Best bar
What brings you back to a bar? Cool clientele. An attentive, swift, and knowledgeable staff. A comfortable vibe. Convenient location. These characteristics, while necessary for a bar to be tolerable at least, could just as easily describe a place to get an oil change. What really brings you back to a bar is the nebulous sense of excitement, a feeling of possibility that here at this place, tonight, something you're not expecting might happen. That means different things to different people, of course, but we think that's why our readers return to the B-Side Lounge in the no-man's land between Kendall, Inman, and Central Squares. The bartenders excel; the barflies are young and have hip in their gaze; and it's cool without being exclusive. But there's something about the place - the hard-boiled eggs on the bar, maybe? - that leads you to feel that tonight might be a little different. It's the B-Side, after all, the hidden tracks, the stuff you don't get on the full-length album.

"I don't like jail," oft-sotted author Charles Bukowski is credited saying. "They got the wrong type of bars in there." The right type of bar, according to our readers' poll for the second year running, is the type named after this hooched-up writer. At Bukowski Tavern, in its original incarnation in Boston as well as in its newer doppelgänger in Inman Square, beer's the thing. Its beer menu - pages and pages of it - is one of the city's most comprehensive, with a swooning selection of lagers and lambics, porters and ales, Hefeweizens, Dunkelweizens, and loads of local brews. And at the Cambridge location, if you're able to sample every beer on offer within an eight-month span, you become a member of the Dead Authors Club; membership involves getting your very own stein engraved with the literary legend of your choice. For beer, Bukowski is bar none, with service as surly as the inebriated ink-slinger.

B-Side Lounge, 92 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, (617) 354-0766; Bukowski Tavern, 50 Dalton Street, Boston, (617) 437-9999, and 1281 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, (617) 497-7077.