Christina’s Place

In my experience you find a few types frequenting Christina’s. Passive aggressive neighborhood locals. Crowds truly trying to squeeze every ounce out of the night looking for the last and latest drink. Usually someone you fairly know and are trying to avoid. And someone’s cheating significant other. I learned this and more the couple months I frequented regularly.
No judgements here though. I’ve gotten by with very cheap tabs here, pickles on the house, and free shots. It really is a dive bar but not in the sense of how the hipster movement popularized them.
I wouldn’t say there’s anything necessarily nice about the place except the fact that they sell alcohol, have a kitchen, pool table, and touch tunes. Well actually that is pretty nice but there is some meaning somewhere in that statement. The burly bouncer Dennis is a stand up dude, respectable.
If you’re looking to squeeze in that last drink then go for it. But no matter which dive bar it is you can usually go home or to someone else’s place.

Since gaining new ownership, this has become a bit of a hive of scum and villainry in the neighborhood. There’s always cops on the scene (just witnessed two loaded cop cars storm in today) and fights just outside of the place on any given Sunday.
The other day I witnessed a fight where a drunk Mexican guy with no shirt on was fighting toe to toe with a bunch of punks for 15 minutes straight. Shouting obscenities and getting into it, he seemed like he was so damn drunk he couldn’t feel anything.
Don’t come here unless you want to get into a knife fight, a fist fight, or possibly get shot.

Cheap beer, cheap food, cant go wrong with a $ 1 burger and fries every day of the week!
Love this place!

Ah man! What is there to say? $ 3 Guinness on the daily with free Irish Breakfast and Corned Beef over St. Paddy’s Parade Weekend. Also, some of the best bloodies on Sunday for only $ 3! $ 1 delicious Burger and Fries/​Tots with any drink order? Yes, please! This is my all time favorite bar with amazing staff and incredible deals. Tip your bartenders heavy with all that money you save!

A cheap Temperance, a $ 3 whiskey, and $ 1 for a legit burger AND fries?! «Value» says the deceptively non-​surely bartender. «Value.»

So, I had to come back and repost my original post because apparently the Unilocal support team didn’t like the naughty words in it, (several months later) so I’ve replaced the naughty words with symbol gibberish.
Okay, so I’ve been coming here on near a decade since I moved in to the neighborhood, lots of things have changed, but the most important things are still the same. Lovely Guinness pints are now $ 3 instead of $ 2, but inflation is a %^&*$, you can walk a few blocks west to the Abbey Pub for a great show, but their Guinness pints are $ 6 and good luck trying to get the same kind of personable service there, and if you can find somewhere else that pours flawless pints of Guinness at that price point, you should be there drinking them, but since that place doesn’t exist, come here. This is a fantastic neighborhood 4am bar where you are welcome whether you are white, black, asian, female, tranny, hispanic, gay, lesbian, etc, or just annoying but still tolerable as a human being (if you’re from Schaumburg though, just $&*% off and die). The owner built this kitchen in the corner a few years ago that is literally no bigger than a broom closet, and I would give 3 stars for any human being that could put edible food out of there, but the $ 1 burgers are a great deal. Aubrey will definitely take really good care of you as long as you aren’t a total $(@*#$()%*(!. Also, great deals on booze or pool or food most nights, and you will never have to deal with a gaggle of Lincoln Park &*$^# or anything as awful coming here. Jim and Silvana, you are sorely missed. Pure Love.

Christina’s is the best old man bar in Chicago! $ 3 Guinness, drink specials all the time… and since the new owners took over, $ 1 burger specials that are actually amazing! The bartenders are pros, the ambiance is exactly what you want in a local dive.

Small, intimate shotgun bar. Diverse crowd, representative of Avondale. Most everyone is friendly and will be happy to shoot pool if you ask. $ 3 for a pint of guinness, slow poured, with a clover on top. Great bartenders. I don’t want to call this a «dive» because nobody treats it like one, this place is loved.

