' says Farkell. Forty-six miles down the road from Brady on the Missouri River, in the small city of Great Falls, I'm crouched with my camera near a mannequin wearing a repurposed prom dress in a room overflowing with fabrics, threads and sequins. At center is a Singer sewing machine and at the helm, Sandra Thares, seamstress of mermaid costumes and owner of the Sip 'n Dip Lounge, a tiki retro cocktail bar. Yes, mermaid costumes. Sip 'n Dip features windows with underwater views of swimming mermaids. (Currently, there are no mermen.) As part of their employment, each mermaid receives two tails and two tops per tail – all handmade by Thares. In 1996, the first swimming mermaid was a housekeeper dressed in a green plastic tablecloth on New Year's Eve. Over time, the concept became popular and grew into a regular weekend event. It's now a defining aspect of the bar, with mermaids putting on a show six or seven times a week. Mermaid Bingo Night was added in 2024. The evening entails three rounds of bingo in which the mermaids hold up the number cards. It is, as Thares puts it, 'something to do on a cold Montana winter Monday'. Usually, everyone gets a Hawaiian lei. The prizes are not monetary but instead they are 'fabulous' rewards. No matter what is happening on any given evening, Thares says, 'I always tell people that the thing about the Sip 'n Dip is that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are from, what your background is, what your political beliefs are, none of that matters [at] the Sip' n Dip; there's always something to talk about. And no matter who you are, you make new friends.' At each dive bar that I visit, people share the details of other dive bars that I should go to. More than once, people point me in the direction of Sun River and the 'bra bar', more formally known as the Rambling Inn – a place where customers leave their bras behind to hang on the walls in exchange for free drinks. Alas, the bra theme is great fodder for good-natured double entendres regarding 'cups' and a fun starting point for lighthearted conversation. Throughout my dive bar tour, the Helsinki Bar – the last remaining building in Finn Town in the small mining community of Butte – kept calling me back. I was previously there on St Urho's Day, a Finnish holiday celebrating the fictional St Urho, when I met Fiina Heinze. Heinze is of Finnish descent, and I witnessed her crowning as the 2025 Queen of St Urho's Day amid a packed bar, jello shots and premade plastic bags filled with a mysterious mixed drink. According to Heinze, St Urho is celebrated for driving away the grasshoppers that were destroying the grape crops in Finland. The holiday is something of a whimsical Finnish rivalry to St Patrick's Day: 'It's just a day that the Finns decided to have [on] the day before St Patrick's Day. It's not a national holiday.' I think that's the thing about dive bars: in large part, they are about stories. The stories that we listen to and that we share. The stories we experience while we are there. And if you're lucky, it can mark the beginning of a new story with a lifelong partner. All this, I think, is like the dive bar itself: an expression of that imperfect, enduring and sometimes sticky thing called love.
