Whatever audience is being targeted here, I'm not in it.

The Lava Lounge (conveniently located right behind my house) is doing a food thing on Mondays (see above) and Tuesdays (tacos!). If hanging out in a cramped, darkly lit crossbreed of Geiger's basement and Peewee's Playhouse, paying premium rates for drinks and chowing down on bar food is your thing, then the Lava Lounge is certainly worth looking at.

Personally, it's not my thing. I've been mortared out of the place at least twice by the horrid, vacuous droning of the medieval torture device they call a "jukebox," and many more times by the even more horrifying experience that is an all-request 80s DJ*. And while I'm sure marketroids would sling about words like "cozy" and "intimate" to describe the interior design, I personally lean towards vastly more accurate terms such as "cramped" and "claustrophobic." It's hard to do a neutral writeup of the place, considering it features several of the bar elements I seek to avoid (such as the South Side "hipster" crowd, for example, which leaves me clutching for my flamethrower and brass knuckles at every encounter).

I like the aesthetic of the Lava Lounge, honestly - the interior design is pretty neat, some of the employees are really cool, it's owned by my landlords (so I get a slight discount on some things) and overall it's a very pleasant venue until people start showing up en masse.... which is a natural side effect of things like Meatball Mondays, Taco Tuesdays and 80s Night. It just can't hold a substantial crowd, and it gets huge points off for that in my book.

If you like quirky atmosphere, have mainstream musical taste and can stomach large numbers of people in a very small space, you'll enjoy the Lava Lounge.

* Friday night is 80s night. If you get there early he'll play the good stuff... but the second the fratstains and sororisluts start pouring in, the output changes from Post Punk and Proto-goth to The Cure followed by James followed by The Cure followed by just about every hit single on the list of "reasons we left the 80s behind" followed by The Cure AGAIN. Combine music you can hear on the radio any day of the week with peroxide blondes with the already claustrophobic interior and what you have for a few hours is no longer the Lava Lounge, it's the Robert Smith Tribute Bar. Vastly Less of The Cure is the major reason I get my 80s on at The Upstage.