To All the Pirate Bars Ayye’ve Loved Before

Visiting a beloved bar is less about the bar itself and more an attempt to re-inhabit happy memories, to open a door that leads to them.

My friends and I were irresponsibly wasted. It was that time of night when the people who had foolishly driven to the bar admitted defeat and started making arrangements to pick up their cars the next day. We stumbled up the stairs that led from Quarry House out to the street, which was silent. The time of night and its attendant quiet couldn’t dampen our need to let the good times roll on, but where could we go? What place could defy the tyrannical rule of last call? Only one bar would do, and my friend Chelsea couldn’t even suggest it without giggling: “Let’s go to Piratz Tavern!”

And we trundled our merry asses into the pirate-themed bar across the street.

Piratz Tavern, home of cocktails that tasted like Robitussin and hit like Dilaudid, of sea shanty singalongs led by servers with names like Blackjack and One-Eyed Mike, bartenders’ breasts hoisted up to their bearers’ chins by punishingly rigid bodices, food that had too recently seen the inside of a freezer and for too long, what is left to say about you? I’m not sure what occupies your space now, nor do I want to know—that’s your space, however few people were usually in it. My friends and I would go to Piratz Tavern for the camp of it, but it never felt mean-spirited. The place was a winking punchline set up for us by a vaudevillian straight man. What mattered wasn’t whether staff were classically “in on” the joke of the place, but rather, that they luxuriated in the joke, their role in making it notwithstanding. At the root of our wisecracks at Piratz Tavern’s expense was affection towards it. We razzed it, gave it noogies, and wouldn’t hear a word against it—it was family.

Then Jon Taffer visited, with his Bar Rescue camera crew and his ideas about success in The Industry. The owner was struggling to keep the place open, begged him for help, and Jon helped by waving a purification wand at every special element of Piratz Tavern. In short, he spoiled everything we loved in the first place.

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Kitchen Nightmares and Bar Rescue are basically the same restaurant makeover show with different nouns plugged into their Wikipedia entries. In the former, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay visits restaurants that are deep in the red to diagnose and cure their operational problems. In the latter, celebrity bar owner Jon Taffer does the same with bars—including my cherished Piratz Tavern. Most often, the problem presented by the show is a megalomaniacal owner who refuses to change the nebulous “things” that are “not working”—everything from the menu to the decor to the advertising. I’ve never seen an episode in which anybody states the obvious: that the business model for bars itself is the thing that is not working, nationwide, for anyone. As we’ve seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, even many successful-seeming bars and restaurants are one long-term emergency away from collapse. Their survival, tenuous as it is, depends partially on the bar owners’ ability to underpay and overwork employees. Poet Brendan Joyce has written extensively about just how well the restaurant industry has ever “worked” for its staff, and writers like Sara Selevitch are shining a light on what restaurant work now looks like under the terms of this pandemic.

All that said, shows like Bar Rescue do raise the interesting question of what it means for a bar to be successful even while “success” still skirts the razor’s edge. When people go out drinking at a bar and have a great night, is it the same experience as that of successfully buying a plunger at the hardware store, or booking a hotel room for an upcoming trip? Restaurants and bars are businesses in a way that their patrons mostly prefer not to think about. They exist to nourish and entertain, and it’s hard to effectively do either if the experience feels transactional. We’re trained from birth to associate the act of nourishing people with that of loving them. We go to bars, often as not, to feel loved—by each other, by the underpaid bartenders who rely on us for tips, by the very room in which we sit. How many times have you, personally, visited a bar and seen some loner chilling on his stool, speaking only to the bartender in a comfortable way that suggests they’ve been having these conversations every day for a long time? A bar or restaurant becomes successful on the backs and social skills of its staff. Without the tender idiosyncrasies of its one-of-a-kind crew, Piratz Tavern was nothing but a narrow room with a deep fryer in the kitchen. Jon Taffer could slap a new sign on the front awning and forbid the staff from using their usual avast-me-hearties pirate lingo, but in chipping away at the bar’s signature aesthetic, he removed all its warmth. A similar chilly ghostliness is palpable in photos of the bars and restaurants that have reopened their doors despite the lingering danger of the pandemic. The places still exist, technically, but only as radically altered shells of their past selves.

The night that we drunkenly descended upon Piratz Tavern, we were lured there not just because it was nearby and open. We were drawn by the memories of every other time we’d gone to Piratz Tavern—silly memories that had risen to the level of minor legends in our group of friends. We hoped that Blackjack the bartender might once again delight us by putting an arm around Chelsea in front of her husband and whispering pirate puns in her ear, or that the outdoor patio might be hosting another amateur dance contest for some reason—“for some reason” seemed to be the logic behind a lot of the events that Piratz Tavern hosted. We wanted the sugary smell of Blue Curacao to duel in our noses with that of old frying oil, while One-Eyed Mike entertained us with the story of the sword fight that took out his eye. (I always assumed that he’d made up this story to sound more pirate-y, but I’ve since seen it repeated in the Washington Post, so I guess it was true all along! Sorry, Mike!) Visiting a beloved bar is less about the bar itself and more an attempt to re-inhabit happy memories, to open a door that leads to them and walk around inside them.

Bar Rescue visits many legitimately failing businesses. Piratz Tavern was one, and even after the show worked its makeover magic, the bar eventually shuttered. Owner Tracy Rebelo has claimed that the Bar Rescue crew’s fixes did more harm than good for her bar, which is believable. Taffer’s makeover idea was an attempt to court the suits who worked in the office buildings surrounding Piratz, renaming the place “Corporate Bar and Grill,” and installing a ludicrous self-serve draft machine that turned out to be illegal in the county where Piratz was located. The draft machine was returned and the suits never came; Piratz was Piratz again within the month. Bar Rescue promised to cure Piratz’s ills, but only saddled Rebelo with Yelp trolls on top of the other stressors that already plagued her business.

