Eli's Mile High Club

Eli's Mile High Club is on a stretch of MLK in North Oakland that does not, on first or second pass, look like it is hiding anything. There is no marquee. There is a hand-painted sign. The door, when you find it, is the only thing telling you that behind it is one of the great rock-and-roll dive bars in Northern California, and probably in the country.

Inside: a long, narrow room, a small stage at the far end, a few booths, sticky black-and-white linoleum, a bar that runs almost the full length of the place, and the smell of beer and slow-cooked meat. Eli's, in its current incarnation, is a punk-and-metal-and-soul venue that also serves some of the most aggressively excellent fried chicken in the East Bay. These two facts are not in opposition. They are, in fact, the entire point.

The chicken is brined, breaded, fried with the kind of care that should be illegal in a place where the ladies' room door does not entirely lock. The mac and cheese is the real, breadcrumbed-on-top kind. The ribs come glossy and pull off the bone with the smallest amount of suggestion. While you are eating, three feet from your elbow, a band you have never heard of is setting up, and somewhere in the next forty minutes they will be louder than you thought a band could be in a room this small.

The crowd is everyone — old punks, new punks, a couple having a date, a guy who has clearly been here every Saturday since 1996. The bartenders are kind without being saccharine. The cover is small. The stage is barely a stage. And what you are getting, when you are here, is the particular kind of joy that exists when something is exactly itself and exactly enough — a fried chicken plate, a longneck, a band playing two feet from your face, in a room that asks nothing of you except that you be present in it.