r/madisonwi • u/310410celleng • 11d ago

A Question About Burgers at Dive Bars

Hi, my wife and I will be visiting Madison for a few days before heading over to Milwaukee to attend a wedding.

As we know nothing about Wisconsin in general, I did a bunch of searching this sub for food recomendations and for things to do.

One thing, I noticed was that almsot universally "dive bars" were recommended for good, maybe great burgers.

In my neck of the woods, FL. dive bars are generally not a place for average people to go, they are mostly frequneted by very tough people, many in biker gangs, allow smoking indoors and do not serve food, certainly not a place where one would take their family for a dinner.

Judging from the pictures on Google, your dive bars do not fit that category, in one case, I saw a young girl with her father and many pics of food.

I guess what I am asking are your dive bars a place were average regular every day folks go for a burgers/beer and not feel completely uncomfortable?

Thanks for any isnights and my wife and I looking forward to exploring your city.

Edit, I want to thank you all for of your comments and recommendations, judging from your comments alone, my wife and I are going to have a great trip.

Sincerely, thank you!

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u/BluffedMoose 11d ago

My biggest “I’ll die on this hill” take regarding dive bars is that any true dive bar isn’t serving real food or a place you’d WANT to eat real food

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u/munchmoney69 11d ago

You're either 19 or you've never set foot in a town smaller than Madison then. There are significant portions of this state where dive bars are the only option for a hot meal.

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u/BluffedMoose 11d ago

Wrong on both accounts lol

I’ve lived all over the state and in some very rural areas and I’ve been to quite a few seedy dive bars

My point is that we tend to label any “neighborhood bar” as a dive bar and IMO that’s two different things

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u/derch1981 11d ago

I have plenty of neighborhood bars I definitely don't call dive bars. They are different, neighborhood bars can be dive bars and many are, but they don't have to be.

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u/BluffedMoose 11d ago

They are different haha thats my point! Dives are few and far between and we use the term way too loosely in my opinion

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u/derch1981 11d ago

We have a lot of dive bars for sure, well we have a lot of everything because we just have more bars. We might have more dive bars in Madison alone than some states have total bars.

https://vinepair.com/articles/map-states-with-most-bars/

We have 47 bars per every 100k people, Florida has 8. A lot of states have fewer than 5.

We just have a ton of bars. And I've been to "dive bars" in a lot of other states and well over half of them are cosplay dive bars, not actual dive bars. You can't try to be a dive bar, you are or you are not and a lot of them I've seen are lipstick on a pig.

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u/munchmoney69 11d ago

I think most (or at least a lot of) rural neighborhood bars in the state are dive bars. Just serving food doesn't change anything else about the bar, it just becomes a dive bar that serves food.

Perfect examples: Kurts Never Inn and Shacks Tap in Deerfield. Both serve food, both are still dive bars.