Not quite 24 hours in Atlantic City’s 24/7 bars

My self-imposed mission was simple: spend time in Atlantic City’s 24/7 bars soaking up the vibe. Not all 24 hours — 12 out of 24 sounded like a nice round number. I should be there late-night. The very early hours of morning would be interesting, too. But what about primetime evening hours, I wondered. Would I miss the energy that comes with peak crowds?

Turns out, the real question was: Did I have it in me?

Moving walkways bring me inside the belly of Bally’s, and the smell of smoke tapers off as I head toward the gaming floors. A couple steps up is Carousel Bar, a sleek, glowing circle with a three-tiered column at the center packed with bottles of high-end booze. A waist-high glass wall separates it from a cocktail lounge.

There’s a clever circular menu with the kind of intricate cocktails invariably crafted by a consulting mixologist. The Expressway Negroni has Bacardi aged rum, Jersey tomato-infused Campari, sweet vermouth, and Castelvetrano olives. The Lucky Nucky, on draft, boasts small-batch whiskey, amaro dell’Etna, salted peanut, and root beer saltwater taffy.

“Is that gross or —” The bartender shakes his head before I complete the thought and steers me to an espresso martini. I am tired, despite attempting to adjust my circadian rhythm, so why turn down a pick-me-up?

It’s thick, sweet, and pale with Irish cream, but the espresso martini is welcome nonetheless for its funnel cake garnish, served exactly how you’d expect: cold in a plastic cup. It’s the only food on offer here. The young bartender closes out his shift and waves enthusiastically at a pair of elderly women at the bar. His recently clocked-in counterpart is in constant motion, doling out bottles of beer and cocktails in plastic cups.

Suddenly the bar is spinning … really … slowly. I confer with the couple from upstate New York next to me. Is the center moving? How do the bartenders manage? Wait, are we moving?

A slight jolt confirms we, the customers, are in fact moving. It’s disorienting until we fall deeply enough into conversation to forget. We talk other casinos on my route. The Borgata, the wife says, is where the Real Housewives of New Jersey go to gamble. “Opulence,” the husband pronounces in an almost reverent tone.

How would we characterize the people that come to Bally’s, I ask.

“Real people,” chimes in the man in the Eagles T-shirt a few stools down.

Despite strong winds and a drizzle, there’s a slow but steady trickle of customers walking up the boardwalk to the Ocean Casino Resort. The moon looms large above the amusements in the distance, a halved pita in the sky.

Inside it’s another mini-journey to the 24/7 bar: up an escalator, down a hallway, past a zillion slot machines, all windows left behind. When I find it, the Gallery Bar, Book & Games is bathed in blue lights. Neon hexagons are suspended above the enormous elliptical bar. Stadium-size TV screens wrap around the space, flashing up to seven different programs at a time. It occurs to me that if I really want to stay up all night, I should stay put.

They don’t serve food here either, except on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 8 p.m. I could drink another dessert à la the Ocean’s 5th Birthday Cake Martini (chocolate martini, half & half, strawberry froth float, chocolate shavings), but I opt for water and the Monday Morning Quarterback, a margarita with a generous splash of Corona for some fizz.

Customers down the bar are hunched over inset gaming consoles, poker games flashing in their glasses. The woman next to me is on her third or fourth cosmopolitan, complimenting the bartender as she orders another. “His cosmo’s very light. Cotton candy light!” She insists I try a sip.

On my way out, I trail another guest waddling down a long, dark hallway to the women’s room. “You can do it!” a woman at the sink encourages. The bathroom attendant joins in: “Yes, you can do it, ladies!”

Finally, a bar with a kitchen. I’m early for a midnight(!) interview at the Irish Pub so I can eat something. “Just a heads-up, we are cash only,” the bartender clarifies. I order the Jersey crab cakes and a Yuengling.

Irish Pub is all stained glass, lacquered wood, and Tiffany lamps. It’s the other side of Atlantic City’s coin — Boardwalk Empire and Monopoly, not Trump and the Taj Mahal. Vintage boxing posters and Victorian advertisements line the walls. The ceiling is decoupaged with smoke-stained newspapers. The penny-tile floor mimics an Oriental rug.

“Good night everybody!” a woman announces as she exits, explaining to her comrade, “Well, I don’t know, I like to say good night.”

“She’s not from New York,” remarks another customer, who begins briefing her bar stool neighbors on her pets. They’re trading cat pictures in minutes.

Six 20-something guys barrel through the bar door. A few sit, the others linger behind. “Do you guys do an Irish car bomb?” the ringleader asks.

I let the bartender know I’m here for an interview, and an emissary comes over: Lily, a miniature poodle clad in a security shirt, and Maggi Sellers, a friend of the bar who routinely drives down from Morristown, N.J. “It’s only two hours, 10 minutes, six turns from my house,” she says.

Owner Cathy Burke emerges from the bar’s warren of rooms. She sports platinum blond hair, cherry-red lipstick, and a sheer, flowing duster cardigan that shimmers and sparkles. “Are we ready to rock and roll?”

Cathy and her husband, Richard, opened the Irish Pub in the ’70s, inside the former Elwood Hotel, established circa 1900 and reportedly used as a model for Monopoly game pieces. There are still rooms to rent upstairs, where the Victorian decor — some acquired from now-demolished Atlantic City resorts — is even denser.

No surprise, Cathy is an Atlantic City history buff; her parents owned a rooming house around the corner. She brushed up on her facts before we talked.

