World’s Best Dive Bar!

What is so appealing about crappy (read nearly non-existent) service, menu choices that aren’t available, and the most surly wait staff ever encountered? Furthermore, this saloon is located about an hour or more drive from – well, anywhere. What’s worse is that the furniture is made from discarded wire spools, like the kind you used for a table in your first apartment and rough hewn logs and slabs. The tables don’t sit level, the floor is uneven…the place is a dump!

Character! That’s the appeal. You know your soulless suburban chain restaurant that tries to look like it has character, yet might as well be a cafeteria inside a mental institution? The Bucksnort is what those dead soul restaurants are trying to imitate; but they’ll never get it, and the corporate owners are probably happy with only putting on a facade of originality, much like their customers are probably content to live out their existences in characterless tract homes, not knowing much about what’s going on in their world other than what television tells them.

At the Bucksnort Saloon the people are real. The people who work there are also from somewhere near there. They don’t care what you expect in a restaurant and they aren’t going to kiss your ass. The way they see it, you drove two hours to get here, you’ll take what they’re serving or you’ll get back in your car and drive two hours back. The saloon’s customers? Either they’re regulars who also couldn’t care less about your expectations or they’re visitors forced by their surroundings to step away from their fantasy existence and face who they really are – becoming, for a moment, real.

On the drive there, you have time – in fact you’re almost forced to really take it all in. You really start to get in to the grove of the place. The narrow, winding road presents you with surprises at every turn. The houses in the area, which are mostly cabins built in the ’30′s, offer a glimpse into a different plane of existence.

With all the preparation and foreshadowing of what you are about to be greeted with, the snarky “We’re out of chicken wings” which the waitress barks at you unapologetically still comes as a bit of a shock. The same response is given to an order of jalapeño poppers – it becomes a game to try and guess what they might not be out of.

A pleasant surprise comes when I order a beer. I have high expectations here and will often judge an entire establishment on the response I get to “What kind of lager do you have?” If that leads to a suggestion of Flat Tire…or anything else that has ale right there in its name…you’ve lost me, and my willingness to tip has decreased greatly. This happens on a fairly regular basis by the way. Suggesting Guinness is nearly as bad – if your career path has put you in the business selling beer I would expect you to know that a stout is just a different kind of ale. At the Bucksnort, they know their beers and when I asked for a lager, I was presented one of the better ones I have ever had.

We ate and drank. Told stories, talked about things that mattered…or maybe they didn’t. What did matter is that for awhile the people of Sphinx Park, CO allowed us into their world and we ended up being more in touch with ourselves because of it. To ensure that the message that Sphinx Park and the Bucksnort move at their own pace stuck with us, when I tried to settle the bill with a credit card, I was told that the machine was out of paper. The paper must be on the same delivery truck with the chicken and jalapeños.