Tucked away on the ditch-lined narrow backstreets of gentrifying Sunset Heights, the Rose Garden is a tiny white clapboard house trimmed in Polish red. Rose bushes — the bar is owned by a woman named Rose Marie, who is known to dish out homemade kielbasa — line the minuscule parking lot, and five or six tables are scattered about in the tiny one-room bar, which serves a variety of bottled Texas and domestic beers and suspect wine only. (Bring your own liquor.) And that's about it, save for some cool Elvis-iana on the walls and the jukebox, which is a true marvel if you like honky-tonk. And by honky-tonk we're talking the real deal: Johnny Bush, Gary Stewart, Gene Watson, Floyd Tillman, Patsy Cline and Ernest Tubb. And as you might expect, a little musical paprika in the form of Texas polka is also on the mix. Rick Heysquierdo, the host of KPFT's Saturday morning country-Americana show Lone Star Jukebox, says it's the best juke in the city and it's easy to see why. (Bring lots of cash, both for the juke and the bar. Neither accepts plastic.)
On a typical night in the Rose Garden, you'll hear a well-selected sampler of classics by country music hall of famers, while in the corner, a table of fiftysomething men, each blessed with an ample beer gut, sit and play dominoes and reminisce about Houston's hurricanes past and how in pre-sprawl Houston, you could once reach virgin Gulf Coast prairie in a few minutes instead of an hour. It's like an evening sitting at the garage poker table with Uncle Emil from Hallettsville. In a city where size and flash are often worshipped at the expense of comfort and attention to detail, the Rose Garden should be a municipal treasure.
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The Spot Club
1732 W. 18th St.
713-864-4485
Longnecks are for lawyers and you won't find any of the former and few of the latter at this near northwest side strip mall bar. It's hard to believe, but the Spot has been there for over 40 years, ranking it among the oldest bars in the Inner Loop.
A bad smell greets you when you get near the bar, but you soon get accustomed to it. Pink sparkly curtains bring a touch of bedazzlement to the medium-sized room, where a stage for karaoke stands in one corner, and for those too sedentary to avail themselves of the bar's two pool tables, there's a paperback library with a couple hundred mysteries, potboilers and romances. Party pics of the regulars line the walls, and once a year, the owners festoon the ceilings with dangling parrots and flamingos for the bar's annual luau. Even Don Ho at his most chillaxed would sound like Guns N' Roses compared to the sounds we heard coming from the jukebox — a soporific succession of Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli and other show tunes. The older Anglo crowd was nodding off over their light beers at the U-shaped bar, when the aging barmaid — perhaps the very same woman who hung the nearby sign reading "I'm still a hot chick, only now it comes in flashes" — turned her attention to us.
"I've worked here 27 years and I don't even drink," she said with a deep, smoke-cured Texas drawl. "I am on a ton of antidepressants, though. You've gotta have somethin'."
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Lone Star Saloon
1900 Travis
713-757-1616
It used to be that dives were pretty much the only bars you could find downtown. That all started to change in the 1990s with the coming of the light rail line. A nightlife boom was the result, but much of it was composed of oontz-oontz dance clubs that came and went — and continue to come and go — with dreary regularity. Most of the douchebag crowd has moved on, first to Midtown, and then to Washington Avenue, and by the time you read this, they will probably be somewhere else. Welcome to Houston, home of the wandering nightlife districts.
No doubt in large part thanks to its location in the extreme southwestern corner of downtown proper, far from the faintly throbbing pulse of the discos on Main Street, the Lone Star Saloon has observed all this hullaballoo with regal disdain. And thus it remains the dive-iest bar downtown, a title it acceded to after the demolition of Charley's (or whatever that bar on the ground floor of the now-demolished Montague flophouse was called.)
Local songwriter Greg Wood perhaps described the Lone Star best. "It has a real Deer Hunter vibe," he says. "I always feel like a Nam vet on my first day back 'in country' in there." Indeed, little of the barebones decor — including the tiny pool table — you see once you pass the cactus and the bull skull that adorn the front entry was crafted after about 1975. And neither was much of the music on the jukebox — it seems like every time I have quaffed a Busch tall boy or three there, something like Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" or B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone" was playing. And then there's the barmaid. The Lone Star has been through quite a few, but one has outlasted them all, and is still there at this writing: a French-speaking Vietnamese woman in her '60s who likely remembers pre-fall Saigon and the shenanigans of our boys on R&R.
