E-Mail This Article to a Friend Buzz for the buck Where to go for the city’s cheapest drinks BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Dive on over • B-Side Lounge, 92 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, (617) 354-0766. • Cantab Lounge, 738 Mass Ave, Cambridge, (617) 354-2685. • Charlie’s Kitchen, 10 Eliot Street, Cambridge, (617) 492-9646. • Flat Top Johnny’s, 1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, (617) 494-9565. • Model Café, 7 North Beacon Street, Allston, (617) 254-9365. • P.J. Kilroy’s, 822 Beacon Street, Boston, (617) 266-3986. • Silhouette Lounge, 200 Brighton Avenue, Allston, (617) 254-9306. • Sligo Pub, 237 Elm Street, Somerville; no phone. • TC’s Lounge, 1 Haviland Street, Boston, (617) 247-8109. • Tim’s Tavern, 329 Columbus Avenue, Boston, (617) 437-6898. • Triple D’s, 437 Huntington Avenue, Jamaica Plain, (617) 522-4966. — NM

WHETHER YOUR fortune’s been swiped by the rotting economy, you’re a pauperish student with holes in your shoes, or simply someone who favors the unfussy and humble over the upscale and elegant, there’s good news for the lot of you: cheap drinks can be found in this city. There are dive bars and bars with dive prices aplenty. We’re here to remind you that not every establishment in Boston charges 12 bucks for a cocktail or six for a pint, that there are places where you don’t have to worry about your hair or running out of funds after the first round. As temperatures drop and election season heats up, don’t let your hope plunge with the leaves and the polls. Duck inside these bars for drinks that will keep your nickels in your pocket.

The dive-bar moniker, so it’s told, originated back in the 19th century and was used to describe subterranean saloons, hidden from the view of the abstemious and well-behaved citizens strolling the sidewalks. Dives have long been synonymous with the seedy, sordid, squalid, and cheap. The following bars don’t all fall under that classic definition, but some of them certainly do. Take P.J. Kilroy’s, for example, a few minutes by foot from Fenway Park and the bumping and grinding of Lansdowne Street. A Busch on draught costs $1.50. A pitcher of it costs $6. (Pitchers of Miller Lite and Bud cost $7 and $8, respectively.) We’ve all been to bars where a single pint costs that much. Three dollars get you a 16-ounce bottle of Bud; if bright-colored shots are more your speed, barkeep Christie has come up with a menu of her own test-tube shooters in red, blue, and green. The green shot, a "melon margarita," includes Midori, tequila, triple sec, and a splash of sour mix. There’s a pool table in the back and bully music on the juke. You don’t come to Kilroy’s to see or be seen. Head across the street to An Tua Nua for that, or to Audubon Circle just down the block.

Down by Berklee, tucked quietly into a side street like the consummate dive that it is, you’ll find TC’s Lounge, where everyone — Berklee punk rocker, tie-loosened professional, huge-biceps construction worker, or grizzled old barfly — looks like a regular. The back wall is lined with hundreds of Polaroids of customers smiling big for the camera. A few look like they’ve had one too many of the lounge’s infamous OxyContin shots ($4.50). Let’s just say there’s a reason the shot is named after a narcotic painkiller, and we’re surprised its recreational use hasn’t been banned. For $5.75, you and a friend (or just you, for that matter) can get a pint of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bottle of Bud.

No cheap-drink story would be complete without mentioning two bars over in Allston, the Model Café and the Silhouette Lounge. Low on the frattitude that plagues much of the Allston/Brighton bar scene, the Model features $2 pints of PBR, and everything — save Guinness — is under $4. The bar has also long proved to be a woozy womb for burgeoning bands, a place where a bassist, a drummer, and a kid who can howl express their shared love for the tune on the jukebox, and voilà, rehearsals start the following week. Down a few blocks, the sign for the Silhouette glows in its ’50s-style script, which has, like the bar itself, gone in and out of style. It’s surely a drinker’s bar, and men with mullets and denim vests perch on stools next to kids in studded belts and bright sneakers, while jock types in sweatshirts play pool in the back. Everyone wants to throw some dahts. And even our frosted beer mug smells like popcorn. PBR is $1.95, and pitchers come cheap as well.

The Slummerville nickname is no longer as accurate as it used to be, especially in Davis Square. Starbucks, Diva, Orleans, and the Joshua Tree certainly don’t qualify as wrong-side-of-the-tracks, nor do the crowds of freshly washed and neatly dressed patrons, a demographic you won’t always find at the Sligo. Down the street from the Burren, Sligo stands as a bastion of all that Somerville used to be. It’s a dive through and through. On a recent Wednesday evening, a guy double-parked outside the bar. The cops pulled up, checked his plates, and when the man returned, he was cuffed and carted off. He had a warrant, said one of the cops to the onlookers, mostly the Sligo crowd who left their barstools to see what was going on. Get a Guinness for $3, or a PBR draught for $2.25.

Unlike the bars listed above, Flat Top Johnny’s, over in Kendall Square, can’t be considered a dive. Indeed, it’s consistently voted one of the best places to play pool in the city. But non-dive status in this Cambridge pool parlor doesn’t mean upscale prices. Nothing nods to ghetto like 40s, and Flat Top Johnny’s serves them up for $5 — in a brown paper bag, no less. And there are bottles of Schlitz, PBR, and Miller High Life to be had for $2. To top it off, the servers deliver them without bumping your stick.

The B-Side Lounge, in Inman Square, likewise can’t be considered a dive. But the bar that occupied the space before Patrick Sullivan bought it six years ago certainly was, in the worst possible way. It used to be the type of place, Sullivan explains, where patrons sold blow to 14-year-old kids in the bar. Needless to say, it’s come a long way. The B-Side serves comfort food with flare, along with a sweeping variety of cocktails. If you feel like paying for your food, try the heaping plate of blue-cheese-topped fries. If you feel like eating for free, grab a hard-boiled egg off the bar. According to Sullivan, the best bang for your buck, drink-wise, is the Down Low, a generous shot of Jack Daniel’s and a pony can of Bud for $7. That or the Windsor Hi-Lo, named after the Windsor Tap, the tavern that the B-Side replaced, which includes a 16-ounce can of Schlitz and Green Chartreuse frappe (110 proof!) for $9.

Across the river in the South End, there’s Tim’s Tavern, a no-frills establishment in a neighborhood often fraught with frills. The beers are cheap — 12-ounce domestic draughts for $1.75; $2.75 for 16 ounces — but at Tim’s, the burger’s the thing. Every bite will remind you why you’re not a vegetarian. A bottle of Bud, a huge and delicious burger, and a side of onion rings make the perfect $10 meal.

Three other places worth visiting despite the oncoming cold: Triple D’s, in Jamaica Plain, Boston’s first sports bar lined with black-and-white boxing photos; Charlie’s Kitchen, in Harvard Square, where the tattoos are more interesting than anything on the walls; and the Cantab Lounge, in Central Square, with its various crooners and comics.

Nina MacLaughlin can be reached at nmaclaughlin[a]phx.com.