Bad Guy Bar

Reg: Welcome to the Salty Spitoon. How tough are ya?
Tough Guy: How tough am I? How tough am I? I had a bowl of nails for breakfast this mornin'!
Reg: Yeh-hah, so?
Tough Guy: Without any milk.
Reg: [visibly intimidated] Uh, right this way, sorry to keep you waiting.

— SpongeBob SquarePants

This is the watering hole where bad guys hang out to plot their nefarious deeds. If it's not dingy and/or a strip club, it is whatever the latest incarnation of "nightclub" looks like — a throng of people dancing in ways that resemble an orgy — the Coolest Club Ever, because as we all know, Evil Is Cool. The principal bar in any self-respecting Wretched Hive will naturally be of this kind. There is usually a pool table, if not an Illegal Gambling Den, which may be hidden behind a false wall panel.

Bad guys tend to lead a vicious lifestyle of gambling and sex, as well as alcohol, tobacco and other drugs (see I Need a Freaking Drink, Good Smoking, Evil Smoking and Drugs Are Bad).

Typically the site of Villains Out Shopping, though some business goes on there too (Black Market goods and services can be arranged, for the right price). If the heroes wander into such a seedy dive, chances are that a Bar Brawl will break out when the local thugs attempt to intimidate the newcomers. On the other hand, the bar might be a no-violence Truce Zone enforced by The Syndicate, its proprietors. As such, it might dub as a Good-Guy Bar in the middle of a Wretched Hive. Similarly, if the rough-looking patrons are freedom-fighting members of La Résistance, it may be a good guy bar.

In modern times, this is where you will find Orcus on His Throne — a modern-day royal court, complete with bodyguards, advisors and a crowd of lesser hangers-on and mooks cheapening themselves for their master's amusement. There may be blatant fanservice sequences with exotic dancers. The bar's fire exit alley and rear loading dock may be used for a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and other illicit activities.

Contrast of course Good-Guy Bar, where heroes (or sometimes heroes and villains) hang out. A Den of Iniquity is a comparable setting that's hidden from the public. If set in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, it will likely be a Bar Full of Aliens with green skin and three eyes.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Yellow Flag bar in Black Lagoon. It isn't any noticeably worse than the rest of Roanapur, but it is considered neutral territory by the gangs of the city. It still manages to be blown apart on a semi-regular basis.
• Dante trashes one that's run by demons in the very first scene of Devil May Cry: The Animated Series.
• The Jikochuu in Doki Doki! PreCure have one as their HQ where they hang out when not attacking. It's got a bowling alley, and it even has a sleazy Film Noir saxophone musical motiff in its background.
• The Devil's Nest pub in Dublith in Fullmetal Alchemist, home to the homunculus Greed and his chimera henchmen. It ends up being raided by King Bradley and his military, who kill all the patrons except Greed.
• The Mascot Village in Magical Witch Punie-chan has one of these. It's where Punie first meets Paya-tan.
• My Hero Academia has a small, classic-looking bar that also serves as the base for the antagonistic League of Villains. Its bartender is even one of its members, Kurogiri.
• Natsuki from My-HiME frequents such a bar to gather information on shady dealings.
• Nagi visits one in My-Otome to participate in shady dealings, especially when one John Smith is concerned.
• In Sailor Moon SuperS, the fourth season, the Amazon Trio had their own bar in the Dead Moon Circus. A bartender was never seen nor was any furniture other then the bar itself (the background being empty blackness). The only way viewers knew it was at the circus was because the Circus's Logo was seen in some shots.
• In The Seven Deadly Sins, the Boar Hat can be seen as this from a different perspective since the Seven Deadly Sins are seen as criminals within the setting of the manga.
• Star Driver has a bar where Vanishing Age hang out and play darts.
• In the Tamagotchi animated series, the Spacey Brothers, the show's primary antagonists, often visit a cafe for bad guys called the Waru Cafe.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, Yusei visits a bar named "Bootleg" after he's released from the Facility to show the bartender a card he's been given by another character and ask for a contact. The bar is located in a poorer part of Neo-Domino City, with many of the customers and the bartender sporting criminal marks.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, there's a place called BARian; it's unclear exactly where it is, but this seedy bar with poor lighting seems to be a popular place for the Barians, the villains in season two. (Although, the only customers who have been seen there are two of them, Alito and Girag.)

Comic Books

• In Astro City, Joey "The Platypus" Platapopulous runs the Down Under Club. The front is a legitimate nightclub with scantily-clad waitresses, while the back is where all the scheming takes place.
• The Bastion in Copperhead has a single bar that hosts a constant low-intensity barfight. Just getting a drink involves elbowing past several people and throwing a few punches.
• The DCU:
  • Batman:
    • Every bar in Gotham City. One story even says that Batman pays to keep several of them open just so he can have places to overhear information.
    • The Iceberg Lounge nightclub (the one run by the Penguin) is one that stands out, both in its popularity with crooks and with Batman if he needs to know something. It doesn't always work out. Two-Face: Year One has the freaks take it over until a SWAT Team invades, killing all of the expendable lackeys and one penguin. (An actual penguin, not the supervillain.)
    • Another standout Gotham example is Finnigan's, which is a cop bar. Due to the corrupt and crooked nature of most cops in Gotham, it's also a bar where the uninitiated are likely to get shot at. Jason Bard tends to frequent the place to try to feel out cases; he is just barely tolerated due to his past as a member of the GCPD before he got shot and had to start using a cane.
  • In the story arc "The Lords of Luck" from The Brave and the Bold, Supergirl needs to hire Lobo to take her to Rann, and her "guide" insists on stopping by every seedy bar he knows along the way.
  • A few issues of Justice League International feature a downstairs dive called the Dark Side that appears to cater primarily to second-, third-, and no-tier baddies. It also features a wallboard listing which villains are active, which are in prison, and which are sidelined or missing for various reasons. Later, much of the JLI team re-unites as the Super Buddies and discovers that their new neighbor, former supervillain Richard "Dick" Hertz (alias Blackguard), is starting a bar next door. While his place (also called the Dark Side) won't actively encourage villainous patrons, his partner (our old buddy Guy Gardner) advises him that it's best to let them come in should they decide to, seeing as how this is such a litigious society and all.
  • In Justice League United #5, Supergirl and her fellow Leaguers visit Block-C20, a derelict Space Station-turned-bar for bounty hunters and criminals.
  • Kingdom Come, in which heroes and villains tend to switch sides just for the hell of it, has an underground bar where many hang out. It also appears in its partial sequel The Kingdom (DC Comics). (Rorschach of Watchmen fame makes a cameo in a couple of panels; in one, he's breaking Brother Power's fingers.)
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Micah Rains is a Private Detective who runs his business out of the back room of a bar frequented by criminals, which leads to Micah being in frequent bar fights.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Bar with No Name, in Medina County, Ohio — infamously the location where the vigilante Scourge of the Underworld disguised himself as the bartender to assassinate 18 supervillains (who had ironically gathered there to discuss how to deal with all the recent Scourge murders) in Captain America #319. The Bar with No Name has multiple branches; there's another one operating in New York City.
  • An issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) goes into the Bar with No Name's origins, with it being claimed to have been as old as time and once had the devil himself as its bartender (a flashback panel shows a collection of upper-level Marvel threats drinking at it, including Thanos buying a drink for Death). Peter then casually informs the audience that this is all false, and that the bar was just a random speakeasy in the prohibition era that had a kitschy title. The C-List villains who go there have a weekly Spider-Man trivia contest for a large pot of cash, and this storyline's kicked off when Boomerang drags that photographer who takes all of Spider-Man's pictures to the bar as a ringer to win the pot.
  • In Daredevil, regular Mooks go to Josie's, including Turk Barrett.
  • Deadpool used to frequent the Hellhouse (previously Sister Margaret's School for Wayward Children) for both mercenary work and R&R. He also goes to the Bar with No Name.
  • The Bar with No Name story was reused in an issue of Punisher: War Journal. A group of villains gather at the New York branch to honor Stilt-Man, a supervillain who the Punisher had killed in issue #1 of the series. This time, the bartender is the Punisher, who poisons everyone's drinks and blows the place up. Unlike the Scourge incident, everyone survives and it was back in business in less than a month.
• There is one located in the Savage Dragon version of Chicago. Its name is never given but it is a popular hangout for supervillains.
• In Wanted, Wesley's father reveals that he met Wesley's mom at a BGB called "The Masquerade Club" during a sex party.
• In Watchmen, Rorschach tends to visit a bar filled with seedy lowlives whenever he needs info on criminals. This for him means beating people up until they give him a lead or at least until he decides they know nothing. Needless to say, the locals are all scared shitless by him... except that one guy. Shame about his fingers. By sheer statistics, it's unlikely that more than a small percentage of the bar's patrons are actual criminals, but Rorschach isn't interested in whose fingers he breaks in such a place — in the "Under the Hood" fake-documentary feature that was released with "Tales of the Black Freighter", there's a snippet of an interview with the bartender of the bar, who defends his customers and condemns Rorschach. Also, within the "Black Freighter" mini-continuity, there is a pub where pirates congregate.

