Corner Taverns

No visit to East Aurora is complete without a stop at the 140-year-old Wallenwein Hotel – just don’t expect to sit at the bar after a day of exploring the village.

Wallenwein is one of the only taverns in the region that features a bar with no stools – a staple of German taverns dating back to the same time period. As far as owner Ben Holmes knows, this stool-less bar has been a fixture since the tavern opened in 1882 to offer food and lodging to horse-drawn travelers making their way to Buffalo from the Southern Tier. A turn-of-the-century photo behind the bar shows patrons enjoying the standing room much as they do today – save for the spittoons sitting on the floor.

There is, of course, an adjacent dining room with plenty of seating that offers classic tavern fare. Holmes is set on maintaining Wallenwein’s bar tradition, as the inviting standing room makes it easy for first-time customers to walk in, order a beer, and chat up the locals who have treasured this tavern for more than a century.

This longtime bar on the northern fringe of downtown is as much a presidential museum as it is a local watering hole.

Presidential memorabilia covers nearly every square inch of Founding Fathers Pub, named by Esquire and Buzzfeed as one of the top bars to visit in the United States. There’s presidential portraits, campaign posters, historical newspaper clippings, political statuettes, life-size cutouts of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and even placemats featuring small inset photos of every commander in chief.

Founding Fathers is the brainchild of Michael Driscoll, who left his job as a social studies teacher to open the pub in the 1980s. Driscoll still bartends on Friday and Saturday evenings and has become Buffalo’s defacto quizmaster, doling out trivia questions and testing the historical knowledge of returning customers and first-time patrons alike.

Sit down at the bar with a friend, order a couple of cold ones, grab your bowl of free popcorn and chat up Driscoll for one of the most memorable pub experiences in Buffalo – or anywhere.

Stepping into Rohall’s Corner is like spending an evening in your “grandfather’s old rec room,” according to owner Greg Rohall. There are ketchup-and-mustard colored walls, brown and red floor tiling, recessed lighting, glass block windows and a back wooden bar stocked with hard liquor.

Rohall had searched for the perfect spot to own a corner tavern after a lengthy bartending career. He found it in Black Rock at a corner tavern that opened in 1946, closed in 1984, and sat vacant for more than two decades with its postwar character intact before reopening in 2011 as Rohall’s Corner.

Those 27 years of dormancy preserved the look and feel of the tavern that otherwise would have been remodeled. The original wooden coolers still keep the beer cold, including rare and vintage finds like Utica Club – one of the popular blue-collar beers of Buffalo’s industrial heyday – and Stiegl from Salzburg, Austria. Rohall’s successfully straddles a fine line between an old-time “shot and a beer” joint serving Old Vienna and Pabst Blue Ribbon to a contemporary bar offering live piano music and an extensive wine list. Its humble exterior along Amherst Street conceals one of the city’s top hidden gems.

A quick glance through the 30 different beers and 70 liquors available at the Adam Mickiewicz Library and Dramatic Circle reveals this is no ordinary bar. Zywiec and Okocim beers are on tap, cans of Tyskie are in the fridge and bottles of Krupnik and more than a dozen Polish vodkas line the shelves. For the cost of a cover charge at a bar in a larger city – just $10 – visitors can become a member of this private club that has been a staple of Buffalo’s East Side for more than 120 years.

It’s well worth it; the Adam Mickiewicz is one of the most unique drinking and cultural experiences in Western New York – and beyond. Arrivals from Poland in the 1890s built the club – which also features a library with centuries-old Polish books and an auditorium that’s Buffalo’s longest operating theater – as a way to keepthe connection to their heritage strong.

The bar is tucked away inside the club – enter the front door and walk through a foyer and an old parlor room with a pool table and a 1950s jukebox to get there. Maps of Poland line the walls of the bar, which is open every Friday and Saturday night, and it’s not unheard of to still hear members sitting at the barstools speaking Polish.