Dirty Frank's

Dirty Frank's is a dive. It's dirty, noisy, and cheap, and filled with hard-drinking artists, hard-drinking old men, and drunks. It's a great bar.

The outside of Frank's has no sign at all, just a mural of famous Franks (Zappa, Sinatra, -enstein's Monster), naming the place in a giant rebus.


The place hasn't lost the grimy ambience it had when we first saw it in the 80s, when then-Inquirer columnist Clark DeLeon was a regular and the movable-letter takeout menu, which was unappealing to begin with, was made worse by vandalism and its half-hearted repair:

original	vandalized	fixed, sort of
TAKE OUT FOOD MEAT BALLS HARD BOILED EGGS TUNA SALAD	TAKE OUT FOOD RAT BALLS H B EGGS TUNA SALAD	TAKE OUT FOOD AT BALLS H B EGGS TUNA SAL

The final version was there for quite a while. Who the hell would eat any of those things coming from Frank's? Assuming they could actually be bought?

But one thing at Frank's that everybody loves is Sheila. Behind the bar for more than two decades, and with the gossip rag brouhaha past and forgotten, she is institutionalized at Frank's, if I mean what I think.

The key to a successful visit to Dirty Frank's, as in so many things, is timing. If you get there before eleven or so, you're likely to score a booth. But if you arrive too much earlier, the place will be dead. And if you get there really early, there may be enough light to see how nasty it is. But as the evening draws on, the bar fills up with people and energy. It's a Philadelphia experience not to be missed.

Cherry Street Tavern

The Cherry Street is a corner tappie in Logan Square, with the comfortable vibe of its neighborhood. It looks the way it should: wood on the walls, tile on the floor, and behind the bar, a carved and mirror-backed altar to the Beverage Gods.

Check the blackboard to the left of the bar for the list of draft beers. Locals like Yards, Flying Fish, Stoudts, Dogfish Head, and Yuengling are well represented, along with the imports and the swill. There's something for everyone.

If the Eagles, Phillies, Flyers, or Sixers are on TV, then they're on TV here: a couple of TVs in the front room compete with the jukebox (translation: LOUD), and a couple more in the back room quietly go uncontested. While the front room says "bar" (beer signs, liquor bottles), the leitmotif of the back room is "sports". A centerpiece of the sports memorabilia is a blown-up photo of a legendary local high-school coach bawling out a referee, who looks like he's withstanding a gale.

Living up to the "tavern" moniker, the Cherry Street serves a simple, solid menu of excellent bar food: soup in the winter, and sandwiches and nachos year-round. A stand-out is the roast beef with provolone on a kaiser roll, with horseradish on the side.

Bill is your host, and he brings real enthusiasm to the job. If you ask him for a plate of nachos, he'll say, "Nachos? Sure, we can do that!" with a tone that implies that he would love to do that. The rest of the staff can't quite reach his level of eagerness, but everybody here is competent or beautiful (and some are both). So you're good in any case.

The bar has been here for decades, and local lore has it that Jimi Hendrix refreshed himself here, back when the original Electric Factory was on the catty-corner block. Whether that's true or not, the Cherry Street has been experienced by many.