What's the Deal With Quarters?
Newsflash: The strip mall dive bar is actually Saratoga's friendliest watering hole.
If you blink, you’ll miss it. Sandwiched snugly between Mama Mia’s and Advance Auto Parts in what is perhaps Saratoga’s most eclectic plaza is a place called Quarters. That’s all the ambiguous sign that’s visible from Route 50 says: Quarters. But if you peak behind the “A Day at the Races” flag that’s (intentionally?) obscuring the door, you’ll find what one would suspect to be a hole-in-the-wall bar. Think Tin & Lint, strip mall edition.
“I always thought it was a scary, little dive bar where you’re going to walk in the door and the music’s going to screech to a halt and everyone’s going to turn and look at you,” says Saratoga native Chris Guarnieri of the off-the-beaten track watering hole. Those were my thoughts exactly as I walked into the bar for the first time on Thursday evening.
Mind you, my Quarters debut was a long time coming. Like most everyone I’ve talked to about the bar, I was intrigued yet skeptical about what went on a few doors down during my weekly trip to Market 32. The allure only grew when I commissioned a participant in one of my recent speed-dating events to report back on his experience at the bar’s weekly open-mic night. “They had no beers on tap, and there were two things on the food menu—a basket of fries and a basket of wings,” Aidan told me. “The performers were overall very talented. A lot of Grateful Dead. A majority, even.”
Obviously, I had to check out the place for myself.
But when I walked in on Thursday, I was pleasantly surprised. “Oh,” I said to my friends Maddy and Erica. “This is nice.”
There were 15 or so normal-looking people sitting at the bar, playing darts, trying their luck at the New York Lottery Quick Draw, or, in the case of one eccentric woman, chasing a shot of tequila with a handful of blueberries. The room was clean, and we quickly made friends with regulars James and Gary, who were sitting next to us.
Of course, Quarters wasn’t that nice—it’s still definitely a dive bar. “It’s as townie as townie can be,” says Chris, who wound up buying the bar four years ago with her brother, Mark, and three other people, including Mark’s 1987 Spa Catholic JV baseball coach, Frank DeRossi, whose family owned famed Italian restaurant DeRossi’s on Beekman Street from 1910-1981. Frank had been a Quarters bartender, and Chris and Mark actually remember coming to the bar with their dad in 1982, the year it opened. “My mom would go shopping at Price Chopper [now Market 32], and my dad would come in here,” Chris says.
“I was 7, and my dad would peek in the door to see if it was packed,” Mark jumps in. “If there wasn’t a lot of people, he’d wave me out of the car and I’d come in while my mom was shopping.”
More than 40 years later, he owns the joint.
Under the new ownership, Quarters made somewhat of a turnaround, at least aesthetically. They tore up the carpet—yes, carpet—that’d been in there since 1982, and painted the walls that had been smoke-stained back when customers were allowed to smoke indoors. (That was the Quarters I had been imagining.) They purchased the full NFL Sunday Ticket, so they get all the games, and recently began offering a limited food menu that, since Aidan’s visit, has expanded from two to three items: chicken wings, chicken tenders and fries. (They went live on DoorDash this week.) Mark says they’re still testing the food thing out, and on nights when they don’t offer food, they allow customers to bring in dinner from Mama Mia’s next door. They still don’t have draft beer—but who needs it when you’ve got a specialty Redbull cocktail menu, Pink Whitney and Green Tea mixed drinks on tap, a full bar of liquor, and pretty much any bottled beverage you can think of: Miller Lite, High Noon, Fiddlehead and Pedialyte included.
Another change Chris and company made was to build up Quarters’ nightlife scene; the bar used to open at 8am and close fairly early. Now, it opens at 10am, when some of the backstretch workers typically come in, and stays open a bit later thanks to the Wednesday open mic night and the live music Chris books for Friday and Saturday nights. Mark says some of the jockeys come in for a drink on Sunday evenings after their last work day of the week, and trainers like it because they aren’t recognized as frequently as they would be downtown.
After stopping in Thursday evening to check the place out, and again on Friday afternoon to interview Mark, Chris and Frank, I returned to Quarters on Friday evening (yes, for the third time in 24 hours) to witness the crowd that shows up for the live music.
“Ten dollar cover,” said the guy sitting on a stool at the door.
“Ten dollars?!" my boyfriend Pete said.
“OK, two dollars,” he replied. “OK, a beer.”
When we got inside, another man walked up to us. “He didn’t try to shake you down for money, did he?” he asked of his friend who was not actually a bouncer but instead just a regular customer. (Pete bought him a beer anyway.)
We’d apparently missed the band’s first set, as well as a mad rush of people who’d stopped by while waiting for a table at Mama Mia’s, but did see a guy showing off pictures of a marijuana plant on his phone, another guy eating an entire pizza at the bar, and plenty of Dead Heads grooving to Grateful Dead tribute band Half Step. I felt like a regular already, waving to Mark as he rushed around picking up empties, and chatting with James and Gary, whom I’d met the night before. Of the handful of people I talked to that I didn’t previously know, two of them hugged me.
“I’m 47 years old and I’ve been to a lot of bars,” said one woman named Carissa who barely stopped dancing long enough to chat with me. “This is the best bar I’ve ever been to. It’s like hometown America.”
—Natalie
Great write up nat, will have to check it out…