I really enjoy this bar. I am not saying that just because it happens to be my name, though. It’s a dive bar with critical acclaim and charm. The staff is fantastic and friendly. Jim is my favorite bartender at Christina’s Place. I also enjoy the owner quite a bit. So, I am not a Guinness fan but this bar pours the best Guinness in Chicago. I have had Guinness at other bars (EXIT, restaurants, etc) but this place knows how to pour a Guinness. The price for a glass of Guinness is also the lowest I have ever heard of in this city $ 3 for a pint of guinness, slow poured, with a clover on top. For the price and the pour itself, I would recommend anyone go here.

Best bar in Chicago. Friendly bartenders and good booze!

3÷18÷2012
This bar is very small, even though the outside makes it look to be about the size of an average Chicago Walgreens (which is bigger then most bars) and to also have two floors. If you were the only one in this bar, it would be hard to walk around except in the back, behind the pool table, where no one would «be» i.e. it’s not in the area that is part of «places to stand». You might stand normally stand there voluntarily if you are waiting for someone, pissed off, or playing Game Boy for example. There are a total of two tables with three chairs each, but the tables are big enough for only one (maybe — if ONLY drinks are on it), and if you use the chairs no one can walk by. So you cannot sit down unless you sit at the bar.
Karaōke is on Saturday. The karaōke is falsely advertised in that the bar is open ’til 5 a.m., but karaōke *ENDS AT 3* and doesn’t even start ’til nearly midnight (though it’s done by a guy with a laptop (real mike though) so it could be more «whenever he feels like it» and therefore start earlier on some days, yet none of the websites talking about Christina’s Place (which mention both karaōke and open hours) mention this at all! However, Christina’s Place does not seem to have a website, so the misleading information is on external websites and therefore most likely posted by customers. Unfortunately the only way to leave on public transportation stops running around 12:30, so it’s pretty bad if you come there without knowing in advance that they end the karaōke.
The singers are half-​ignored and half-​payed attention to, which is good if you want to do songs you aren’t good at yet. It also seems you might be able to sing more then twice a night if you can avoid being pissed off long enough to want to sing at that moment. However, the songs done SUCKS. The first guy actually did «Luck Be A Lady Tonight» (um, wtf???). The song selections available is rather large and includes enough «awesome» songs as well as some other songs to do, but the songs the customers actually pick are like you were 10 and at your uncle’s wedding in a soccer-​mom family in 1991. In other words the songs you’d do if you’ve never even heard of either Nirvana or 2Pac. Unfortunately, they also have Mexican songs available, and while I was there people used them. This is not a Mexican or Spanish-​language bar.
Guinness is $ 2 but it’s served warm and at various levels of pour. They also do not use Guinness or Coke-​like glasses but use angled glasses instead. The first one I got was as disgusting as Trader Todd’s $ 3 generic stout and the last one would have been great if it had you know actually been fucking cold.
The place is not very clean, perhaps «dingy». Most of the floor actually made out of an unfinished plank or sheet of wood, like a homeless guy might use to cover an oily spot on the floor of their trailer, or what you expect if you ask for wood sheets on FreeCycle. A very small portion of the floor is clean white ceramic tile, this is where I put my things. The walls are dusty. The bar countertop, and a weird home-​kitchen «island» long-«countertop» thing they also have, is VERY clean (except for the whole not-​cleaning-​up-​a-​giant-​spill-​for-​a-​whole-​hour thing). The female bathroom is clean, sort-​of (at the beginning of the night anyway), like if you were in someone’s shitty Chicago house or maybe trailer or something who had this bathroom, and cleaned like you do for a house, but the «style» of bathroom makes it seem dirty anyway; like you might expect to find in a tow truck shop. You could not put anything on the floor, fortunately there was elsewhere to put my bags (outside the bathroom) on the day I went. The male bathroom is smaller and smells like piss (piss not pee).
There were two bartenders, a female and a male. The female was really nice. The male, who may be the owner, ignored me for about an hour and a half while I either signaled or attempted to say «excuse me» as he walked by a total of about 30 times. I say «attempted» because in the millisecond that it took for the signal to get from my brain to my mouth to open it, he was already either in the back, at the opposite side of the bar, or getting something for someone else (usually someone who just walked up). After this hour and a half, the female asked «Is everything alright,» not because I’d been crying and making annoyed gestures every time the male passed me without allowing me to say anything and/​or ignored my signals, but because they saw what I’d written on Unilocal,which was this only shorter, worded more strongly, and with 1 star. I was offered first to be given a free drink ($ 2), THEN asked to delete the review in exchange. However, I didn’t actually even get a free drink because later a customer spilled my full glass, AGAIN. The female who talked to me is really nice while she’s talking but I’m not gonna lie or think a place is better then I thought before just because employees are nice!

