The Best Dive Bars in Brooklyn
Soccer Tavern
6004 Eighth Avenue, Sunset Park
It’s situated on a commercial strip once nicknamed Lapskaus Boulevard after the Northern European stew, a nod to the dominant Scandinavian population. Back then, Eighth Avenue was full of bars, though most of them have since closed. Soccer Tavern, in fact, is the last of those places, sort of comically located in the middle of what’s now Brooklyn’s bustling Chinatown, its simple, unchanged storefront cramped by neighboring Chinese-language signage. One of our fathers used to come here to find dockbuilding work—it was like a de facto union office—but nowadays it draws both the few remaining neighborhood holdouts, likely to be found reminiscing about stores and theaters long-since closed, and new immigrants, making for a nice mix.
