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What I feel a lot of people who've not experienced them don't get about your average British pub is that it's basically a communal living room. You're not just there for the pints (although they're very important too).

Fun story, when I was an intern there was a pub just outside the industrial estate where the office was situated. This pub was frequented so regularly by the company that one of the developers actually had access to the till. On hot days we'd walk right past the queue, pull our own pints, pay for them, and be out in the beer garden long before everyone else!

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Yeah, that's exactly it. (E.g. at my local bar the regulars can just add another tally on the sheet at the bar and grab a beer.) Dive bars / neighborhood bars are just a shared living room with beer.

The catch is that something called a "pub" in most of the US implies it's a bit fancier.

Somewhere you're going for dinner, but not to chat with random folks. That's not necessarily the case in the midwest, but still, something labeled as an "Irish Pub" or "British Pub" here is going to be 1) slightly more upscale and 2) focused more on food.

So what you'd call a pub is a "dive bar" or "neighborhood bar" over here.

Food is typically a potluck or something grilled outside, as having a kitchen would make it a restaurant and result in different inspections/rules/etc. There's probably a potluck anytime there's a big game on TV. You're _highly_ likely to run into your neighbours. There will probably be at least one bar dog or bar cat.

Which is doubly odd, since in the UK & Ireland traditional pubs are noticeably not focused on food. Although gastropubs and the like are starting to become more common.

In the UK many pubs struggle to make enough money without food.