Dive Bar Review: Tattooed Mom
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
What's the fanciest brew they sell?
Tattooed Mom
Maria Pouchnikova
Maria Pouchnikova
Dive: Tattooed Mom, 530 South St.
Time of visit: Monday, 10:11 p.m.
Crowd: A handful of couples sit around the room. Apparently Monday night is de facto couple's night for the 20s crowd. There's a hilarious and friendly bar staff.
Fake hipster dive or real dive? Fake hipster dive, although the regulars that have been coming here for 18-plus years might disagree.
What bartender gives when you ask for "fanciest" beer: This place has a good beer list in addition to cheap booze, so: Flying Fish Abbey Dubbel.
Smoking: No.
Food: Full bar menu with vegan options.
Scene: Walk into your eclectic artist great-aunt's living room and grab a drink, friend, while the music shifts from Nazareth to the Yardbirds to Cults (and it works). Self-caricatures of starving artists dot the bar's landscape. To my left sits the platonic ideal of the hipster couple: sleeved, pierced and bespectacled, staring silently into their iPhones as they sip $3 Narragansetts (Narragansett: What we were into back when you were into PBR). Upstairs is the apotheosis of punk rock dive decor, but it's closed on Mondays.
Good For: Making jokes with the bar staff; listening in on the mother-daughter double date featuring a failed male model (mom's date) and an awkward preppy kid with a vocabulary apparently limited to a squeaky "Ha, yeah!" (daughter's date) in a conversation that consists exclusively of daughter excitedly recounting a recent wedding that every person involved in the conversation attended, and commenting on photos from said wedding, as if this were some goddamn live-action performance of a vapid Facebook wall; developing short-lived crushes on manic pixie girls before their boyfriends show up and ruin nascent true love; convincing your friends from the office that you're cooler than you are; brief, fleeting respite from the Wildwood-boardwalk-without-a-beach that is South Street, sometimes briefly interrupted by the bewildered walkers of the boards who wander in.
