The Shanty

Nothing bad to say about this bar. It's got a nice outside smoking area, nice bartenders, nice place to grab a drink before dinner.

They have beer there. It's a bar. What else is there to say? It's a dive. Downtown eureka where all the bums hang out. It is also a bit of a gritty place. The first year I lived in eureka around 2008 there was a shooting right outside between some mongrels and hells angels...... Not a place I would frequent if given a choice.

Epic? Like the Titanic sinking, like an Ebola plague, as epic as a clearcut. The Shanty, once upon a time, was a nice little bar. The hipsters here are the bloated snooty kind; theyre dumb, ignorant, stupid. Theyre not even smart drunks; the "women" look like meth addled saquatches. Ive been to dive bars all over the country---this is a hipster bar pretending to be a dive bar: weak drinks, attitude from bartenders who don't know their worth(a few dollars), the smell of living breathing sewer. Don't go here, go to the Logger Bar, the Alibi in Arcata, anywhere but here. Once upon a time , the Shanty may have been a nice "bad" place, now it's awful, all around, like a junkie with pneumonia and gout.
Update, look at all the positive reviews and ask yourself: Do I really want to be in a bar with smarmy bartenders? It takes alot for me to feel like I hate a bartender, but the ones here make it easy, they have the arrogance of a gulag guard, the rent-a-cop mentality of "I can destroy your life", and they will.  From the look they give you, is it because Im in better shape, smarter, better dressed, well mannered, more worldly?And, all the above, all it takes is to wear clean clothes, have been to one foreign land, say Thank you and Bam! They despise you. Whats cool at the Shanty : looking homeless, snarling, smelling, living in the 90's, forever, ad absurdum. The lingo here, a mix of rap, white trash, Bukowski, Natural Born Killers. Speaking of killers, the people who frequent this hole seem to be the type that collect mass murderer playing cards, try hard to wear thrift store clothes, easily hate everyone and everything that isn't broken down, torn apart, smelly and angry. Don't know, don't care, this place needs a team of cleaners, a massive 30 gallon bowl of Valium punch and a horde of Mongols to torture the wan smiles off the workers here. The people who come here? Theyre dead already. Anyone who thinks this is "cool" is a cretin, a child, a junkie or dolt.Stay home, drink your vodka---that smell? Its yours, revel in it, you can recognize it...at the Shanty? There are millions of smells and stenches that will coil around you and sodomize your nostrils---never before has a non fishermans bar smelled like rotten pudenda and semen. But, the Shanty does!Stay home, your nose is precious.