Electric Avenue Cafe

Buffalo, New York

Every downtown needs an unassuming corner dive bar resistant to urban revitalization and Buffalo’s answer to that call is Electric Avenue Café, opened in 1981 as a reggae club and in many ways untouched ever since. White brick stretches around almost the entirety of the first floor of a large apartment building in downtown Buffalo (as does the script name of the bar), leaving ample room for Electric Avenue Café to occupy a deceptively large space that includes pool, darts, pinball and jukebox filled with staff-made mix CDs.

Rick Platt, whose father opened Electric Avenue Café, manages the space today, combining efforts with next-door Mohawk Place, which Platt purchased out of foreclosure and reopened in 2014. Mohawk Place features a live music vibe that occasionally spills over into Electric Avenue Café, resulting in occasional performances in a corner of the space. On weekday afternoons, regulars play volume-on Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and the food selection here consists of two kinds of jerky. Local artist Ramon Dennis painted an intense and quite large futuristic cityscape mural in the rear of the space, adding to Electric Avenue Café’s eclectic interior.

The Basics

Classification:
Neighborhood Bar

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Further Reading