Love coming here, The old man can do a shamrock in your Guinness which I thought was very cool. The beer is cheap and well poured… They also have karaōke nights. The ppl their are nice and friendly and their bar food is great.

If this is a dive bar, then I am going in head first. I’m drowning in liquor and beer– it’s that inexpensive. And the people here aren’t shallow– just normal people like you and me. I even got a salty surprise from the bathroom! Wait… what… this water metaphor has gone too far… off the deep end! Heyo!

One of my favorite haunts in all of Chicago. Hadn’t been in in a while, but checked in recently, caught up with Jim, played some pool, and, as generally happens regardless of your plans, stayed until Last Call, and loved every minute of it.
Last night I wandered in for «one beer» with a friend, and found Aubrey and Silvana in charge of the Friday Night festivities along with a DeeJay who reads a room far better than most I’ve run across in more than a decade. As always, it’s a great crowd and a welcoming, efficient, funny and friendly staff.
Christina’s is sums up everything I like about a bar. It’s not pretentious and will tear you up and spit you out if you are, but if you are looking for genuinely laid back fun people with stories to tell, songs to drunkenly sing, and heads full of completely random trivia and late night Philosophy, a place that a woman can feel safe walking into alone, and leaving alone (if she wants to), then check out Christina’s.

A classic Chicago neighborhood corner bar, to which I was steered by a regular. At the initiative of one of the bartenders, Christina’s has recently added a modest rotation of draft and bottled craft beers – probably not enough to make it a beer-​geek destination bar, but worth a drop-​in if you’re in the Irving Park neighborhood (hey, it could happen!), with a thirst for something more interesting than the locally-​ubiquitous PBR. I noted four Great Lakes lines, Anchor’s new California Lager, Revolution’s Rosa and Anti-​Hero, and Founders Red Rye. The bartender tells me that they sell quite a bit of the Red Rye in connection with shots of rye whiskey, of which they also have a good selection. Draft Guinness is still a bargain at $ 3, but just recently raised from a really spectacular $ 2. Full bar. Pool tables. 4 AM license, 5AM Saturday nights.
Public transit access is only fair by Chicago standards; there’s no longer a CTA bus line on Kedzie. One-​quarter mile from stops on the 80-​Irving Park, 82-​Kimball, and 152-​Addison lines. Nearest «L» stations are Belmont or Addison on the Blue Line, both about one mile, which can be partly bridged by the 82 or 152 bus lines, respectively.
For pub crawlers, about a mile and a half from Revolution, Kuma’s Corner, Laschet’s Inn, and Resi’s Bierstube. (Unfortunately, not all in the same direction from Christina’s.)

Jammed at at 3 AM, closes at 5 AM… oh yes, this I can do.
This place is pretty damn cool. It’s got one of the top 10 ugliest/​cheapest front doors I’ve ever seen, there’s not enough chairs for the amount of people that pack in here, there was at least a 3 person wait every time I used the single occupancy men’s room and we ordered our drinks by yelling across a distance of 5 feet hoping our voices carried over the voices of others closer to the bar.
Wanna know what though? It all freakin’ works out somehow.
Even though it was standing room only at 3 AM there were plenty of lean-​to spots along the walls and half wall (kind of a separator between the bar and tables), the lines for the restrooms moved quick and I don’t know how… but somehow the bartenders heard and correctly fulfilled every drink order we put in.
Here’s a fun fact, every 20 oz Imperial Pint of Guinness ($ 3.00) helps support Firefighters Nationwide. I’m not a fan of Guinness, but I had to get one just for that. Nothin’ beats drinkin’ for a good cause Seriously… if there’s a good charity «Drink your face off» thing going on let me know… I’m here to help.
The crowd is great, seems like everyone was kinda expecting to get bumped or have a wee bit of beer on their shoes… my bad pink Nike’s girl, I’m sure that’ll dry right up. Staff is cool, even when they’re jam packed the make it a point to get to you. I don’t think I waited more than a minute or two before having them get us our drinks. Gotta give ‘em props for that!
I hope to come back here sooner than later, it was a really good time.

