Dan's Café Dive Bar

Adams Morgan, Washington, DC –

Built into a flat, square building with no exterior windows or lights, the most prominent evidence of the dive hiding behind the boarded-up façade of Dan’s Café is the string of rowdy frat boys usually careening out its door.

A dozen shelves of booze stacked behind the sticky bar glitter like lost treasure, drawing a crowd of college grads gearing up for a bleary-eyed night of hard liquor doled out in Dan’s special style – tall glasses, a bucket of ice, and a mixer ready for DIY drinks.

Old-school neon signs, slowly dying plants, and drink prices scribbled on a piece of paper and nailed to the wall make up most of the décor, but after a few shots served in condiment squeeze bottles that could drop a small elephant, no one is really looking at the furniture.

When not crowded around the electric fans trying to catch a breeze when the air conditioner-free bar heats up, those budget-conscious partiers still standing can try and find entertainment on the probably broken pool table or at the old jukebox that boasts music from an era when compact discs were a radical technological achievement.

With a maximum capacity of about sixty and a reputation for being a small and gritty pre-game dive, Dan’s Café fills up early on Friday and Saturday nights as guys with an agenda stop in for a quickie before stumbling to another neighborhood locale.