Fan Works

• Anyone: Kurogiri's bat serves as the headquarters of "Anyone", which at its core is a villain organization. Unlike many examples, Kurogiri is implied to have regular civilian clients, as he joined Anyone after its leader helped him set up his business.
• The The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Game Mod, Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, features The Restful Watchman, which opposed to the city's more upstanding tavern and inn, The Jerall View Inn, is a sleazy little bar where some of Bruma's more shady citizens hang out at night.
• The How It Should Have Ended Villain Pub is a recurring location in Evil And Ham, where aspiring supervillain Taylor Hebert consults the professionals for advice.
• In Colors and Capes, Xander gets a job working at Gotham's local version, despite being a superhero. He gets along well with all of the regulars, including talking down the Mad Hatter when he's off his meds, and strictly enforces the bar's Truce Zone rules regardless of who breaks them.
• The Slime Bar in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf is implied to be one, though it is only mentioned in "Wild's First Christmas". The Mirror Universe version of Tapper's Tavern is also one, where the Smurfs of that world drink, smoke, snort pixie dust, gamble, fight, use obscene language, and engage in all sorts of immoral affections with each other.
• Halloween Unspectacular: The ninth edition features the Backslide Tavern, a place where all the villains go to hang out. When we first see it, the patrons there are discussing the new criminal mastermind on the block; when we last see it, said mastermind is blowing it sky-high with everyone except Plankton inside.
• The Hero and the Veela mentions a Death Eater hangout called the Drunken Hag.
• Love Opens Many Doors: In the eighth chapter, Ranma and his party have to visit the Bottle and Jug, a notoriously sketchy bar in the Hive Ward run by a clan of fensir, who keep a semi-legal gladiatorial combat pit in the back of the building. Ranma ends up having to fight a gauntlet against the bar's resident fighting champions in order to win a silver-furred, two-tailed fox. Because she's actually a polymorphed Kasumi Tendo. When Ranma wins, the owner lures Ranma and his companions to a special room and then shoves them through a portal to another world.
• The Shoddy Inn from No Competition is more disreputable than evil but still attracts its fair share of prostitutes and dark creatures.
• The Canceled Op in No Gods, Only Guns. Given that it's a human-friendly dive bar and Humanity Is Insane (because the fanfic is a Borderlands 2/Mass Effect crossover) this might be a given, but it goes deeper. See, the three Asari that decide to rob it have picked the wrong one, because it's where mercenaries go when their missions get canceled, hence the name. So when the Asari try and rob it, a curb-stomp ensues.
• The Pirate Pegasus features a bar in Thieve's Hold, a gathering place for pirates.
• No Hurry At All mentions Skunk's, the toughest bar in Knockturn Alley, whose owner would do absolutely anything to earn a few galleons.
• In Shadowchasers (Cyber Commander), there's The Den, a place in Neo Domino City where ophidia hang out. (Not all ophidia are villains, but at this point in the timeline, a lot are, and Ember meets Hebi-Na, who clearly is at this point, here.) The fic also mentions a few other bars that cater to specific races, like the Meat Locker, a nightclub for orcs, bugbears, goblins, and gnolls, which other races were "discouraged" from going to.
• A Shadow of the Titans:
  • The HIVE has a fully stocked bar in its lower levels, complete with bartender, bouncer, and karaoke machine. Since they're all villains, they don't care that most of its clientele are underage.
  • The canonical Iceberg Lounge is a prominent location in the Gotham Arc, as Penguin acts as a job broker for Jade. It's noted that aside from its criminal clientele, there's plenty of normal people who visit it just for the food, music, and the chance to glimpse Gotham's more notorious citizens.
• The Drunken Doxy from Uncle Quentin's Spy doubles as a brothel for "the worst of the magical world."
• In The Vampire of Steel, Willy's Place is the place where Zol-Am goes to gather an army of undead ("Is there a gathering place where our kind can be found, in this city?", he asks).
  The moon was up and the night was, thankfully, almost cloudless. Willy's Bar was a place which the living had no business visiting. It still had a bustling and varied clientele. It was run by a bumbling demon who trucked with the criminal supernatural element (which, in Sunnydale, was just about all of it), and you could find pretty much your phantasmagoria of ghoulies, ghosties, and long-leggity beasties there, with their beverages of choice.
  Buffy and her friends were among the few breathing folk who came there in a capacity other than as victims.
  This time, the Slayer went in with her redheaded friend, the latter of whom was wearing her Supergirl outfit under her jumpsuit.
• In What About Witch Queen?, there's The Red Boar, bar in Weselton city where society's worst meet. Bar fights seem to be regular occurrence, bartender misses part of his ear, and smuggler king Drachner uses it as his local HQ. Kristoff even outright calls it "a bad-guy bar".

Film — Animation

• Batman and Harley Quinn features a dive bar between Gotham City and Bludhaven which evil minions come to unwind. You can see henchmen from past series patronizing it; Two-Face's goons Min and Max sing "Don't Pull Your Love" on open mike, various henchmen from the DCAU series dance along, and even animated versions of Catwoman's goons from the Adam West show indulge in some light-hearted mockery of Batman.
• A Bug's Life: Mos Eisley from Star Wars is parodied in turn on two levels with the bar in the tin can and the cantina scene involving Hopper and his gang.
• Gene and Hi5 in The Emoji Movie after leaving Textopolis enter one of such bars full with everything considering "bad" in computer systems; Trojans, spams, computer viruses and Internet trolls for some reason.
• The Rat Trap in The Great Mouse Detective, complete with a Bar Brawl and a dancing showgirl mouse with a surprisingly bawdy song number. This is an homage to a similar scene in one of the original Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films.
• The Red Lobster Inn from Pinocchio, where Honest John and Gideon make a deal with the Coachman to send boys to Pleasure Island.
• Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third have a straight example featuring fairy tale bad guys. "The Poison Apple Bar" features a Cyclops doorman, the Ugly Stepsisters serving drinks, and Captain Hook on piano. It also has signs saying "Unhappy Hour" and "We Reserve the Right to Behead Anyone." The bar gets converted into a Suck E. Cheese's in Shrek Forever After following the Heel–Face Turn of the patrons, as the original sign is in the trash at the back.
• The Thug Tug from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which has some tight standards of manliness, where a bubble blown from the soap dispenser ends up starting a man-hunt.
  "All bubble-blowing babies will be beaten senseless by every able-bodied patron in the bar."^note ...bar
• The ironically named Snuggly Duckling from Tangled. A subversion, in that the thugs in the bar all turn out to be somewhat nice guys with dreams of doing something with their lives besides being thugs.
• Toy Story 4 parodies the trope and the way it's often played with the back room in the antiques shop where Bo takes Woody. Like so many tough, experienced heroes taking naive allies into such places, she tells him to keep quiet and let her take the lead.

