Bad news coming off the tipster button. http://www.scrumptiouschef.com/food/contact.cfm is how folks contact us through the site with news they want to share about taco finds, burger scores, restaurant openings and sadly, dive bars that have shut down.

Like Pancho and Lefty's, one of our absolute favorites. When Central Texas loses a joint with nearly a century of history we grieve the only way we know how; by hoisting a cold Lone Star beer.

Field report: http://www.scrumptiouschef.com/food/index.cfm/2011/10/2

We drank a few thousand of the damn things before we finally got ahold of one with an upside down label.

Kicked back at Pancho and Lefty's, one of our favorite Austin area watering holes we marveled at the unique label of one of our favorite beers.

The bartender, a veteran of 40 years in the Texas dive bar industry allowed as how she'd never laid eyes on one either.

Must have been a sign from the heavens to drink more Lone Star.

related http://www.scrumptiouschef.com/food/index.cfm/2011/10/2

When our affairs of the day carried us to Parmer Lane recently we wanted to make the most of it. It's not often we make our way to the southern edges of Dallas so we felt it was incumbent that we either eat, drink or do something beneficial to our humor.

Score.

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We love Eater Austin. The site is pure dynamite for anyone interested in eating well in our fair city. But we just read the results of their Best Bartender In Austin poll and have to ask "Where's Waldo".

Lovejoy's is our favorite bar in Austin by a wide margin. Yes, we drink nightly all over town but like Bar Tonique in New Orleans, ultimately we have one favorite spot to tipple and it has to be Lovejoy's.

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The list of bars and restaurants we've been tossed out of is a short one but Cloak Room is on it.

We love old people. They're a link to our past and we always treat them with the reverence and respect due to a person who's exhibited the resilience it takes to survive for multiple decades on this giant hunk of earth relentlessly spinning it's way around the universe.

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Sitting out in Hare Texas looking out across the vast plains of the Blackland Prairie, Pancho and Lefty's is just a quick sprint up the road from Austin. But you might as well be a million miles away from America's fourteenth largest city.

Inside the old dive bar it's good and dark with just the faint glow of beer signs and televisions piercing the gloom. It's a good gloom too. Very peaceful. Beer is cheap as it should be out in these parts, nobody's trying to get rich selling overpriced Lone Star in Hare Texas.

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There are few beer joints we hold more dear in the dive bar pantheon than Cactus Rose. We first discovered it a few years back on a barbecue run through Williamson County.

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Frontier Bar fulfills several criteria we hold dear in our dive bars. Firstly, we love that they will sell you a delicious, ice cold beer for exactly one dollar.

While it's true that we've been in Austin long enough to remember when plenty bars did just that, our recent journeys through the nightlife scene found the trait to be vanishing.

Settling in at the bar with a one dollar Miller High life, The Cramps on the juke box and the soft mechanical clatter of the ancient beer cooler, we begin our hang.

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TC Perkins is calling it a day.

TC's Lounge has closed.

The property has been sold to some Michiganders who will be reimagining and repurposing the ol girl.

We reckon owning a juke joint in Austin Texas since 1979 has taken it's toll and it's time for Mr. Perkins to rear back and enjoy life for awhile.

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The Tale of Ed's Cucaracha could stand as an object lesson to bar owners everywhere. Don't buy the bar next door.

The Cockroach was running along just fine a few years back. Every night was the perfect dive bar milieu of scenesters, punks, mechanics, rockers, ex-Lubbockites, bewildered collegians and good old squares.

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When my best friend Lukey got a pool table I devoted myself to the game and quickly figured out it could be a good way for me to relieve some of our friends of their pocket money.

I was ten.

Those halcyon days are long gone. I sold my stick years ago and haven't played a game in a coon's age.

Yet I still like The Grand.

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