What makes a bar a home?

What makes a house a home? It's not the nice cabinet knobs, or the 2 car garage. It's not the 47 inch plasma screen TV or the finished basement with a workout room. Home can be a trailer park. Home can be a tiny hut in the forest surrounded by hungry bears.

What makes a bar a good bar? It's the same unmeasurable quality that gives a home it's... home-i-ness. The Deville Lounge lacks many of the amenities of nicer bar. They don't have many beers on tap, the floors are cold concrete, the food is served on paper plates, but everything in the place is strangely familiar; the bartender unusually accommodating; the booths inexplicably comfortable.

I'm not usually one to recommend a bar with only 2 beers on tap, but The Deville Lounge is the perfect bar for a laid back evening. If you want to avoid the crowds and relax, or you just don't want to change out of your pajama pants before leaving the house, the Deville Lounge is the place you want to be.

I love Lucy

Maybe it's just me but I like my bars to either have 30 beer choices or two. The Deville lounge has two options Bud and Bud Light. While I don't really love Bud or Bud Light there is something so unpretentious about these kinds of bars that immediately puts me at ease. It also takes the chore of making decisions away from me. "Do I feel like watching my figure tonight or not?" That's the kind of choice I can handle.

Walking into this place I immediately felt like I was in my best friend from grade school's basement, where her dad had a homemade bar in the corner for when the fellas came over. The booths each had a separate theme with decoupage sports cut outs underneath the varnish on the table. We sat at the Dale Earnhardt table, (the other booths were all dedicated to various Michigan sports teams). The floors were concrete. My absolute favorite part of the decor though was the fact that the lights over each booth were shaded with a Christmas liquor tin. You know that tin with the harlequins that that bottle of DiSaronno that your aunt gave you for Christmas came in? That one. It was all so DIY. I loved it.

Lucy, the bartender was a super cool lady who is raising three of her 16 grandkids and by the end of our visit here I felt like she had taken us under her wing. She was very friendly while still being real. None of that phoney baloney stuff you get other places. This place was so unpretentious that I very quickly felt comfortable. It's nice to go to a place every once in a while and feel like you're hanging out in someones basement, drinking beer and eating wing dings off of a paper plate.

Deville Lounge

Deville Lounge is a dive. There are two beers on tap, drunks, one person working, and a barely functioning bathroom that makes your hands filthier after you wash them. Its the best kind of dive.

What ruins most dive bars is their attempt to be more divey or deny their diveness. The Deville has not succumbed to such stupidity. This is a place to have some beer, play some pool, get drunk. No extras, just the things you need. It is what it is.

You might ask why the hell would someone want to drink in a dive. Well you shouldn't want to drink in a dive, that would make you hipster. You drink in dives because a comfortable bar has been discovered that lets you drink beer, sit, and talk without having to try to look good and be cool. You are already cool. Dude, you are drinking beers with friends and hanging out talking about stuff you like! Take off your sunglasses, you're inside. Take off your big fat coat and stay awhile.

When you go to the Deville say hello to Lucy. She's a beer angel. Rarely have a gotten such awesome service from any bar or restaurant. She went above and beyond what I would hope to get at a 2 or 3 star restaurant. I will becoming back to the Deville and she is the only reason. Plenty of bars are similar to the Deville but they are lucky to have someone like Lucy there.

While you're there take a look at the hallway floor to the bathroom. Its encrusted with pennies.