Atlantic City Is The Drunkest City in New Jersey (Well, Tied For 1st)
A sign in the window at Tony’s Baltimore Grill in Atlantic City. (Photo | Dan McQuade)
It’s no surprise that a city where the booze flows freely at all hours is the drunkest in New Jersey. What might be surprising is Atlantic City is not alone at the No. 1 drunkest place in New Jersey: It’s tied with Belmar, Monmouth County.
The new rankings, compiled by RoadSnacks, rank New Jersey cities based on the number of bars/pubs/liquor stores/wineries per capita, plus the number of recent drunk tweets and the divorce rate. (Okay, that’s pretty clever.) And A.C. and Belmar — not to be confused with Camden County’s Bellmawr — came out tied for the No. 1 spot.
I don’t know much about Belmar, but I do know that Atlantic City is one drunk town. Here is small sampling of places I’ve had drinks in AC just in the past 365 days:
- Angelo’s, an 80-year-old Italian restaurant in the Ducktown section with simply unbelievable pasta
- Tony’s Baltimore Grill, your classic corner bar that hasn’t been updated in decades, which also serves amazing pizza
- Chelsea Pub, a 24-hour bar (!)
- Firewaters, a bar in Tropicana with wonderful bartenders, 101 bottles and 50 taps
- The Pool @ Harrah’s, literally a giant pool complex under a dome
- Four different beach bars, including a k-themed one
- Martorano’s, an Italian restaurant that plays club music at night and classic mobster movie clips nonstop (or, the time I was there, two early Season 5 episodes of The Sopranos)
- Casino hotel lobby bars, where the people-watching is incredible
- The restaurants of Gordon Ramsay and Guy Fieri
- Hooters, for the second half of an Eagles game
- In front of any number of slot machines in many casinos
- The end of the pier at The Playground
- This Mexican place at the outlet mall, Los Amigos, that I guess is a tourist trap but makes very good margaritas
- Vagabond Kitchen and Tap House, a gastropub if you somehow hadn’t guessed from the name
- Out of a plastic bottle on the boardwalk after leaving a Bernard Hopkins fight at 2 a.m.
What does this mean, other than that I definitely go to Atlantic City too often? It has a lot of great places to drink! Atlantic City is not that big, and yet there’s a great variety of places to drink there. Having eight casinos helps, I suppose. I would recommend most of these places for drinks to anyone. How can a town not be the drunkest in New Jersey when it has this many good places to drink and casinos will literally give you free booze if you gamble?
Meanwhile, Wildwood ranked eighth; it has the most bars and liquor stores per capita in New Jersey. This is not surprising, but this is actually kind of a shocker: How North Wildwood isn’t on this list?! Maybe people in North WW never get divorced.
Of course, I may have to doubt the methodology on this list, since Ocean City — a dry town came in 48th on the extended Top 100 rankings. Clearly, this is a result of picking up drunk tweets from Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City, New Jersey, is a dry Christian town!