South China Morning Post
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Your Hong Kong weekend drinks guide for May 23-25
It's open(ing) season for Hong Kong's bar scene. The last few weeks have seen several new concepts start welcoming customers, and two of the latest and possibly greatest are Bar Oasis and Goose Island Taproom. The former, helmed by Alex Pun of fruit spirit cocktail bar Orchard, is currently in its soft opening phase, while the latter is in full swing serving the best brews out of Chicago. If you're at a loose end on Friday, be sure to head to the new and improved Kai Tak as Kinsman's Gavin Yeung celebrates the former airport's aviation history with a collaboration at rooftop bar Jin Bo Law. Thursday, 22 May Bar Oasis Alex Pun and his team at Bar Oasis. Photo: Handout What: This month Alex Pun – the brains behind Orchard, Hong Kong's only eau-de-vie concept – brings us a modern take on the dive bar with the soft opening of Bar Oasis. Get an early look at the three on-tap cocktails and five signatures that are ready for public consumption, all at the immensely reasonable price of HK$100 each. Pun and his team are still refining the service and concept, but expect speedy, energetic service and great concoctions that reflect the best of dive bar culture all the way from the 1990s. Advertisement Where: Bar Oasis, 28 Hollywood Road, Central When: 6pm-2am (but double check Instagram for the latest opening hours before visiting, just in case). Friday, 23 May Jin Bo Law x Kinsman Jin Bow Law Skybar at Dorsett Kai Tak. Photo: Handout What: The Dorsett The Dorsett Kai Tak 's Jin Bo Law Skybar offers stunning views of the waterfront, and this weekend it's hosting Kinsman's Gavin Yeung (also associate editor at the South China Morning Post's PostMag). Yeung will work with NIP Gin to craft signatures that capture the energy of the defunct airport and Kowloon City, and that highlight the area's unique history and atmosphere. Where: 15/F, Dorsett Kai Tak, 43 Shing Kai Road, Kowloon City When: 7-10pm Saturday, 24 May Goose Island Taproom
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
On a roll: the snowballing success of BuzzBallz pre-mix cocktails
A trip to a dive bar over the weekend has left me riddled with despair. It was the first time in quite a while that I'd left a house party to Go On Somewhere Else™, and when I arrived at 3am, I noticed that all the other customers were so young. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. None of them was even alive for the millennium bug, yet they all wear low-rise jeans. While my friends and I sing Avril Lavigne's Complicated with eye-watering sincerity, they join in ironically. Hell, they even show their top and bottom teeth when they smile. And, at this party, they were also all drinking BuzzBallz, curious little single-serve drinks that are becoming as prevalent as tonic wine in that small category of bottles you regularly see balanced precariously on windowsills on a Sunday morning. A buzzball is a cocktail in a rotund little can or plastic container that fits rather ergonomically into the palm. Sealed with a ringpull at the top, and made with opaque or transparent recycled plastic, they have a pleasing y2k vibe. The company was founded in 2009 by one Merrilee Kick (a fabulously American name), a teacher who wanted the welly of a cocktail but without the fragility, or ceremony, of drinking it from a cocktail glass. It's little wonder that BuzzBallz have picked up pace with gen Z. I've written before about the tinnification of booze, and its implications for the drinking habits of the younger generation, but these ones are designed specifically for those among them who actually enjoy drinking. BuzzBallz come in 200ml measures, and are all at 13.5% ABV, which puts them at the same strength as a medium/large glass of wine. That said, with the help of their high sugar content, I daresay you'll get to where you need to be a lot quicker. There are various flavours, from Chili Mango and Lotta Colada to Tequila 'Rita and Pornstar Martini. (Incidentally, does anyone know why we started calling the latter passion fruit martinis? If you're old enough to drink one, you're old enough to know what a porn star is, surely?) So, to the off-licence! My local in east London had five varieties in stock, so I bought one of each. And, on the whole, they're actually fun and really rather delicious – not as strong as I'd have hoped (it's only 13.5% ABV), and lacking the acidity of a cocktail made with freshly squeezed lime or lemon. If you're comparing BuzzBallz with a fancy cocktail from a glitzy bar, you quite obviously shouldn't. This is a completely different ballgame, for when you're after something you can pull from a box of melting ice as if you're diving for pearls, when it's hot out and all you want is something cold, simple and sexy to drink. Strawberry 'Rita £3.99 (200ml) Drink Supermarket, 13.5%. A lurid cherry red, but the strawberry doesn't taste too artificial. Add a squeeze of lime. Choc Tease £3.99 (200ml) Drink Supermarket, 13.5%. I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. Like a boozy Chocomel. And it tastes strong. Pornstar Martini £3.99 (200ml) Drink Supermarket, 13.5%. Super-sweet, but good if you like your pornstars more vanilla. Chili Mango £3.99 (200ml) Drink Supermarket, 13.5%. Really, really good. If a picante margarita is your thing, you'll get a lot out of this.
