Cheers on Kavanaugh does not have a theme. This is worth stating plainly because nearly every bar in a neighborhood as self-consciously charming as Pulaski Heights does. Cheers is just a bar — a long, dark, slightly worn bar on Kavanaugh Boulevard that has been here since 1985 and intends to keep being here. The surprise is that it also has two regulation bowling lanes in the back room, which you will not deduce from the outside, and which the bar does not appear to advertise with any real urgency.
The bowling situation is worth explaining. These are not novelty duckpin lanes or some reclaimed-wood boutique experience. They are full-sized lanes — real lanes, with real pins, real rental shoes that smell exactly like you expect — crammed into a back room that also contains a pool table and a jukebox. You can reserve them, or sometimes you can just wander back and find them empty on a Tuesday. Lane rental runs around $20 an hour, which splits reasonably among four people who have already committed to a second round.
The front room is what you’d expect from a neighborhood bar that has been in one spot for four decades: regulars who know each other’s orders, a bartender who does not need to ask what you want after the second visit, and a television tuned to whatever Arkansas game is happening. The drink prices are honest. You are not paying for atmosphere. The atmosphere, such as it is, arrived on its own and stayed.
Kavanaugh Boulevard is a strange little commercial strip — coffee shops, a dry cleaner, a few restaurants, the kind of walkable neighborhood node that every city of this size seems to have one of. Cheers sits close to the Markham Street end, easy to miss if you’re driving and not looking for it, which many people apparently are not, given that it coexists peacefully with a clientele that has apparently been keeping it alive by sheer loyalty since the Reagan administration.
The food is bar food — wings, that sort of thing — and nobody should come here for dinner with serious intentions. Come for a beer before you walk down to one of the actual restaurants. Come because you live two blocks away and it’s Thursday. Come because you’ve discovered the bowling lanes and you want to settle something with your friends in the most lo-fi way possible.
What Cheers does that most bars don’t is maintain a credible indifference to what it’s supposed to be. It’s not trying to be a dive, which is different from actually being one. It’s not trying to be a sports bar, though sports are on. It’s not curating its own scruffiness. It has simply continued to exist in a neighborhood where things open and close at a reasonable clip, and that continuity has given it a specific gravity that newer places tend to lack.
Show up on a weekend night when the lanes are booked and the front bar is three deep and you will understand why the regulars don’t bring it up unprompted. Some places you keep to yourself, not from selfishness, but because explaining them always sounds less interesting than they actually are.
