Turtles All the Way Down: My favourite dive bar in NYC

Even though they’re almost all aggressively similar, it’s important in New York City to have a favourite dive bar. A dive bar is a bar, of course, but it’s the kind where you pull up a stained wooden stool and get the happy hour special which is, without fail, a beer and a shot for $5.

One of the most confusing parts about moving to the US for me was trying to parse out what the most obvious equivalent of a British pub was. In Canada, they have pubs that are called pubs and look like pubs and have reassuringly familiar names like The Old Queen’s Head or The Hare and the Haddock but when you walk in and take a seat, a hostess chases after you and tells you, in a tone that suggests you may as well have slaughtered her first-born son, that you have to wait to be seated. That’s confusing enough. In the US, it’s a whole other ball game; in New York alone, there’s a chain of shops called “Bagel Pubs” that sell baked goods and definitely not alcohol.

And so we come to the humble dive bar. A bar serves cocktails made by a mixologist and has fancy olives on the menu; a dive bar will do you a frozen margarita made in a slushy machine, but 99 per cent of the patrons are only drinking beer or house wine (McSorley’s in the East Village notoriously only has two things on the menu, “light beer” and “dark beer”). The best place – and sometimes the only place – to sit is at the wooden bar itself, facing the ubiquitous shelves of spirits and the ubiquitous blackboard announcing the beer and shot deal. There’s a tip jar. The floor is probably sticky. And, at my favourite dive bar in Brooklyn, there’s also a large aquarium filled with turtles.

Turtles All the Way Down is an unassuming place on Malcolm X Boulevard, a less grand-looking avenue than it sounds in a neighbourhood that one might charitably call up-and-coming. The name is a conceptual reference to the philosophical problem of infinite regress and a direct reference to the turtles that lived, before Covid, directly behind the bar and underneath the spirit bottles and now, having spent time in lockdown growing larger at the house of one of the bartenders, in a tank near the tables at the back. Surrounded by soft fairy lights, the turtles peer without curiosity at the jukebox, the miniature shuffleboard and the surprisingly spacious back patio which boasts a tiki bar in the summer. Behind where you order is a toy stag's head, which gets decorated in Christmas lights during the holidays, and various other bits of kitsch that the staff will sometimes clarify – if you look too hard at them – are “not for sale”.

Come on a weekday night or a weekend during the day and Turtles is the perfect place to joke with the bar staff, admire the local pets, and have a cheap but good drink in Bed-Stuy. They’ve even recently started doing oysters on Wednesdays. Come on a Friday or Saturday night, however, when it’s open til 4am and you’ll be elbow-to-elbow with the student crowd, so choose your vibe carefully. Either way, the turtles will be there – and every first Sunday of the month, they race them on the shuffleboard table (yes, really).