Breaking down Southern Living's 25 legendary dive bars in the South

And how the hell do these lists get made anyway?

Recently, Southern Living took a crack at making a best of the South dive bar list with some success, though these lists are never really perfect. How can they be? There's just too much ground to cover and too many tastes to placate.

I've written my fair share of lists for Thirllist back in the day and there's definitely an art to these. When you're doing them for a large media outlet, it comes down to clicks. The New York Times might have some journalistic leeway to maintain integrity, but most others don't. Typically, you have to include some famous spots for the normie readers, a few curveballs to get the trolls riled up, and do your best with the rest.

Overall, it seems like a decent list, though I haven't spent too much time in Alabama or the various Florida beach towns. A couple of these don't seem like dive bars, but not too many, so that's good. From the 25, the 8 I've been to are all good picks, though Dixie Chicken I'd definitely leave out:

• Green Parrot Bar, Key West

• Griffon, Charleston

• Planet Marfa, Marfa

• No Name Pub, Big Pine Key

• Donn's Depot, Austin

• Sloppy Joe's, Key West

• Santa's Pub, Nashville

• Dixie Chicken, College Station

Of course, Texans can nominate scores of dives to substitute for Planet Marfa and Donn's Depot, the former of which being a hybrid outdoor bar rather than a classic dive. But it's impossible to make everyone happy with these things. Some additional notes I had while reading this piece:

• No idea how I missed Port O Call in New Orleans, since I've visited NOLA quite a few times over the years.

• I had planned to go to Earnestine & Hazel's in Memphis but it was closed during COVID

• Johnny's Hideaway in ATL making this list but not Claremont Lounge is pretty wild. The Claremont just got massively disrespected, imo.

• I went to Santa's Pub with some college friends, and one of them randomly ran into their cousin, who was also in town. Crazy coincidence.

• White Water Tavern in Little Rock is an absolute banger and should've been on here.

These types of lists are also inherently a hazardous assignment because there's almost no chance a freelance writer (or even staff writer) has been to all the locations. Economically, it just doesn't make sense. Freelancers typically don't pull in big money, which you kind of need to travel all over the South and go to all these places. Especially in the Florida Keys. If, and when, a writer finally starts pulling a good check, are they going to keep writing on the side at great expense to their free time and earning potential at their other gigs or day job? No, probably not.

There's also zero chance that Southern Living has a budget to pay someone to travel to all these places. That's something that may have happened in the '70s or '80s when magazines were a primary source of entertainment and the average person actually read something once in a while, rather than drooling onto their iPhone screen as the TikTok videos turned their brain into scrambled eggs. Times are different now and that train don't come round here no more.

So, the result is something that's cobbled together from recommendations, Google searches, and *some* actual visits. Overall I still enjoy these, but they should all be taken with a grain of salt and a shot of Old Grand Dad.