This place is just not my thing. It’s not a dive bar, I don’t know why people keep calling it that. Clearly they haven’t been to a real dive bar.
Anyway, if you order anything other than their cheap Guinness, it’s not that great of a deal. They measure practically everything — measure all the liquor pours, scan the bottles of beer as they come out of the cooler, scan the bags of chips, a million cameras watching everything… I know they do this is Ireland, but I’ve never seen it to such an extent here in the states. I understand trying to keep losses down to a minimum, but it’s not a relaxing, welcoming environment. Rory, the owner, is pleasant enough though I do find it odd that an owner accepts tips. Other bartenders, eh, not the warmest bunch and they treat every customer like they’ve never been in a bar before but whatever.
The crowd is very varied and inevitably a fight breaks out nearly every time we’re there. Lots of darting glances and folks looking to start something.
Inside the place looks like it’s being held together by duct tape. The girl’s potty is pretty disgusting, everything is falling apart and dirty, and it’s always out of toilet paper. Amazingly, the guy’s bathroom was nicer the one time I really had to go.
Eh, not my thing and I won’t miss it. I do wonder what bar these other reviewers were at. To each their own — I’ve left more space for the others who do like it.

Thank you, Unilocal,for advertising free Irish breakfast on St. Patty’s day at Christina’s (while supplies last)!
The BF was hell-​bent on Kegs-​n-​eggs, and I was hell-​bent on spending as little money as possible on St. Patty’s day. Enter, Christina’s. When we drove up, he asked me how I manage «to find the most ghetto places.» He quickly changed his mind when he realized that a) it’s a dive bar, not ghetto; b) there was ROCKSTAR street parking; c) I wasn’t joking, breakfast was really going to be free; and d) Guinness is $ 2 a pint. ALWAYS.
We walked in, grabbed a plate, and were served heaps of delicious traditional Irish fare: bangers, baked beans, scrambled eggs, potatoes, ham, and black & white pudding. We found a spot to set our plates and my man went up to the bar to get us a couple of pints.
$ 6 out the door for a great St. Patty’s day breakfast that kept us full well into the afternoon (even after miles and miles of walking.)

Home of the $ 2 Guinness! What a value! Guinness for the price of. .. Pabst!
I strolled in here latenight, one night, to meet a four star person of interest. What fun! This place is great. From the giant bottles of cider, to the charming and friendly bartenders. It’s not a dive bar (though it is divey) so much as it is a friendly neighborhood joint. With $ 2 Guinness.
There’s a back outdoor area that is hilarious. It has a tiny little room for smokers to huddle in during cold winter temps. With third world style wiring and giant paint chips peeling off the ceiling.
And the neighborhood characters who inhabit this joint are endlessly amusing. Love this place.

I love dive bars. I don’t know why. Probably because they remind me of Cheers in that «everybody knows your name.» Actually, most of the people don’t know your name but they don’t care and you make new friends anyway. Some people think they are seedy and dangerous, but I have yet to experience a dive bar bar fight, which is more than I can say for the fancy suburban bars.
A large group of friends and I came here after an amazing dinner with copious amounts of alcohol. Why did we come here? Three reasons — more alcohol, karaōke and pool. These things go hand in hand. We also found out they had pints of Guinness and bottles of PBR for $ 2. The bartenders even went as far as to give us little shamrocks atop our foam. That’s attention to detail!
The place is quite cramped, but everyone is friendly and no one makes a big deal about a little bumping here and there. If you ask me, the guys especially didn’t mind when I brushed past. One even asked me to repeat the sweeping motion. And I got plenty of high-​five love after singing my songs. The KJ even complimented my shoes (again, attention to detail!) So keep a lookout for me and my crew. I’m sure «Haute Dish» or «E Diddy & The Meat» will make their sophomore appearance in the near future.