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Everyday: 12pm - 4amSkinny Dennis is a down-home, honky-tonk saloon. They've paired their woody space with cold beer and live country music. This is a choice spot when you want a break from the cocktail scene, and are itching for some action with a good ol' dive bar for the evening.
OUR ARTICLE
BY: Travis Platt Contributing writerIt won’t stop. The search for the “next, next” when it comes to regurgitated bar themes and copycat atmospheres. Now the “next” has become the normal and we must ask ourselves, where do we draw the line? Well, meet Dennis. Skinny yes, but damn is this legend thick skinned. Dennis gladly draws a line in the sand with a snakeskin boot to guide anyone back to the reality of what a bar should be like in America— wild, welcoming, loud, and 100% organic.
We’ll be here at Skinny Dennis next to the jukebox, wearing a cut-off jean jacket, gripping a Coors Banquet beer, coordinating our sips to Bruce Springsteen.
Let Thrillist zombies pile in line down the street to wait 40 minutes for a drink with a sparkler shooting out the top, probably ordered just to be “boomeranged” for social media purposes — neat, not really. We’ll be here at Skinny Dennis next to the jukebox, wearing a cut-off jean jacket, gripping a Coors Banquet beer, coordinating our sips to Bruce Springsteen. And we glorify in the fact that it’s not for everyone.
There is something about the feeling of peanuts crunching under the soles of your boots that makes a beer taste better. Snag any classic brew, and when you’re ready to move past ice-cold suds, order up what will no doubt be in everyone’s hand, a Willie’s Frozen Coffee. Don’t worry about what’s in it, and don’t you dare ask. Just make sure to toast to the painting of Willie himself before your first nip.
So, who actually was Skinny Dennis Sanchez? Standing at 6’11 and weighing 135 lbs., Sanchez was a country musician in the Los Angeles area who slapped bass in Nashville’s own Guy Clarks’s band. Sanchez died at the age of 28 due to heart failure on stage. He died doing what he loved most, and his stories serve as the spirit animal for this Brooklyn bar that can never be replicated.
Skinny Dennis lives by the slogan “If you don’t love it, leave it,” because not everyone is a honkey-tonk badass. Perhaps it’s the glow of the vintage bar signs or the escape to what feels like a dive-bar cabin in the middle of Montana, but we here at CYTIES just can’t get over this atmosphere. Especially when live music within is vibrating the outside sidewalk of Metropolitan Ave. Skinny Dennis is where you go to start your night and then never leave. It’s more than a place; it’s a bar that truly captures a distinctively small-town American spirit in one of the world’s biggest cities.
Here’s to you Skinny Dennis
The only one I think I will miss
I can hear your low bass singin’
Sweet and low like a gift you’re bringin’
— L.A. Freeway, Jeff Walker 1972
