B & I had enough time on Friday night between the last two movies to check out the Greenbush Bar, a place we’ve been meaning to visit for years that is so hugely popular, we had to wait twenty minutes for a table. No worries; I grabbed a beer from the bar and we cozied up in a couple of chairs by the door while we waited.

Greenbush Bar is on the 900 block of Regent Street in the basement of the Italian Workmen’s Club and, in a lot of ways, it’s just what you would expect a basement bar to look like. The ceiling is low, the walls are panelled in pine, and the ceiling is painted black so that the colored Christmas lights that are strung everywhere stand out all that much better.

The bar is a long, gentle curve of wood along the right wall as you walk in; when we got there, all the seats were taken but it was not yet three deep, the way it would be by the time we left. The rest of the room is low two-person pine tables, pushed together here and there where larger parties have been seated. Pizza seems to be their signature menu item; every other table had one on a wire stand that diners eagerly tore pieces from.

B and I weren’t looking for a pizza; B tried the special instead, which I forget right now. I had spaghetti and meatballs; the spaghetti was not bad, the sauce was good and the meatballs were very good.

We lingered for as long as it took us to finish our beers without gulping them down; there was quite a crowd waiting along the walls by the time we were finished.