Film — Live-Action

• The pub that the young boy leads Gary to in '71 is being used by protestant paramilitaries to build bombs.
• Airplane!: The Magumba Bar, featuring fighting Girl Scouts and disco dancing. Before you decide based on the "Girl Scouts and disco dancing" description what sort of place it is... the Girl Scouts in question are having a knife fight.
  Ted Striker: I was in the Air Force, stationed in Drambuie, off the Barbary Coast. I used to hang out at the Magumba Bar. It was a rough place. The seediest dive on the wharf, populated with every reject and cut-throat from Bombay to Calcutta. It was worse than Detroit.
• Ye Olde Benbow Taverne in Batman: The Movie. Lair of combative sailors, pirates and the United Underworld organization (Catwoman, the Joker, the Penguin and the Riddler), apparently so irredeemable that Robin questions why Batman would risk his own life to save them.
• In A Bronx Tale, a biker gang tries to break up a bar belonging to the neighborhood mob boss and are given a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown in a scene that makes a significant impression on the teenage main character.
• The Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange. Alex DeLarge and his droogs always assemble at the bar to sharpen themselves up for a night of ultraviolence by sipping milk laced with narcotics. The decor of the bar is stark black and white, with all furniture composed of white statues of contorted, naked women, some of which dispense the spiked milk. It's never firmly established whether the other patrons of the bar are as violent as Alex's gang, though it seems unlikely: the woman singing Ode to Joy and her companions appear shocked when Alex strikes Dim for mocking her, and a bit flustered when he nods to them. All in all, it seems more of a trendy (or what would have been called "mod" at the time the movie was released) scene bar where (some) bad guys happen to hang out.
• Constantine (2005): According to Chaz Kramer, Papa Midnite's bar is a "haven for those who rise and fall" — i.e., half-breed demons and angels. Several of the half-breed demons are seen with a struggling victim kidnapped for some nefarious purpose.
• The bar in one of the first scenes of Cruz Diablo where Commander Rocafuerte and his men gather to talk about the ghost-demon Cruz Diablo. There's a fight.
• The gangsters, Sky Pirates and gamblers from Dakota Harris hang out in an Asian bar of this type.
• Deadpool (2016): Weasel runs one wherein many criminals and mercenaries hang out, including Wade. They have a betting pool (called the Dead Pool) where they bet on people's deaths (Weasel bets on Wade, which he bemoans after Wade gains his Healing Factor). Much later in the film Ajax and his cronies show up trying to find Wade and they threaten Weasel; whereupon every merc in the bar pulls a gun on them.
• D.E.B.S.. Lucy Diamond kidnaps Amy and takes her to a bar that's a hangout for criminals like her.
• The Oro Verde and Tarasco Bars from Desperado, both of which were hangouts for members of Bucho's gang, and both of which were cleaned out in bloody fashion by the Mariachi.
• In Dick Tracy, Big Boy Caprice uses the Club Ritz as his base of operations, after forcing Lips Manlis to sign the deed over to him (right before killing him). The place offers illegal gambling to patrons, but Caprice mostly uses it as a front for his gang's other crimes.
• Dick Tracy vs. Cueball: The Dripping Dagger, owned by Filthy Flora, is a gathering place for the criminal element of the city. It includes hidden rooms for criminals on the run that Flora rents out at an exorbitant rate.
• The Blind Pig is a hidden speakeasy for wizards in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them where many shady characters hang out, including Tina's informant, Gnarlak.
• Fight Club: Lou's Bar is where the first in-universe fight club appears. It's also implied that the owner, Lou, has ties to organized crime.
• In The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, The Garbage Pail Kids get into a barfight in a bar titled The Toughest Bar in the World.
• In Goldeneye, Bond finds Robbie Coltraine's character in a bar like this.
• Darcy's music venue in Green Room — because, well, it's a white supremacist bar.
• In Gun Fury, Pedro runs a cantina on the Mexico/Arizona border where he buys stolen goods and sells guns to bandits and outlaws on both sides of the border. Slayton's gang holes up there overnight, and Jess tells Ben Pedro has too many gunmen on his payroll to risk attacking it.
• The Neo-Nazi bar in The Hebrew Hammer. Strangely enough, they do have an old bottle of Manischewitz lying around.
• Inspector Gadget 2 has The Blue Monkey, which is where Claw is getting his henchmen from. Gadget goes in undercover and ends up getting beaten up by the patrons until G2 shows up and saves him.
• Exaggerated in John Wick with the Continental, an entire hotel for criminals and the hub of Winston's power. Payment for services or a night requires special gold coins unavailable outside the criminal underworld. There's a large, surprisingly classy club in the basement with an access fee of another gold coin. On the grounds of the Continental, there's only one rule: no killing. If you break this rule, Winston will find out and will kill you, as Perkins finds out. The sequels show that the Continental is an entire hotel chain with a location in seemingly every major city in the world.
• The quaint little town in Kid Detective (2020) has The Boiler Room, which serves as HQ for the drug trade in town.
• Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! Detective Boyle and scientist Johnson investigate a bar where the killer tomatoes hang out. They know it's this trope because the moment they open the door they're nearly knocked over by the gang of outlaw bikers fleeing in terror from whatever's waiting inside.
• Shadow Company, the villains of Lethal Weapon, hang out in a bar and do business there.
• In The Matrix Revolutions, the Merovingian and his wife are lounging at Club Hel — so that Trinity, Morpheus and Seraph have to "fight their way through Hell" to rescue Neo.
• The El Sleazo Cafe from The Muppet Movie has some elements of this. It's full of ill-tempered and unsavory-looking characters, and Kermit's arrival coincides with a man getting thrown out through the front door.
  Kermit: Rough place, huh?
  Man: That's the toughest, meanest, filthiest pest-hole on the face of the Earth!
  Kermit: Well, why not complain to the owner?
  Man: I am the owner.
• In The Naked Truth, Nigel tries to bribe a couple of thugs in such an establishment, filled with shadowy working-class thugs who spit on the floor. When his bribe, a pearl necklace, breaks apart, everyone in the bar dives after the pearls spilled on the floor — to pick them up for him. The supposed Bad-Guy Bar turns out to be a Salvation Army cantina.
• The Three Cripples pub in Oliver Twist.
• In the fantasy franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, there is Tortuga and the Captain's Daughter. Played with, since some of the pirates are the good... er... not-as-bad-as-the-rest guys in this world.
• In The Princess and the Pirate, Bob Hope finds himself in a local bar, in a pirate town, so dangerous that he sees a man being killed because his shadow falls on someone. The killer then takes a liking to him and invites to drink a HUGE pitcher of ale - OR ELSE! This is a town where no one stops a man from dumping his victim's body in the harbor because "He has a permit" and his landlady tells him that, yes, there used to be a competing hotel but it burned down "suspicious like" while lighting her pipe with a comically oversized match.
• Another Bob Hope moment - in Road to Utopia he orders a lemonade in a Yukon bar - noting the reaction of everyone around him, he snarls "...in a dirty glass!"
• In Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed, there is a bar called the "Faux Ghost" which Scooby and Shaggy visit, both run and frequented by many of the gang's old villains and pretty much dedicated to their hatred of the gang, including such things as Whack-A-Mole games of Scooby and co. as well as Dartboards of Hate.
• In Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, The Hare and Eagle is a pub that is apparently a gathering place for the sweepings of the streets of London.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022), Sonic and Tails stop by a bar in Siberia during their quest for the Master Emerald's compass. Said bar is filled with dozens of hostile patrons (complete with an old lady knitting a skull and crossbones!) that almost toss the two into a fireplace, but fortunately they manage to save themselves by winning a Dance-Off.
• Star Wars:
  • A New Hope : The Mos Eisley cantina, where bounty hunters and smugglers hang out and Luke almost gets killed for no reason at all.
  • Attack of the Clones has Obi-Wan and Anakin enter a seedy bar in the lower levels of Coruscant. A "Death Sticks" dealer tries selling his drug to Obi-Wan, only to end up Jedi Mind Tricked by Obi-Wan into abandoning his ways.
  • On a larger scale the moon of Nar Shadda (orbiting Nal Hutta, the Hutt's homeworld) has been described is a massive bad guy bar. Han Solo described the place as what Coruscant would look like if you took the top 100 layers off of the city-planet.
• Touchez pas au grisbi has a bad guy bistro. It looks very respectable, but if straight people come in off the street, the landlady will politely tell them that all the tables are booked and recommend the restaurant across the street.
• Ultraman Geed The Movie: Connect The Wishes! has a seedy backstreet bar in Okinawa which is frequented by both humans and aliens, with the aliens being an unruly, hostile bunch willing to kill anyone who looks at them the wrong way. Riku ends up in hot water when he unintentionally pisses off a Nackle alien, quickly leading a full-blown Bar Brawl between the AIB and several angry aliens, but then Gai Kurenai made his Big Damn Heroes entrance.

