Drinking Down in Old Town Pasadena

Quoting directly from their webpage: "Vertical Wine Bistro abides by the notion that wine, not food, can be the anchor of a meal ... experts and novices alike peruse the … domestic and international labels with the help of an unpretentious staff." Douchebags. Two kinds of customers show up to stake out their territory and sample some of the 400+ plus wines: (1) scenesters who just went to an art gallery and want to talk about the fragmentation of lived reality under conditions of late capitalism; (2) cougars who will fuck you in the coat room. (photo) [link]

Three floors, two of which are filled with men who have glazed hair, shaved chests, too much Axe, and a weird tic where they try to impress their dates with their total … lack of any pool game. The bottom floor is a dance club filled with women who have to wait in line at other dance clubs and make up for it by desperately throwing themselves at men to prove something. Which is awesome, if you go for that sort of thing. Don't be the guy who's over 30 at Q's. It's cheating, and frankly it's kind of creepy. [link]

This place tries very hard to be what its owners think a New York lounge is like. There are strange rules about where and when you can carry your drinks, who gets to … serve them to you, etc. The lounge is very swanky, and there's a reasonable variety of live music on most nights. Add to that a patio, the ethos of being well-hidden, and complicated martinis pulled off with something better than incompetence -- all the makings of an impressive albeit immoderately priced Old Town date destination. [link]

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Old Town's stab at a legitimate dive bar. The floor is dirty, the pool tables lopsided, the free popcorn was already stale during the Reagan administration, and the … bartender is a flaming bitch. This is the one place in Old Town where you might actually get into a fight with someone who's not a drunk Cal Tech frat boy desperately trying to regain the small sense of masculinity that was beaten out of him in high school. This place is for pitchers of beer, sports, and happy hour. Don't order cocktails. [link]

Not so much a bar as one of the few cheap post-bar dining options in Old Town. This place specializes in making large amounts of Mexican food appear in front of you and … then not charging you very much for it. It's been around forever, and they're now building a Pinkberry right next to it. Which is kind of like building an outhouse next to St. Peter's Cathedral. Holy shit I hate Pinkberry. Anyway, they have everything from giant vegetarian burritos to carne asada tacos, and you should feel free to pile on tons of their justifiably well-regarded salsa. (photo) [link]

This place used to be the Muse, but it wasn't skanky enough, so it went out of business and this place took over the location. Nothing particularly exceptional -- there … are three dancefloors and underdressed women dance on them. Best complaint on Yelp : "some of our girls were not let in because they were heavy." Tourists. [link]

Notable for two things above and beyond the regular restaurant. First, it's a late night lounge with a dress code, bouncers who can't be bribed out of enforcing that … dress code, and there's live music that isn't terribly bad. Second, they've got a happy hour that begins at 3 p.m. and ends a little before the lounge opens, giving you just enough time to hit one of the nearby dive bars, finish drinking anything that approximates "affordable," and head back if you're so inclined. The rest of the time, the restaurant is a pretty swanky tapas bar that serves businesspeople, suburban families, and guys who don't know enough to take their dates to hole in the wall places in Hollywood. [link]