House Bar

Amarillo’s Route 66 corridor may draw the majority of the city’s drinkers in search of nostalgia, but a few blocks away, a transition zone between that more trafficked area and Amarillo’s downtown core serves as fertile ground for dive bars past and present. House Bar is nothing if not accurately named, a bar quite literally living within a semi-urban home in a part of Amarillo that feels like it’s on the way to something else.

Without the sign out front proclaiming House Bar’s name, the building itself would fade into the fabric of the neighborhood that surrounds it, a neighborhood that on this reviewer’s visit included a boarded-up apartment building and a pair of industrial-looking garages across the street. The gravel parking lot out back gives way to a side door just around the corner from the bar’s main entrance. A dive bar named House Bar needs a front lawn, and a loose collection of metal furniture strewn around the outside area lives up to the billing.

Inside, the look is pure dive bar, in the best possible way, a dark, drinking enclave with what looks to be an original wood floor, dollar bills stapled over the bar, small stage area in back. A handful of glass shelves behind the bar display the liquor possibilities for the evening, Christmas lights strung through liquor shelving and ceiling alike. Vinyl records adorn one wall, surrounded by the type of Budweiser posters you’d expect to find on a teenager’s ceiling.

Low tables surround the centrally-located bar, a U-shaped seating area emanating from the liquor & beer heartbeat in the center. Of course, the best part of a dive bar like House Bar is the people within, and this reviewer’s visit included an wide-ranging conversation with one of the bar’s long-time afternoon bartenders. The discussion made it clear that House Bar is all about a rotating set of regulars, each served with their typical beverage as they sauntered into the space.

Of course, that same conversation also included a slight warning about the evening crew, which can “get a bit wild.” And that’s to be expected given the authenticity of House Bar’s dive bar vibe, certainly one supported by some aggressively fair pricing on the domestic tallboys kept on ice behind the bar. And that slight undercurrent feeling that anything could happen in a dive bar like House Bar is what makes a visit worth it in the first place.

There are dive bars that rough up their appearance to cater to the vibe a little more, and there are dive bars that don’t have to do that because they’re organic extensions of the neighborhood around them. House Bar falls into the latter category, a dive bar not because it’s cool to be one, but rather because that’s how they’ve grown as part of Amarillo’s changing urban core. And that kind of authenticity in any walk of life is hard to find, let alone with cheap, ice-cold Lonestar behind the bar.