Literature

• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: The villain's former agent is found drinking at a ramshackle tavern that "all but announced it preferred gamblers and highwaymen to merchants and pigrims". The booze isn't great, but they have no trouble with the service.
• Atlas Shrugged: The bar where Jim Taggart, Balph Eubank, Wesley Mouch and the other villains hang out. It's designed to look like it's underground but is actually on top of a skyscraper. The basement design is symbolic of the fact that despite their wealth and power, they cannot aspire to greatness, they have to drag it down to their pathetic level. It's established that the drinks are rubbish so they only drink there because it's a fashionable place, which shows that they are conformists. Still, were it not for the bad drinks and the even worse company, you have to admit, it would be a pretty cool place to be. It looks underground, but it's not!
• The Book With No Name: The Tapioca, the bar in Santa Mondega where all the bad guys go to drink, strangers are served piss instead of booze, and once every five years the entire clientele (except the barman) is massacred by an angry man with a taste for bourbon.
• Carnosaur: Sir Darren Penward's Mooks hang out at a pub near his mansion that is essentially explicitly owned and operated by them. No one else is welcome, and strangers tend to get roughly escorted out and sometimes beaten up.
• A Clockwork Orange: The Korova Milk Bar. It's more firmly suggested in the book than the film that the bar is a popular spot for gangsters like Alex and his droogs. Amusingly, compared to the film it's a much more sedate-looking place, with murals of cows on the walls, no statues, and a few private curtained cubicles for people working through a really major synthemesc trip.
• Most Ensenadean bars in Conciencia y Voluntad are depicted that way. Hell, the whole city is a Bad-Guy Bar.
• The Dark Tower: The Dixie Pig and The Travellers' Rest. The former looks like a typical restaurant in New York, except vampires secretly use it for cannibalistic feasts.
• The Death of Achilles: The Hard Labor Tavern has a corpse in the basement.
• There are several variations on the theme in the Discworld:
  • Biers, the bar for Ankh-Morpork's most monstrous citizens — except that Pratchett's undead and lycanthropes don't so much prey on helpless humans as hold night jobs and discuss flea shampoos.
  • A genuine villain bar (with no name) appears in Hogfather, as a dark room where people have drinks while discussing business. "The business generally involved the transfer of ownership of something from one person to another, but then, what business doesn't?"
  • And then there's The Mended Drum, "the most reputable disreputable tavern" in Ankh-Morpork; someone with the name Uglag the Invincible would quickly be proven not to be, but a child walking in to order a glass of lemonade need fear nothing more than a clip upside the ear (and that from the child's mother upon hearing their new vocabulary). It starts out as a straight example and evolves into a rather overt parody of this kind of establishment as the series goes on and Ankh-Morpork becomes more civilized. As of Going Postal, the Bar Brawls are partly choreographed and have a formal points system.
  • Then there's The Troll's Head, which is something like a more serious and gritty version of the Drum. To give some idea of what kind of place it is: the thing outside it that shows the bar's name is not a sign, but the actual severed head of a troll. And there are live trolls in town who might object to that — but don't, which probably says a lot about the bar's clientele. This is a reference to English pubs with names like the Turk's Head and the Saracen's Head, which allegedly acquired those names during the Crusades for similar reasons; many pubs with such names still exist, but with rather less grisly signage.^note This idea is referenced more directly in Jingo, with The Klatchian's Head. Fred Colon remembers his granddad told him his granddad saw it when it was a real head, though it was shrunken even then.
• Dragaera:
  • Subverted with Valabar's, where the food is so good that while assassins and others hang out there, it is a safe zone as they wouldn't be allowed back if they committed a hit there.
  • Five Hundred Years After has a straight example.
  • The restaurant Vlad's father owned was patronized mainly by House Jhereg, although it's unclear how many of the customers were actually part of the Organization.
• Galaxy of Fear: The Brain Spiders: The End Of The World cantina. Uncle Hoole says it's the worst-run establishment he's ever seen, even worse than the Mos Eisely cantina.
• Garrett, P.I.: Morley's Joy House in these novels is a Subverted Trope: while it's a favored hangout for lowbrow thugs and criminals (or upscale thugs and criminals, after its makeover as The Palms), Morley Dotes is a vegetarian teetotaller and refuses to serve anything stronger than cider.
• Gentleman Bastard: In these books, there are the Last Mistake in Camorr, where the Right People hang out, and the Tattered Crimson in Port Prodigal, a Wretched Hive and pirate HQ.
• Harry Potter: There is The Hog's Head, the shadiest bar in Hogsmeade. Whose owner is, incidentally, Dumbledore's brother, but no one knows that. It's implied that he passes on any information he finds to the good guys.
• Honor Harrington: The Rhodesian in the novel Torch of Freedom is notorious for being one of the baddest mercenary hideouts on the whole Mesa. Victor Cachat still manages to "impress" the local population.
• Knight and Rogue Series: In this series, Fisk goes to a bar where most of the criminals in town like to hang out. The bartender even has a system for fetching other criminals if you need to meet up with them.
• Lynda S. Robinson's Lord Meren Mysteries series has the Divine Lotus, a shady house of many pleasures in Tutankhamun-era Memphis. Its proprietress changes the motif frequently, but at the time of the novels' events, it's set up like a Greek kapeleia with lounging couches, bare-bodiced serving women, and imported wines.
• The Manual of Detection: The Forty Winks, which is under the mortuary in the cemetery in the old port town.
• Nightside (Strangefellows): Owner and bartender Alex Morrisy will be crushed. Or maybe the opposite, since he hates the place and only hangs around in such a dive because of a family geas; his customers, alas, have no such excuse.
• The Shadow: The Pink Rat and The Black Ship in this series.
• Adam-Troy Castro's Spider-Man: Sinister Six Trilogy features the Machiavelli Club in New York City, an upper-class restaurant supposedly created by a villainous mathematician for the purposes of catering to those with a "special brand of vision". Sadly, construction was incomplete, as the Machiavelli's patrons run the gamut across continuities, companies, and universes. A short listing of its patrons include:
  • Ra's al'Ghul
  • Hans and Simon Gruber
  • Justin Hammer
  • Diedrich van Horn, a villain from the Ellery Queen mystery novels
  • The Joker
  • The Kingpin
  • Dr. Hannibal Lecter
  • Lex Luthor
  • Elijah "Mr. Glass" Price
  • Carmen Sandiego
  • Keyser Soze
  • Randolph and Mortimer. Even the Gentleman takes a moment to wonder how they managed to get an invitation. The novel even covers their Intercontinuity Crossover appearance in Coming to America. When the Gentleman remarks that last he heard, their fortunes had both been wiped out, they coyly reply that they had come into a new source of venture capital, calling it "a grant from a visiting African dignitary".
  • Their waiter is even Henry from Isaac Asimov's Black Widower mystery series (something which is a serious slander to a fine upstanding gentleman).
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: The Old Pink Dog Bar of Han Dold City, where customers are periodically murdered by a large bird and disembodied arm which live behind the bar.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible: The superhero team The Champions visit a super-powered villain bar to squeeze the patrons for information. Later, Doctor Impossible goes to another villain bar, held in a secret location that changes every so often to avoid the heroes.
• Played with in Starship Troopers, the bar isn't exactly bad, but most of the clientele are hostile to MIs.
• When undercover in the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Blaze of Glory, Riker and LaForge visit a bar called The Flying Dutchman, which they've been advised is somewhere dishonourably discharged merchant vessel officers who can't get legitimate work can get work. The unadorned exterior leads Riker to expect an old fashioned pirate tavern, but inside it's an ultramodern strip club with live music (behind a forcefield, because the patrons have a direct way of critiquing the band).
• Star Wars: Crucible: The Red Ronto cantina. Han feels that it reminds him of the cantina back on Tatooine all those years ago.
• James Ellroy has the Grapevine Tavern in his Underworld USA Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood's a Rover). Located in St. Louis, it's a popular Mafia hangout. It shows up in all three novels, and it's the scene of a bloody massacre in the third book. Despite the rather pleasant name, it's apparently a rundown POS dive.
• Wicked Lovely: There is both the Crow's Nest, a mortal bar which is something of a nostalgia-fest for Seth, and the Rath and Ruins, a faerie club which much of the series revolves around (and the name of the fan forum).