Still, she wouldn’t have contacted Taffer if her business had been succeeding, would she? This is a common theme on these shows: Owners have opened the restaurant or bar of their dreams, decorated it to their taste, filled the menu with food they’d like to eat. They’ve hired capable staff and stocked the walk-ins. They may even have some loyal customers, like Piratz Tavern had in us. Where, then, is the success? Can Jon Taffer revive a dying bar without desecrating what the owner loved about it in the first place? Can anyone?

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As a principled and thorough journalist, I Facebook messaged my friends Chelsea and Rosalind, asking what they could remember from that night at Piratz Tavern, as I was blackout drunk from the first “fish bait” shot. (“Don’t ask what’s in it,” the rigidly corseted bartender advised, handing over the shot with its gummy worm garnish. “Especially not when you’re puking it up tomorrow.”) Fortunately, Chelsea and Rosalind were both responsible enough that night to make a few memories in the place we never really believed would close down.

“That was the night that the bartender found out I did comedy and then did a full Dylan Moran set he’d memorized at me, while wearing full pirate regalia,” Rosalind said. “And I remember Blackjack, the other bartender, hitting on Chelsea in front of her husband, like, a lot.”

We wanted the sugary smell of Blue Curacao to duel in our noses with that of old frying oil.

It was true; he had. He’d flirted with her so artlessly that what we remember now is the goofiness of it. It was like watching an SNL sketch of a horny pirate. Chelsea laughed in his face, and he didn’t mind a bit. I think he may have even said, “Arrrr.” The flirtation was amped up to levels of parody, demonstrating its lack of threat, which, now that I think about it, could’ve been the whole thesis statement for the Piratz Tavern experience. Staff made suggestive wisecracks, but always with a wink and a raucous laugh. Breasts were uniformly semi-exposed and super-high, but the effect was campy, Renaissance Festival-like. As Chelsea once charitably said of the place, it wasn’t for everybody.

Bars excel at making memories like Chelsea’s torrid love affair with Blackjack possible. This stuff can only be brewed in a perfect cauldron of bonhomie, intoxication, and loosened inhibitions. It’s not limited to a group of friends goofing off, either. I remember the day I finished writing my book and celebrated at Birdy’s. Jackie, the bartender, remembered that I’d been trying to find an agent for it, and did a shot with me to celebrate—a night I spent alone, but briefly in community with Jackie, soaking up the ambient spirit of all the happy people chattering around me, not really alone at all.

I worked a decade’s worth of front-of-house jobs in bars, coffee shops, and restaurants myself—a decade during which my coworkers and I were constantly exploited by our bosses, tormented by nasty customers, aching in every joint with pains that should have belonged to bodies decades older than ours. And yet, it felt like a powerful thing, to be the gears that turned other people’s happy nights for them. For all that I hated most of those jobs, I was always proud when regular customers asked to be seated in my section or bantered with me to impress their dates. On a good night, when I was in the zone and didn’t have jerk customers or a boss breathing down my neck, I felt like a part of humanity in a way that an office job doesn’t allow, even though most office jobs pay so much more.

But “feeling like a part of humanity” doesn’t pay the bills in a capitalist society. When bar and restaurant owners on these makeover shows express shock at the state of their finances, what I hear them saying is that they’ve built these great places to hang out, and somehow people aren’t hanging out there. They’ve put out stools and bar snacks in the hopes that the public will show up. When failed bars shutter, the people who loved them remember them; others notice the ‘For Lease’ sign in the window and ask themselves what used to be there. If we pity these myopic business owners on shows like Bar Rescue, it’s because we see them wondering, in effect, why nobody wanted to come play with them.

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I can’t tell you how many sentences I’ve begun over the years with “Remember when we were at Piratz Tavern, and . . . ?” Piratz was a rousing success as a place for my friends and I to drink hangover-inducing grog. As a conversation-starter of a first date spot, it was peerless. It fostered an abandon in us that I’ve never found at any other place, made us self-conscious punks feel pleasantly like tourists being tourist-trapped. And it closed anyway.

But what about the version of Piratz Tavern that supposedly “worked”? Piratz may have closed eventually, but Jon Taffer’s Corporate Bar & Grill didn’t last a month before its staff re-pirate-ized the place. As my friend Chelsea (or, if you will, Mrs. Blackjack) said of the remodel, “It was the most dipshit thing I have ever seen. At least a pirate theme has kitsch value.”

Piratz Tavern really was special, one-of-a-kind. It was special in an unprofitable way that fewer and fewer places have space to be—thrilling and eccentric. I can’t imagine that the people who worked there made much money, and I wish they had, and more than that I wish it was possible for more people to live financially secure lives while still having as much fun as Blackjack and the gang always seemed to be having. Piratz made creative choices and didn’t care if you laughed at them. It asked its customers to sign a literal waiver (written in pirate-speak, of course) before permitting them to order an especially spicy dish. Imagine the conversations that tables full of people must have had about those waivers, conversations that have since become memories beginning with “Hey, remember that time at Piratz Tavern . . . ?”

When restaurant makeover shows force such establishments to reject their creativity, they make a profound statement about what success looks like for businesses that famously run on thin margins even when they are successful. Jon Taffer told Piratz Tavern that fixing its finances meant ditching the pirate accents and embracing the tenets of mixology rather than throwing a delightfully random assortment of liqueurs into a tankard and calling it “grog.” He was almost certainly right. But who cares? When I imagine a fun night, I don’t see myself at a place where everything is done the right way. I imagine messy times with goofy people in places like Piratz Tavern, where the drinks tasted bad and were a pleasure to swig anyway.