From Tyson's, get on 123 South. It turns into Maple Ave. Look to your right, it may sneak up on you. If you get to the Amphora, you've gone too far.

Let’s clarify some things here… Vienna Inn is not a small place. With a full bar (like half a wraparound) and a complete surrounding ring of tables, it easily has twice the size of some of the other dives I’ve fallen in love with. But the place has a name, has a history, and also has the corollary, a dedicated clientele. I grew up in the area but I’m square from square stock, so I get my history second hand. Quite a few natives, though, can regal you with a colorful history of the place; every major act seems to culminate around a grease fire. Some versions take the form of cautionary tales (“My pappy sez all them hot dogs around all that beer combined with a lack of cleanliness is a just askin’ fer a greasy conflagration”) or wistful longings (“Consumed be grease every few years and always reborn like the phoenix… they must be doing something right…”), but the message is the same. This place has become an institution despite plenty of opportunities to do otherwise, to throw in the towel. It’s changed management enough to show that this is no fleeting phenomenon, that the populace demands that such an establishment be here.

And just who is doing this demanding? I remember hearing years ago that one could reconstruct entire departments of the US Geological Survey offices on any given night. Generally, I use the elderly as my guidepost; eat where the truckers eat, drink where the old folks drink, it’s the best way to avoid pick-up joint crappiness. But I’ll never be the youngest guy in the Vienna Inn, because it’s got some sort of family jive. Yeah, this place serves food, sure, it’s most famous export is the non-alcoholic chili dog, okay, they have a soda fountain, but this is a bar. I know it, I can feel it, I can rise above the 50% restaurant revenue ABC crap, this is a bar that serves food and apparently food to families. It’s an important distinction, here in the suburbs. Who wants to admit that their local watering hole is a T.G.I. Fridays or whatever? But we’re surrounded by that crap, by restaurants with alcohol in them. The Vienna Inn is the opposite, a bar that has shown no small ability in the field of serving food. And serving food to families, no less. This is simultaneously a place where I could be rolled out to the curb at 2 AM and come back on Monday with a kid in tow (due to, I dunno, a lax Big Brothers program or something). Kerouac talks about the American Crossroads Saloon, where people “bring their kids, they gabble and brawl over brews, everything’s fine. Come nightfall the kids start crying and the parents are drunk.” I thought this was a fiction lost in time when I read it, but here it is, in the flesh, the family bar.