Dive bar with an even divier sub-basement where local DJs put on hoedowns well worth checking out.

Earl Bar, I love you. Not because you’re great, but because you’ve given me freedom to write. Earl Bar management is not going to pull advertising if I use ambiguous adjectives to describe their house band (they have no house band). Nor will they cut off the free drinks if I fail to speak of them in appropriately glowing terms (I think I can spring for a ¥20 zhapi). In fact, Earl Bar will probably never even know they’ve been reviewed, that’s how insignificant it is. But something happened there last month which drew a whole lot of laowais down to the nightlife wasteland of Wangfujing (Earl Bar is next to the Peninsula Hotel) and that was minimal tech DJ Liman throwing down with Ludo (an Italian DJ) to open their new, divey-as-hell sub-basement party space. That’s right, sub-basement. No one will go to Earl Bar except when there’s that kind of hoe-down going down, but that’s the point: there is life outside Sanlitun, outside Gongti Xilu, outside all the places you always go. We gotta break out of our ruts, people. We should go to places like Earl Bar for the foosball table, for the fake alcohol, for the sweaty sub-basement, for the sheer hell of it. -LAM