As the bartender during the day shift told us, there are few downtown bars left in St. Paul, making Gopher Bar a bit of a destination for those working downtown or living nearby. Any type of crowd drawn downtown eventually spills over here in search of beer and the coney dogs that Gopher Bar is known for. We were assured that in days gone by, any deviation from the menu or special request would have been met with an expletive, but our day was lucky and the cook was kind enough to deliver a custom coney (amazing) and, of all things, a homemade egg roll.
The term egg roll is a bit misleading as it conjures up an image far different from the hand cooked, freshly prepared mini burrito that was served up. When the shock of the size of the egg roll became clear to the bartender, she asked us what we expected for $4, the clear connotation being that $4 should go a long way and indeed at Gopher Bar it does. The coney was phenomenal, the bun made up of a sort of split Texas toast, topped with not coney or chili sauce (I was yelled at for the suggestion), but a delicious meat sauce that makes it clear the dive bar’s high food reputation is well earned.
The best dive bars are the ones that make it easy to picture generations of drinkers filling into this same space, surrounded by these same decorations and drinking these same beers. Gopher Bar may be the perfect example of that phenomenon, the interior dominated by vertical wood paneling and posters surrounding the space clearly in positions they’ve held for decades. The space behind the bar alone provides enough visual variety that picking out every detail feels impossible. Modern beer signs mix in with deer heads mix in with colorfully worded signs that we were assured have been actually tamed down over the years.