“I always thought that Atlantic City was 24 hours since its incorporation in the 1800s. Not true.” A friend at the Atlantic County Historical Society informed her otherwise. “It went to 24 hours a day after they opened after Prohibition” in 1933. And unlike many faux speakeasies that sprung up at the Shore post-Boardwalk Empire, Irish Pub is legit. “We have the provenance to prove it.”

Cathy tells me to top off my beer before a tour, but in the swirl of conversation between her, Maggi, and regular Tommy Hawkins (a roadie for Willie Nelson), we never get around to it. I don’t know it yet, but it’s a mercy.

“This is the pièce de résistance, the old-fashioned porch.”

Cathy and I kick back in rockers on the porch. The gentle throbbing in my head gets stronger if I pause, so I keep chatting despite having absorbed so much already. We saw the dining room, the patio, and the inn. We met staff, customers, and porch cats (Honeybunch, Tully). We talked through a litany of famous customers, from athletes (Joe DiMaggio, Mike Tyson) and sportswriters (Budd Schulberg, George Kimball) to musicians (Steely Dan, Elvis Costello) and celebrities (Kelsey Grammer, whose beer is on draft). Before the pandemic forced them to stop being 24/7, the Burkes didn’t keep a lock on the door.

As we rock, we talk Atlantic City’s Boardwalk (”the greatest Boardwalk in the world”); Irish Pub’s Christmas decorations (”I start on it Oct. 15, and I have everything lit up by Thanksgiving Day”); and the Diving Bell, a kids’ ride/submersible on Steel Pier (“Jenn, if anybody operated something like that today, they’d be in Sing Sing”). It’s the kind of free-flowing conversation you have before calling it a night.

But I’ve still got places to be, so Cathy ushers me back through the bar and says good night — but not before telling me to come back for Christmas, the Frasier reboot premiere, and Bag Day.

I’m not sure what to expect at Tony’s Baltimore Grill, given the part-cagey, part-enthusiastic exchanges I’ve had with their anonymous Instagram manager. The latest owners of this Atlantic City institution — opened in 1927 by the Tarsitano family, who ran it for decades — have restored the bar/restaurant to its 1960s aesthetic (when it relocated down Atlantic Avenue), but they really don’t like to be named, or to talk. Would I be in for a frosty reception?

My apprehensions are put to rest when the bartender grips my hand and gives me a warm greeting. “I’m Stormin’,” he says.

Stormin’ Norman Almodovar works at Tony’s five nights a week, from midnight to 8 a.m. And that’s after he bartends at the Hard Rock from 4 to 10 p.m. He brushes off this feat that I am struggling to pull off for even one night. “I take my cat naps, two hours here, three hours there.” He is deeply committed to “the grave shift.” He volunteered to work it post-pandemic, when the bar shifted back to 24/7.

“That’s the way Tony’s used to be. I didn’t want it to change.” His best friend works the shift the other days.

The kitchen crew is winding down, so I order spaghetti and meatballs before it’s too late. There are bouquets of customers in every corner, finishing up pizza, throwing back one last bottle of beer. Norman pours three shots of Jameson’s down the bar.

“I love this place,” one patron sighs as Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5″ rings out from the speakers.

Stormin’ props open the bar’s interior door so he has a better view. He knows most patrons by name and place of work. He says it picks up around 3 and 4 a.m. with casino workers wrapping up for the night. “They hang out here till about 5, 5:30, and when they see the sun coming up, that’s when they know it’s time for them to go home.”

Anyone he doesn’t know, he can size up as they’re walking in. Even before he tells me about all the things he does to keep Tony’s safe — holding up IDs to the security camera, freely exercising his discretion to bounce people, locking out troublemakers — Norman radiates a reassuring, sweet-but-strong energy. He planned to be an Atlantic City cop in the ’80s before he started bartending at the casinos.

“I was making good money back then, because everything was open 24 hours,” he recalls. “There was only two places in the world with casinos — it was Vegas and Atlantic City. And then everybody got involved in it and things changed.”

Besides the slow, steady decline of casinos’ take, the pandemic took a toll, too. “It’s there, but it’s not all there. It’s like a ghost town.”

Still, during the grave shift, he’s rarely by himself. “I always have one or two people in here.” A couple keeps him company as I bid him good night.

I’m cursing myself for not having Ibuprofen in the car as I head to the Borgata, over by “swamp,” as my Carousel Bar companions put it. There’s seemingly no option for street parking, so I go to the garage. It feels weirdly not late here, though my pounding head says decidedly otherwise.

I’m braced for opulence, but the kiosk-lined hall to the gaming floor feels like a mall. Heavy iron tables and chairs surround planter beds in the middle of the walkway. Christmas decorations fill the window of a 24/7 convenience store.

My words are failing me as I weave toward B Bar, past roulette tables and slot machines. A woman glides by on a vacuum-cleaner zamboni. One bartender looks to be clocking out, dumping cash from one tip bucket into another. There’s a built-in gaming screen for every bar stool, and they’re all occupied.

“Let’s go till 4 a.m.,” I overhear someone say as I order a gin and tonic just for show.

I’m reaching a breaking point, even sitting at the bar. My head is splitting, and the seats here are too far apart for eavesdropping. I’ve jettisoned any ambition to circle back to other spots.

The bartender is racking up empty bottles. He drains a fifth of Skrewball for a group drinking peanut butter whiskeys and Amstel Lights (a horrific spin on the citywide), then cracks open a bottle of Patrón.

I call it quits and head to the car, can’t get there fast enough.

How do you stay up so late?, I ask the garage gate attendant. She chuckles. “I make sure I get my sleep.”