Tiki Bar & Grill

Great dive bar with cheap drinks, good bartenders, and good nights for music.  Plus if you feel a little anti-adventurous, you can always slip next door to Lee's for a more "older" quieter (sometimes) atmosphere.

I like this place, okay, it is very small, with very low ceilings and often very crowded. It has the definitive feel of a neighborhood bar in New Orleans. It is usually filled with young 20-somethings presumably from down the street at Centenary College, nothing wrong with that, seeing as to how I'm a 30-something grad student from said college. All three of my favorite local bands, play at this venue from time to time: Dirtfoot, Dragstrip Phantoms and The Stiff Necked Fools. The only downside to this place, and this is a huge one in my book, is that this place is super-smoky. Spend an hour in this place or even just half an hour and you will walk out smelling like you clean chimneys for a living. You almost need goggles in this place (and I don't mean beer goggles, either) just to cut through the heavy fog of nicotine and second-hand smoke filling the air. Look, I like the Big Easy local vibe, I love the live music and the drinks are pretty cheap and the service from the bartenders and staff is always top-notch, it's just that I hate leaving a bar and having to come home and torch my clothes and wash down with an industrial-strength fire hose just to get the stench of cigarette smoke off of me. It gets in your skin! That's how thick it is! London doesn't have a fog this thick!  And as far as the Grill is concerned, I don't know what that's all about, it must be an old part of the name. The patrons are in there getting lit, but I don't see anything getting grilled.