Lola's Depot

Upon leaving this bar in Houston's Montrose neighborhood, a barback followed me out, hurriedly striding across the hot pavement outside with a towel flapping out his back pocket like a dishwasher's battle standard. Like The Charge of the Bud Light Brigade.

He snapped pics of my car, clearly thinking I was some sort of underground operative staking out Lola's Depot, which, by all accounts, is a complete and absolute dump. But maybe the paranoia is warranted when the clientele of your dive bar is a motley crew of punks, hippies, burnouts, gentrifiers, drug addicts, canatakerous misanthropes, and everyone in between. For the record: my kind of crowd.

Lola's Depot is 100% a dive. No kitchen, no cocktail menu, no care whatsoever about your customer experience. I can only imagine what goes down in the bathrooms here. The back patio looks like a Tijuana car impound lot. There are so many stickers plastered over the walls, they might be certified as load-bearing. At $1.75 (during happy hour), the beer is cheaper than bottled water or a used car salesman’s cologne.

Lola's reminds me of the bars Nelson Algren wrote about in 'The Man with the Golden Arm'—dens of scheming and debauchery where you don't know if you'll leave with a good story or see the glint of a sharp knife under a streetlight outside. But that makes things a bit more exciting. Adrenaline is a hell of a chaser.

You might not like Lola's Depot. Hell, you might hate it. But I guarantee you won't forget it. To me, that's good enough. Die with memories, not dreams.

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Standout online reviews:

"You can leave your bra."

"You'd have a better time drinking a quart of beer at a bus stop."

"When I left Lola's I had to stop by the liquor store across the street and buy a bottle of Thunderbird for the ride home."

"Stiff drinks, sure. Inappropriate behavior in your sightline, likely. Cockroaches? Anyone's guess."

"Worst bathrooms in Houston."

"I remember the first time I went into this bar, oh wait, I really don't because I got so hammered that I don't recall much that night."

"Don't like the fact that they've cleaned this place up so much."