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| - Like any lifer undergrad at the UC, I'm pissed and frustrated with how things are run at this institution, even the place I'm supposed to be the least pissed and frusturated: the bar.
Despite being a student bar, the prices aren't that cheap. While the specials are good (like thursday night, yesss), regular drink prices are on par with nearby places. Thursdays are beautiful with cheap cheap cheap triples ($10ish?) and jugs of ANYTHING (except strongbow, those fuckers)
Service is always iffy (I just walk up to the bar to get what I need to drink) and the food is merely good enough. The wings suck although the pizza (only served in the black lounge) is decent.
The issue that I have is that it is too much of a typical bar business and not enough of a student bar. This place has one of the widest molson product agreements I have ever seen: ALL beverages are molson, right down to the liquor and bottles of beer. Yes, that's right, no local beers: your undergraduate bar is a sell out to corporate interests. The banality goes beyond the food and beverage: they had a punching machine in it for a while while crappy games like deer hunter still prevail. The pool table is trite; what about TABLE TENNIS or cheesy-ass board games? While Thursday nights are awesome for getting ripped on the cheap, the place takes on a apple-juice bar vibe, only that the barely 18 clientele can drink. Hard. The DJ plays awful awful (c)rap and classic rock at a volume that the speakers (and sober listeners) cannot handle. Again, moments like that give it the vibe of a Paul Vickers establishment with smaller (and less hostile) door staff.
The interior design is nice, but half assed: this bar isn't tied to the campus except through its geographical proximity and decent deals for campus club and intramural members. The black lounge has a fireplace with comfortable sofa-like-seating around it. The bar table in the lounge is the original (circa 1950s and preserved through the renos). The Den, while lacking windows, is pleasant and quirky, such as the red lights in the far interior. And best of all, both places only have a couple tvs! YAYYYYYYY.
The problem I have is that the interior design doesn't represent the University in any way; there are no artifacts, no photos, no art; no representation of my school. If you were warped into the bar, you'd have no idea you were on the campus of UC. Even the aesthetic of the menu and its offerings don't tie itself to the school. Dino Ribs? That's at Moose McGuire's. Despite the decent pie in the lounge, they won't deliver 1000 meters to res. While the bar has decent interior design and the best patio in the city, it's merely a space to drink and eat: it's not a PLACE.
Further, the campus bar enthusiastically partakes in the Canadian tradition of invading our privacy in the hopeless pursuit of 'safety'. In response to previous and isolated acts of violence committed on peak nights by non members, admittance is contingent on your personal information (government issued id) scanned, stored, and shared amongst the private company that owns the equipment and the other dozen or so bars in the city that use the equipment. Apparently, retaining that information after an uneventful night and then sharing it amongst other bars will somehow prevent someone from stabbing/striking/kicking/harming someone else in the Den. So, despite the Den and Black Lounge being undergraduate space, undergraduates must surrender their privacy just to party with their peers. What's worse is that this was imposed by the students' union that we pay dues to supposedly represent our interests. I always thought that an academic institution would be the first to resist shrill cries for 'public safety', but I must be thinking wrong.
The patio is what saves it from a 1 star rating. Regardless, go to Mooses instead. I don't have to pay dues to the owner every semester yet I get a higher level of privacy when I go in. Funny how that works, eh?
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