Live-Action TV

• Any bar on Alias.
• Babylon 5: Marcus Cole has been known to frequent bars in the Downbelow when looking for information, typically getting it via being the only one in the room left standing. G'Kar had a similar method, on occasion.
  • A subversion: Garibaldi stumbles into a particularly nasty one while on the run from EarthForce security officers as the result of a frameup. A somewhat shady looking patron recognizes him and calls security to deal with him!
• Multiple demon bars on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, including one called Willy's, operated by Willy the Snitch.
  Vi: They're demons! It's a demon bar. It's like a gay bar, only with demons.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • Subverted with Josie's Bar. In the comics, it's one of these, with Josie being extremely apathetic to the amounts of drugs, weapons, and even worse stuff that her patrons tend to sell or trade. In the show, Matt, Karen and Foggy are patrons, and have helped Josie out with legal issues. They also spend their after-hours at the bar playing pool.
  • The season 2 premiere sees Foggy visit a crowded Dogs of Hell biker clubhouse to get info on a Punisher attack. He ends up encountering a particularly nasty bunch at the pool table and only narrowly manages to escape without injury.
• The Defenders (2017): Luke, tasked by Misty with helping out Cole and also looking for information on who killed Cole's brother, is directed by Claire to go to an uptown bar called Trouble in a Pair of Dice, as it's the hotspot for criminals to hang out at. When he walks in, he encounters Turk Barrett trying to sell a stolen watch, and takes Turk out back to rough him up for information.
• In Day Break (2006), Detective Choi is assaulted in a white supremacist bar.
• Subverted in Due South, twice. The first was in the pilot episode, when Ray is fishing for information on who killed Fraser's father, and is being menaced after the patrons get suspicious that he's a cop. Then Fraser kicks the door down is alternately uber-polite (weirding them out) and kick-ass violent. Plus, he's got a wolf. The second time is when a friend of Fraser's father is running from a convict he arrested with a murderous grudge. It's the same bar, Ray's being menaced again, and this time two mounties kick the door in, extract the information they want, and rescue Ray, whilst completely ignoring the two dozen guns pointing straight at them.
• 'The Raven', Jeannette's vampire-bar in the TV series Forever Knight. A very dangerous place for the living, but not everybody there is necessarily evil.
• In one Heroes episode, Adam Monroe took Hiro and Ando to one of these.
• Lampshaded in Human Target:
  Winston: So who's this Donnelly guy?
  Chance: Just a guy.
  Winston: Yeah, but a bad guy. See, 'cause that's a bad guy bar, so he must be a bad guy.
• The BBC series Hustle has an Anti-Hero bar, where its cast of delightful confidence tricksters hang out. They have never paid their tabs.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has Paddy's Pub, the dive bar owned by the degenerates known as "The Gang" that they use as their typical hangout to plan out whatever idiotic schemes they're pulling for the episode and has often been the scene of various horrifying carnage and chaos.
• Sort of subverted on Leverage.
  • In seasons 2-4, McRory's, the bar they work out of, isn't particularly seedy or shady, but it is implied to be at least tied to the Irish mob through Nate's family. Hardison is shown bribing the bartender not to break up a fight.
  • In season 5, Hardison's microbrewery in Portland is technically this, due to being the base of operations for Leverage, but it is as far removed from the normal atmosphere of the Bad-Guy Bar as possible.
    • Depending on how you view the Leverage group, it could even be a Good-Guy Bar.
• No Heroics, takes place in a Good-Guy Bar, but mentions a supervillain bar called the Stronghold.
• Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: The Caterpillar's bar is frequented by some very unsavory types. Apparently the Knave owes most of them money.
• A Running Gag in Person of Interest has John Reese slugging his way through a gang bar (usually involving a Battle Discretion Shot and Destination Defenestration) in order to talk to the one guy who has the information he needs.
  Reese: Why don't you wait in the car?
  Carter: *unimpressed* Why don't you wait in the car?
  Reese: Give me three and a half minutes.
  Carter: Oh, please. There are at least ten guys in there.
  Reese: ...Okay, four minutes.
  • ...and later, after Carter shoots a member of the gang and saves Reese:
  Carter: I got bored sitting in the car. And it took you longer than four minutes.
  Reese: Well, this guy hit me over the head with a neon sign. Not very sportsmanlike, and none of them want to tell me where to find their pal Monty.
  Carter: Yeah, that's why you should ask them before you knock them out, John.
• Even Power Rangers has this (no villains are ever explicitly shown drinking alcoholic beverages). The Space and Lost Galaxy incarnations of the show have the Onyx Tavern, in which Mooks and Monsters of the Week from different incarnations of the show, going all the way back to the beginning, hang out. A more recent incarnation, SPD, had Piggy's (though interestingly, we do see Onyx once more.) A Running Gag was the Rangers showing up to grill the proprietor for information, and the patrons immediately running for their lives.
• The Sopranos has Bada Bing!, a.k.a. the Bing, the strip club Sil Dante owns and manages as his front business. Tony's crew uses the Bing's back offices for meetings and the public side for general bar-ness. After Tony takes over the Jersey family, the Bing basically becomes a secondary HQ for the family (alongside Satriale's Pork Store).
• Supernatural has a nasty example in the episode "The Magnificent Seven". Now those guys were evil. Made a hunter chug Drano in front of his wife. Good times.
  • The series also has The Road House, technically a Good-Guy Bar.
• The villains in a few seasons of Super Sentai hang out in a bar.
  • In Ninja Sentai Kakuranger, a secret bar for Yōkai hidden in Tokyo shows up in one episode.
  • In Gekisou Sentai Carranger, the Bowzock live inside of a massive space station called the Baribarian, but we rarely get to see any part of the station besides the BB Saloon, where they spent as much of their time having fun as they did hatching evil schemes.
• The Roadhouse Bar in Twin Peaks. Which has gone through a weird sort of defictionalization as the building that was used for exterior shots was bought by new owners who turned it into a steakhouse called "The Roadhouse"
• Almost every bar in the Dallas area on Walker, Texas Ranger fits this trope. They're all filled with big, mean, lowlifes, and they all get their butts kicked by Walker and his partner(s). One wonders why the bad guys never wised up.
• The Wire contains both variations: in season 1, the Barksdale crew plot their nefarious deeds from within Orlando's, a strip club that Avon Barksdale uses as a front. Meanwhile, Blind Butchie's was a more dingy place, but where Stringer Bell, Proposition Joe, Omar Little and drug-dealing prison guard Tilghman were equally likely to patronize, and equally welcome. It became the location of choice to parley with Omar as of season two.

