There are two kinds of college bars: the low-key, low-cost everyday hangouts —our college year corollaries to Bayside High's The Maxx — and the weekend barn fire kind, filled with Atlanta's youngest drinkers.
The first offers a comfortable place to drink a beer with friends, the second is for turning up the volume on the best years of life.
Find your own after class hangout in one of these top college bars in Atlanta:
Credit: David Graves / Staff
Credit: David Graves / Staff
3177 Peachtree Road
404-844-6403
For what seems like an eternity, the former unholy triumvirate (before Peachtree Tavern closed) in Buckhead have offered a generation of rap enthusiasts a dollar-beer ticket to the depths of a weekend throw down. If you have a pledge brother to drive you, and an affinity (or talent) for beer pong, Busch Light and Jaeger bombs ordered up for the squad, you should get your best Southern Marsh shirt pressed up for a wild night on the cheapest block in Buckhead.
Flip Flops
1140 Crescent Ave. NE, Atlanta
678-705-3891
Take a trip to Statesboro, Georgia, and you will find the exact same bar. Which isn't surprising; there are frozen drink tiki bars in lots of places. What is weird is this -- it will be filled with the exact same people. Twenty-one years old. Croakies. Hopes and dreams. There is something about the well-brand grain alcohol at Flip Flops, or perhaps in the the brightly colored and ironically named frozen cocktails mounted to the walls that keep the kids coming back for more. Maybe its the slushies, ever churning like a row of hypnotic party favors, always ready for another pull on the lever or another rum shot topper. Because aloha also means goodbye.
Dive Bar
3184 Roswell Road NW, Atlanta
678-510-7765 (no website)
Okay, so you could insert Churchill's, Red Door, Pool Hall, or any of the other half-dozen Buckhead meat markets into this slot. It's Buckhead, there are well drinks and a DJ. It's crowded inside, cigarettes on the porch, pedestrian pandemonium in the streets, and everyone is there for one reason: they want to get lucky (or support a friend who wants to get lucky). Usually that hope fades with the increasing detachment of the brain from the body it once directed. But not tonight. If you order the right sequence of Fireball and lemon drop shots (A-B-B-A), bring that "I'm the man" confidence you've taken student loans out to adopt into your personal brand, and maybe dance like you believe it really does looks good, tonight might just be the night you meet the girl of your dreams, player. At a dive bar on dollar-shot night.
3717 Roswell Road, Atlanta
404-941-3081
There is no college bar more dedicated to the craft of coed attraction and retention than The Ivy. The multi-level bar is set a ways off from the rest of Buckhead, but once you arrive, it is pretty much on until the Uber ride. Through a series of subtle environmental cues (not unlike a grocery store or casino) the Ivy gets the 20-somethings of Buckhead to come, stay and flirt. With every flight of stairs, a new universe. Through every oversized doorway, two hundred more fine and beautiful Tinder users, casually doing sippy-straw duckfaces and waiting for someone who is actually, like, you know, basically amazing or whatever.
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