Inside: The Continental Club

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Quality dive bars tend to be places that, when they hatched back in the day, strutted about the yard preening their feathers, and pluckily held onto their spot in the pecking order even as the yard wore down around them. In other words, they rarely begin life as dives. The Continental Club, on the other hand, seems to have kicked and clawed itself free of its tattooed, brow-pierced, Bukowski-poem of a shell, loudly crowing, “I am Dive Bar! I am Good!”

Décor: Better get it out of the way right off the bat: as seen from the street the Continental Club doesn’t display itself to full advantage. It’s a somewhat frumpy little structure perched on the corner of 5th and Santa Fe, with a parking lot that appears to have played host to several recent live-fire exercises. Luckily, what the outside lacks in aesthetic sex appeal is easily compensated for by the eclectic, unabashedly pop-strong, interior design. Framed B-movie posters, black-and-red checkered wall treatments, unobtrusive lighting, and vinyl-upholstered booths. In the quiet of the afternoon, the TVs are usually dialed to “Jeopardy!” or “Cash Cab,” but come nightfall they giddily display an endless torrent of Grindhouse classics. Additionally, the Continental does something that is rare among all bars. They make their walls available for local artists to display their visual creations. And what’s even more fascinating is that the art is, more often than not, quite good. (Sometimes good enough to warrant a visit all on its own.) Oh yeah, and there’s a big ol’ weird steer’s skull above the bar, surveying the scene with one googly eye.

The Bar: Couple of chalk boards inform the curious about daily specials. Typically, we’re talking $3 tiki drinks (Blue Hawaiians, Zombies), $2.50 shots of Beam, $4 Jager-bombs, etc. Otherwise, they offer a robust array of top- and bottom-shelf hooch (including some unusual breeds like Anisette, Ouzo and that fake Absinthe crap that makes ignorant lit majors think they’re Lord Byron), 7 or 8 different beers on tap, and maybe twice that number in bottles and cans. And for tipplers with light wallets: 16 oz. cans of PBR for $2, all day, every day.A crew of seasoned pros, the bartenders know cocktails that last crested the popularity wave about the time “Professor” Jerry Thomas wrote the “Bartender’s Companion” in 1862, so if you’re one of those yuck-riots who get gassed by stumping bar-keeps with their mixology erudition, you better start cramming.Plenty of places to sit during the day and early evening. After about 10 p.m., though, plan on grub-staking a patch of floor, and experiencing a few rounds of scooch-n-shuffle during trips to the loo. A word of caution. If you are sitting at the bar later in the evening and you hear someone holler, “Spring Break!,” duck, or you’ll get wet.

Services: There is some species of live entertainment—rock bands, blues outfits, quirky DJs—almost every night of the week. A juke-box is available the rest of the time, housing a selection of tunes that is simply mind-boggling. And here’s something you don’t see every day: the Continental is (surely) the only watering hole in town that provides customers the occasion to wager on a weekly Chicken Drop. What, you may ask, in the name of Frank Perdue, is a Chicken Drop? Well, there’s a sheet of plywood. It’s been gridded off into twenty-five numbered squares. Squares cost $1 a piece. When the time comes, a chicken wrangler looses his feathered charge onto the sheet of plywood with the numbered squares. If Foghorn Leghorn evacuates on your square, you win the money. For further information, check out “Chicken Drop” by Mojo Nixon. Buy your squares every Sunday afternoon, beginning around 4 p.m. It’s wholesome family entertainment and a biology lesson all rolled into one.

Crowd: Basically, the Continental gang is a sort of socio-political slurry. Blue-collar workers, hipsters, guys smoking pipes, lounge honeys, one or two certifiable whack-a-doos, and folks who defy easy assignment to a particular tribe. The number of hard-cases and drama-drunks is vanishingly small. People are there to laugh, and to gab with their friends, and to flirt with appealing strangers, and to get good and whiffled.

Bottom Line: What are you waiting for? Put the Continental Club at the top of your list of places to go this week. If you don’t have a good time, better see your physician. You have a malady.

The Continental Club
475 Santa Fe Dr.
Denver, CO 80204
720-524-6904

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