The Mount Royal Tavern is a dive bar on the edge of MICA's campus that has been serving cheap drinks to art students, musicians, and neighbourhood regulars since 1944. The interior is a compendium of decades of accumulated tchotchkes and memorabilia; the drinks are inexpensive and the pool table is heavily used. This is the kind of bar that anchor neighbourhoods — unpretentious, completely itself, and entirely at odds with any notion of the trendy or the aspirational.
The crowd is genuinely mixed — art students, older regulars, musicians from the nearby venues — and the conversation, when it happens, tends to be more interesting than at more polished establishments. Worth seeking out if you want to understand how Baltimore actually drinks.