The Shelter

4155 E. Grant Rd., Tucson
520/326-1345

HOURS: Daily 3 p.m.–1 a.m.

The Tucson valley played a major role in the Cold War: For years ICBMs ringed the city, locked and loaded beneath the desert and aimed directly at various targets in the USSR. While there’s the Titan Missile Museum [1] south of town where you can learn all about the Old Pueblo’s atomic-age bona fides, The Shelter is the best place to celebrate, so to speak, the era and its two coolest cold warriors.

It’s dark and cool like a shelter should be, and there’s plenty of good booze and always a campy cult film playing out silently on a TV in the corner. The walls are covered with Jack and Bobby, and the pinball machines ding and flap. I could last out the nuclear winter in here no problem. Happy hour is daily from 3 to 7 p.m.