READ MORE FROM OUR DIVE BARS FEATURE HERE.
One thing Jay Stamates has learned about running dives: You don’t necessarily have to paint over the bathroom graffiti, or even want to. Or police every dust bunny. The 51-year-old Hartford High School graduate and U.S. Navy veteran co-owns seven bars, including The Standard Tavern, Sabbatic and Stella’s: A Cocktail Dive in Milwaukee.
The former nightclub worker has evolved into a “glorified bookkeeper” who’s home by 10 each night. One appeal about dive bars as a business: They can be done well with a $30,000 investment, versus $500,000 for a nightclub.
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What makes a bar a dive bar?
You know what you’re not going to get from a dive bar: You’re not going to get loud, thumping music, you’re not going to get a very kinetic experience. There’s not a lot of dancing.
It can often denote a place that is of lower quality, but that might have been a thing of the past. You’re going to have comfort, you’re going to have a place where you can sit down and relax, and you’re going to have intimacy with the people around you and with the bartender.
What I preach to all my staff is their most important quality is they have to be able to constantly interact with people. The truth is no one comes in here for a drink, no one comes to my dive bars for entertainment. They’re coming for socialization.
Why are people attracted to dive bars?
I think that people know that if they want to go out and they want to meet people, or if they want to establish a kind of secondary family [they come to a dive bar]. If I have to ban somebody from one of my bars for a time, or forever, I understand that I’m just not losing a customer, I’m taking their secondary family away.
Can dives be dangerous?
When I came from the nightclubs, every single [weekend] night, we’d have a fight. I can tell you that in the 15 years that I’ve been in the small-dive-bar business, I could probably count on two hands the number of times that we’ve actually had to go to the next level with things.
In a dive bar, it’s interactive theater; every one of the patrons here takes on a bit of responsibility. So when someone comes in and decides they’re not going to play by the rules, oftentimes the bartender doesn’t really have to say or do anything. The guests are the first ones to step up and go, “That’s not what we do here.”