Manhwa

• A digital bar in Yureka is where professional, specialized murderers just seem to hang out, along with shady, superpowerful businesspeople, conveniently allowing them to conduct deals with each other, and with our questionably motivated protagonists every now and then.

Music

• In the video for "Beat It" by Michael Jackson, when they aren't popping out of the sewers or appearing from dark alleys, the gang members are seen coming out of seedy bars, implying this trope.

Professional Wrestling

• Back in the days when Kayfabe was taken more seriously, the Heels and Faces would stay in different hotels and drink at different bars so that no one would get the idea that they didn't actually hate each other.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • In the Planescape setting, Sigil has lots of bars that cater almost exclusively to fiends, most which being in the Lower or Hive Wards. Of course, this city has a bar for almost every type of creature.
    • One particularly notable bar in Hive Ward is called "The Bottle and Jug". The owner runs a dubiously legal boxing arena in the back ring, where a lot of the challengers are lucky to come out alive, seeing as how his champion fighter is a mutated cyclopskin. And if they do win, he typically lures them into a special backroom which contains portals to undisclosed locations on the Prime Material Plane, and the Elemental Planes of Earth, Air, Water and Fire, before shoving them through.
  • Some sources mention bars and coffee shops in the Lower Planes themselves. How the staff of these places react to mortals varies. (Some you shouldn't enter at all, others seem to be safe, but have bartenders who might try to offer a diabolic pact to such customers, and a few are relatively safe so long as you don't start trouble.)
  • The Basic system supplement "GAZ5 - The Elves of Alfheim" has a short adventure that involves a visit to the Gut Bucket, a low-class dive in the orcish quarter of Alfheim Town.
• Encounter Critical supplement Asteroid 1618. The Shattered Dome is full of monsters of all sorts. The Wretched Hive Cantina always has a number of orcs, goblins and criminals present, and they regularly have fights among themselves.
• In Sentinels of the Multiverse, the Rook City environment has one of these, allowing whatever villain deck you're playing against to draw more cards, representing the heroes running into one such bar and finding a whole lot of trouble.
• A common location type in Shadowrun for players to either get their missions or do a little investigation of their targets.
• The Emerald City setting for Mutants & Masterminds has a bar in the Undercity actually called the Dive Bar. It moves around a lot so the heroes and cops can't find it, but there's plenty of places in the Mazes where you can set up a bar, many of which actually were bars or similar establishments before it was abandoned. In addition, because the city is secretly run by supervillains as a place where — until recently — they can live quietly without worrying about superheroes, both the upmarket nightclub/escort agency Joy's and the exclusive Smoky Gentlemans Club The Tobacconists Club have a notable villainous clientele as well.

Theater

• A less "tough" and more "dishonest" example is the Bar/Inn run by Monsieur and Madame Thenardier in Les Misérables. Definitely an example according to Monsieur Thenardier's description of his patrons
  My band of soaks, my den of dissolutes
  My dirty jokes
  my always pissed as newts
  My sons of whores spend their lives in my inn

Video Games

• Anarchy Reigns gives us Asylum in the run-down city of Altambra. It's a rough place where a lot of Killseekers can be found. It also serves as the setting for the menu screen, where all of the playable characters are depicted doing various things, such as playing cards or arm wrestling.
• The second mission of BloodRayne 2 starts in a bar filled with tattooed punks who attack Rayne with baseball bats, crowbars and whatnot.
• One of these shows up early on in BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm. A trio of seedy ruffians pick a fight with you almost as soon as you walk in the door.
• Cubis Kingdoms has the Sinkhole Tavern, which is frequented by pirates.
• Villain players in DC Universe Online use nightclubs in Gotham and Metropolis as hideouts.
• The Hanged Man tavern in Dragon Age II is probably the seediest place (aside from the brothel) in Kirkwall. Unsurprisingly, all party rogues who aren't choirboys hang out there.
  • Given the main characters are clearly patrons, it also obstensively doubles as a Good-Guy Bar.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Ragged Flagon is the home of Skyrim's Thieves Guild. The guild in the game is quite a bit darker then previous incarnations, and the bar's setting fits as it's dark and literately underground. It probably smells like sewer too.
• Fallout
  • In Fallout 3, in Underworld, there's the "Ninth Circle". It is run by Ahzrukhal, a charming, yet actually very evil, ghoul. He holds contract for Charon, a servant who you can own by either paying 2000/1000 caps or doing a little "favor" for Ahzrukhal...
    • And when you buy him, Charon shoots his former master in the face. Nobody becomes hostile because of this.
  • In Megaton, we have Moriarty's Saloon as this when compared to The Brass Lantern.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has Gommorah Casino, controlled by the Mafia-esque Omertas. They plot various schemes there, and it's implied that agents of Caesar's Legion also meet there.
  • Very terrible people are seen wandering around The Third Rail in Fallout 4. People there behave for many reasons; such as extortion means getting shanked. By the mayor.
• In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, the Lost's clubhouse is a Bad-Guy Bar and your primary save point.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II, Rean has to board the Pantagruel in exchange for his hometown Ymir's safety. He then encounters all of the bad guys he's fought in the past game and a half and all of them are very accommodating with him.
• In Marco & the Galaxy Dragon, the alien gangster Dosgoro runs his operations out of a nightclub—which he named after himself—on the Machine Planet.
• Mass Effect has Chora's Den, a seedy little place run by a local crime lord with brutish alien clientele and saucy alien strippers. One character remarks it often smells funny there, not unreasonably guessing that the owner hides his enemies' bodies under the centre stage.
  • And Mass Effect 2 has "AfterLife", above which the ruler of Omega Station enforces her one rule; Don't Fuck With Aria.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has two, on the same planet: Kralla's Song, on the top level of Kadara Port, where the bartender draws a knife on anyone stupid enough to try and skip out on paying (and asking for her to "surprise" you is a very bad idea), and Purgatory, in the slums, which is darker and dingier, and has saucy dancers. Who do so behind barred windows, not to protect the dancers, but more to protect the "clientele" if (when) the dancers retaliate to unwanted advances.
• A closed bar in The Matrix: Path of Neo is basically this as it's filled with the Merovingian's Mooks. You have to fight your way through it during an Escort Mission.
• The Undersquare in Mega Man Battle Network, although it isn't usually affiliated with the Big Bad du jour. Oftentimes the thugs there will actually seem more Chaotic Neutral then truly evil, and the merchants there tend to sell powerful chips.
• Neon White has the Neon Bar, a bar ignored by the rest of Heaven where the sinners hang out. Too bad the Believers took all the real booze.
• Pokémon X and Y has Lysandre Cafe, a cafe in Lumiose City that's a popular hangout for members of Team Flare since it's owned by their leader Lysandre. It also serves as the entrance to their secret base.
• In The Punisher for the PS2, Frank nonchalantly walks into a bar full of mob thugs, none of whom recognize him until he pulls his guns and kills them all. A cop was hanging out at the bar but not killed because he was in the bathroom. The cop was Frank's contact, and knew what was coming.
• The second stage of Raging Justice is in Makin's, a nightclub belonging to the local mob infested with dozens and dozens of thugs. As soon as you enter, you're roped into a fight with thirty mooks making a circle around you as they come at you five to eight at a time, and you'll need to beat up everyone else in it.
• In the Raidou Kuzunoha duology, the local bathhouse fills this role for the local Yakuza.
• Rainbow Six Siege: The levels "Clubhouse" and "Skyscraper" are raids on criminal enterprises with a Bad Guy Bar inside.
• Return to Krondor has Ye Bitten Dog, a seedy dive that caters primarily to pirates. The bartender, Peg-leg Pete, is himself a retired pirate.
• In Reunion (1994) you have one in your Command Center, of all places. You can hire a spy, a bounty hunter, a pirate and so on. Rather mild version — all those people (and aliens) seem to go there only to offer their services to you.
• The bar at Ulence Flats in Space Quest I. Made more explicit in Space Quest IV when you travel back in time to Space Quest I to the same bar (complete with crappy 16-color lo-res graphics) and run afoul of a biker gang.
• The final part of the first level in Streets of Rage 2 has you storming a bar run by the Syndicate and the boss fight is against the bartender of the place.
  • If you pick the SOR2 route in Remake, you revisit this place. And if you choose to take the stairs instead of going to the bar, someone sets it on fire!
  • In 4, you climb out of the sewers into the bathroom of another such bar, this one occupied mostly by the members of the Red Demons Motorcycle Club. The boss fight is, fittingly, a rematch with Barbon, who was the boss fight for the bar in 2.
• Subverted in The World Ends with You. The bad guy bar (in the sewers no less!) is actually very nice.
• World of Warcraft has a number of neutral locations, but bad ones include Booty Bay, a city run by goblin merchants and pirates. Apparently pirates who don't do anything, at that — though that's probably because protection contracts pay more. Since the gobs don't take sides and inter-faction fighting is bad for business, any attempt at PvP is met with bouncers.
  • This used to make PvP impossible, in the days when the maximum player level was 60 and the bouncers were level 67. Now, however, the maximum player level is 80... and they're still 67...
  • They were upgraded to level 77. Their main threat comes not from their damage, but from their muskets that can knock you halfway across the city in one shot. And they just love juggling you in midair.
  • There's also the Grim Guzzler, the bar of choice for Dark Iron Dwarves, which funnily enough is the only place in Blackrock Depths where they don't attack you on sight; it takes a golem starting a Bar Brawl to turn it into a battlefield.
• A bar full of all the chasers in Yume 2kki can be found within said game. You can only gain access with a certain effect and they're not hostile to you. Unless you attempt to attack someone with a chainsaw.

