Dive bars Beacon Hill Pub, The Tam survive pandemic

After a year that tanked whole blocks of Boston’s restaurant scene, two of the city’s decades-old dive bars survived to serve another round: the Beacon Hill Pub and The Tam.

“We look at ourselves as stewards of these bars. We did everything we could to stay open,” said Julius Sokol, CEO of the Greater Boston Bar Co., an investment group that owns both properties.

The group bought the Beacon Hill landmark and Theater District dive along with other watering holes in a 2018 multimillion-dollar deal, alarming some local barflies with mixed messages about whether their favorite spots would stay intact.

Beacon Hill Pub and The Tam were temporarily closed for sprucing up, while Boston College neighbor Mary Ann’s was permanently shuttered.

But Sokol said the slight changes made to the Beacon Hill Pub and The Tam may have saved them from the fate that befell multiple other bars over the last year: permanent closure.

During the pandemic countless other casual watering holes shut their doors, never to open again, including: The Fours, Pour House, Lir, The People’s Republik, Bukowski Tavern, McGreevey’s, Whiskey’s and Great Scott.

Well before the pandemic hit, the group quietly revamped Beacon Hill Pub to attract new crowds of patrons without losing their core base.

Both bars started taking credit cards. And while Pub patrons loved shooting Pop-a-Shot, they didn’t love arguing over the one machine that was broken for over a year, serving as a makeshift table for empty glasses. Sokol’s group pulled the old machines but stayed true to the bar’s spirit, replacing them with Skee-ball games.

Most importantly, drink prices stayed low.

“Our customer base is extremely loyal and we’d like to give that loyalty back,” he said. “People have their own special memories over the years.”

Sokol’s group temporarily closed Sullivan’s Tap while events were suspended at TD Garden, but Beacon Hill Pub and The Tam weathered the storm. The Pub even got a patio on Charles Street — an idea that would have sounded like a bad joke a decade ago.

That doesn’t mean it was easy. The draw of dives like BHP and The Tam — aside from cheap prices — is the camaraderie and spirit of watering holes shared by generation after generation of young Bostonians. That doesn’t exactly lend itself to social distancing and plexiglass dividers, but after making it work for the last year, both bars are positioned to continue their legacies for years to come.

“These bars made it through seven, eight decades of existence,” Sokol said. “Something like a small pandemic wasn’t going to be enough to knock them out.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3x8hvSK