Red Lion Tavern

This German bar and restaurant boasts three separate drinking areas including a sprawling upstairs beer garden. The bottom floor is dark and cozy with stained glass windows, green booths lining the walls, wooden tables and steins hanging from the ceiling. A sliding wooden door leads to the kitchen where heaping portions of solid Bavarian fare is cooked up. The sausage platter is the most popular menu item. Featuring sliced up piles of knockwurst, bockwust and bratwurst it comes to your table with pickles, German mustard, hot peppers and a basket of bread that is half sourdough and half dark. Other popular menu items include the leberkase topped with a fried egg, the gigantic cold cut platter, potato pancakes and the tender beef rouladen. Sandwiches are giant and packed full of meat or cheese. If you want veggies in your sandwich be sure to ask otherwise you’ll just get mustard and mayo. An upstairs kitchen cranks out one of the best cheeseburgers in town, crispy, golden fish and chips and veggie burgers for the rare meat adverse patron. German beer on tap includes the ever-popular Spaten Lager as well as Warsteiner pilsner, Bitburger and Erdinger Hefeweizen. Beer generally comes in half-liter glasses but can be ordered in a two-liter boot, which is meant to be shared. Shot boards are also available, buy six shots of any liquor and get the seventh one free. Your waitress, dressed in a short dirndl and apron, will bring the shots out on a wooden board call a “saw.” Up the stairs you’ll find an intimate, candle-lighted bar known simply as “the middle bar,” which is generally populated by regulars and is ideal for taking a date. Around the corner is a sprawling beer garden where you can smoke and where things get downright raucous on the weeknights. Expect to fight your way through standing-room only crowds.

 TIPS: Music is offered nightly and there is a great weekday happy hour from 4- 6pm. The waitresses are known for slow service and clipped mannerisms but if you’re nice they will be too. Awesome women work here. And if you get fed up with the scene you can always head across the street to the ever-trendy Cha Cha Lounge