Webcomics

• Bad Moon Rising has Lee's, a popular hang out for the monster hunter crowd, which has rarely obeyed rules forbidding weapons, magic, and mummies.
• Cockeyed Comix: What would you expect at a place called ''The Cloak and Dagger''?
• In Nodwick, there's the Fang and Flagon. It's not exclusively a Bad Guy Bar (good guys are welcome) but most patrons are tough to say the least, so much that Bar Brawls are actually encouraged by the management.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The comic has this as one of its many, many taverns, but only in On the Origin of PCs. During the scene, Elan boldly walks in and announces the arrival of his Paladin companion. In addition to the usual assortment of pissed-off criminals, there are also a Minotaur and a drow looking threatening. They both walk away slowly.
  • In Start of Darkness, there's a Bad Guy Café. They serve terrible coffee, but Xykon likes it.
• Woland's in Rhapsodies seems to fit this role. Generally referred to as a smoke filled pit, It's where Fedya goes to contact his friends in the Russian Black Market for his highly toxic cigarettes.
• One came up in Schlock Mercenary, although when going up against the Toughs the bad guys turned out to be overmatched.
• Unsounded: Nary, a crimelord, uses his pub The Midnight Cricket as headquarters for his gang.

Web Original

• Halo 2 ARG I Love Bees has Sharfie's, a pool parlor at which gangsters hang out.
• Hero House has the Joker's Joint, formerly known as The Iceberg Lounge, until the Joker murdered The Penguin.
• How It Should Have Ended has a Villain Pub to contrast with the Super Cafe where Superman and Batman usually hang out.
• The superhero guide in How to Hero claims that if you don't know where the local supervillain bar is in your city, then you're not doing your job well.
• The protagonists of Pay Me, Bug! visit a Bad Guy Bar to get information and some cargo as a cover for their real job. They get interrupted.
• In the Randomverse, Lex Luthor runs a villains' bar, ostensibly to serve as a counterpart to Stan's Place, the regular hangout spot of Batman, Spider-Man and the other heroes.
• The Yellow trailer of RWBY takes place in one of these. It doesn't actually look like a rough place per se, but it's a kinda seedy nightclub run by Junior, a mafia boss, and the place is crawling with his hatchet/machete-wielding thugs (who he hires out to the Big Bad of the show's first episode) and also Militia and Melanie, two deadly twins. Too bad none of them are even close to a match for Yang Xiao Long.
  • Yang returns to this establishment in season two, while looking for information on the guy Junior loaned his thugs two. But this time, they are all so scared of her, the thugs immediately panic and pull their guns as she walks in, while Junior wisely decides to cooperate without a fight.
  • In Volume 6, Cinder Fall goes to one of these to get intel on the heroes' actions from the leader of a local gang, Lil' Miss Malachite.
• Tech Infantry has the Jade Flower and Emile's Pub, among others. The Rage fits the trope even more so.
• Whateley Universe: Not surprisingly, several are mentioned at times.
  • For a while the only one shown was Superbad, which is specifically a hangout for minor supervillains with day jobs (and the occasional bunch of retired supervillain hunters who are looking for a nice quiet place to drink). It's basically an ordinary working folks bar, except for some of the decor and the tolerance for odd costumes.
  • The Black Mask, a magically self-relocating bar that only those it wants to allow in can find.
  • Moriarty's, an upscale hangout mainly for the sort of supervillains who either are too powerful for the law to touch, or have avoided getting caught even when everyone knows what they are doing.
  • Ribbon tracks down Lady Havoc (his/her daughter) in an unnamed one in Pittsburgh; hilariously, the patrons mistake Ribbon for being Havoc's daughter, calling her 'Baby Havoc'.
  • Forte, an up and coming supervillaness, frequents Outlaws' Tavern in Phoenix, Arizona when meeting with potential clients for her sonic devises.
  • Dragonblade (who is the son of a superhero and a supervillain) mentions that there are separate bars where supervillains' minions go to have a good time (usually by picking fights with each other), at least in the super-criminal haven of Karedonia.

Western Animation

• The Skull and Dagger in Aladdin: The Series which serves as the headquarters of Agrabah's thieves guild.
• Arcane: Subverted, then played straight. The Last Drop is viewed as this by the Enforcers, seeing it as a den of criminals, but Vander uses it to keep the peace. When Silco takes it over, it genuinely does fit the description, becoming more like a nightclub with bouncers outside.
  Caitlyn: Well that place does look like it has bodies buried in the basement.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The bar at the Misty Palms Oasis.
  • Also, the "seedy tavern" where June hangs out, drinking and beating up huge dudes between jobs.
  • In a side comic called Boys Day Out, Katara and Toph try to enter one, but they get rebuffed because it was for guys only. So they come back disguised as guys, and Toph teaches Katara the ropes about being a dude. It works...then hilarity ensues.
  • The Misty Palms Oasis bar makes its reappearance in the sequel The Legend of Korra. Complete with bounty hunters who are fans of Bolin's Nuktuk movie, a rather small inn room, and wanted posters.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold has a supervillain bar called '8 Bar', where supervillains hang out in costume, drinking and shooting pool.
• The Biker Mice from Mars episode "A Scent, A Memory, A Far Distant Cheese" had a transporter accident result in Lawrence Limburger and Dr. Karbunkle be transported to a bar where they meet several villains Limburger hired to take out the Biker Mice in previous episodes, such as Evil Eye Weevil and Corroder Cody. All of them proceed to beat up Limburger for never paying them.
  • The pits are giant craters dug up from Limburger before the Biker Mice arrived on Earth. They had been taken over by some of the worst criminal of the planet who built their own city down there, so of course every bar down there qualifies. Vinnie (in disguise) visits one in "The Pits" searching for infos on his bros, who had been enslaved by the Pit Boss.
• Codename: Kids Next Door
  • In "Operation: F.L.U.S.H." there's a coffee house that would seem just like Starbucks if not for the fact that it was villain-exclusive.
  • The Candy Bar is a place exclusively for candy pirates, like Stickybeard, but they reluctantly let Numbuh Five in.
• The Old Haunt in the Darkwing Duck episode "Negaduck", where Megavolt drowns his sorrows after a failed robbery. Located in an area of St Carnard that appears to be actually called The Bad Part of Town.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Batman: The Animated Series:
    • The Stacked Deck Club, which was the setting for the episode "Almost Got 'im". Though all the other patrons turn out to be undercover cops. Later episodes show the bartender to be so unbelievably jaded and accustomed to everything that goes on there that his reaction to a bar-wide battle complete with gunfire is to calmly pull up a bowl of peanuts and enjoy the show.
    • Harlequinade has Batman and Harley Quinn go to one of the Joker's old hideouts expecting it to be deserted and instead find a very lavish (and highly illegal) criminal casino being operated there. Needless to say everyone there is packing heat, hates the Bat, and it ends about as peacefully as you'd expect.
  • There is a similar bar in Central City shown in the Justice League Unlimited episode "Flash & Substance", but populated by The Flash's various enemies. Batman, Flash and Orion show up there to find out information about the attacks by the Rogues and all the patrons (including the bartender) clear out the moment they see the heroes. The only remainder is the mildly insane Trickster, the exact man they were trying to find.
  • Lobo's debut in Superman: The Animated Series has him lightheartedly rampaging though an intergalactic bar called "The Steaming Load" after he spots the target of his current bounty hunt.
  • Lately, the Penguin has opened the Iceberg Lounge, which is Gotham's Bad Guy Bar, where the rich slum for excitement and which Batman tolerates as long as Pengy provides criminal underworld info on demand as required. (After all, as long as the bad guys are just there for drinks, Penguin's not doing anything illegal... but he might hear things...)
• The Dover Boys features "a certain public house — a tavern of unsavory repute" that the Dover Boys have to pass by on their bike ride. Nothing about the place, apart from Dan Backslide being in there, outwardly suggests that it's too bad, but being virtuous young teetotallers, the Dover Boys and Dora show their "uncompromising moral fortitude" by refusing to even look at it.
• There's one in the town of Gravity Falls called "Skull Fracture", seen in the episode "Headhunters". The place is dingy and dimly-lit, has at least one patron unconscious on the floor (Mabel prefers to believe "He's resting"), and the clientele consists of rowdy bikers and other tough guys.
• For Halloween, all of the Disney villains turn the House of Mouse into one of these with a Villain Song [1].
• The Stinger for the Grand Finale of Kim Possible shows the show's entire Rogues Gallery hanging out in a coffee shop. Well, everyone except Shego.
• My Dad the Bounty Hunter: A G-rated version. Bucky Quanto’s is a popular hangout for the most vicious aliens in the galaxy… mostly due to having the best wings in the galaxy.
• Laughey's Karaoke Club from Ninjago is this, on accident. Its owner, Dareth, never intended for the place to be taken over by the Sons of Garmadon. Even after the S.O.G. is disbanded and Dareth renovates the bar, it's still seemingly only populated by criminal bikers.
• Subverted in Olive, the Other Reindeer. The "Top of the World Bar" near the North Pole, Olive stops in looking for a ride seems to be populated by criminals, but it turns out they aren't that bad. Well, except for that bunny. They even have a song about it.
• Jack from Samurai Jack has a bad tendency to hang out at these, which are all filled with shady bounty hunters wanting to collect the reward for him. Of course, they're all no match.
  • In season 5, Ashi ends up walking into one, encountering plenty of characters Jack had defeated before...including the bartender himself, Da Samurai...and Demongo.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man had one owned by the Shocker, though he left the running of the place to Blackie Gaxton. It gets burned down in a fight between Spidey and the Molten Man.
• Spongebob Squarepants:
  • The Salty Spitoon from "No Weenies Allowed". Only the toughest of the tough are allowed in.
  • In the episode "Plankton's Army" the Tough Tavern appears. It even has some of the same characters that appeared in the Salty Spitoon.
• An episode of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had one of these named "The Secret Hideout"... advertised by huge illuminated signs and neons.
  • In other episode, there was The Meat Locker, a club owned by a mobster. (It was actually a lot better than its name made it sound.)
• The Evil Eye Club on The Tick. Newcomers and suspected heroes-in-disguise may be asked to eat a kitten to prove their evilness.
• The Venture Brothers has Don Hell's, an underground nightclub that admits only members of the Guild of Calamitous Intent and is owned by one of the Guild's ruling councilmen. When Dr. Venture and Billy Quizboy unwittingly crash it, things go quite badly for them.
• Wander over Yonder: An early episode “The Bad Guy” features Wander and Sylvia attempting to blend in with the bad crowd at a bar in Doomstone. Where Wander, taking his act of being a bad guy a bit too far, picks a fight with the patrons. Subverted however, as the patrons turn out to not really be bad guys.
  • A later episode “The Rider” features a more traditional example, known as Weasel’s Watering Hole. Sylvia and her old partner Ryder try to rough up the proprietor for info, but Wander ends up attracting the unwanted attention of the local thugs.

Real Life

• In the UK, common indicators of this are that the bar will be a very functional building on a housing estate, usually purpose-built in the sixties or seventies, surrounded by a car park, and with a large, vicious dog roaming around on the flat, tarmac roof. Certain pubs, particularly in London, will sometimes make some hay out of their past association with celebrity crooks like the Kray twins Firm, but in such cases the pubs are much more likely to be tourist traps than actual crooks' boozers.
• In Russia, a bar like that typically bears an innocent Soviet-sounding name such as "Sea Wave Cafe" or "Little Pine Tree", is located in a dilapidated building on the Wrong Side of the Tracks, serves stale beer and cheap vodka and the police loathes to come near it (but they must, because if there isn't a stabbing or shooting, there's a fight every night).
• "The Hub" was the name of a saloon on Madison Street in Chicago where con artists, counterfeiters, thieves, and other criminals could hang out, drink alcohol, and talk business. This saloon was notable for being the location where Irish crime boss "Big Jim" Kennally would plot his infamously incompetent attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's dead body and hold it for ransom (and would also serve as the location where he would later be captured by authorities after the botched crime).

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