How to Save a Dive Bar and Not Ruin It, According to a Bartender

When the owner of Catbirds, a fixture of Houston’s Montrose neighborhood since 1995, decided to stop running the bar, Bobby Heugel and his business partner Peter Jahnke stepped in. Heugel, who owns and operates several of Houston’s pioneering cocktail bars, had been a frequent guest at Catbirds, and didn’t want to see it go. “It was a bar that we would all go to when we got off work after making fancy cocktails,” he says.

Heugel runs Anvil, Refuge and Better Luck Tomorrow among other Houston cocktail bars—and now, two neighborhood bars. (“I’m kind of sensitive to the word dive,” he says.) In addition to Catbirds, which he and Jahnke gave a light refresh to before reopening at the end of 2023, the pair has also taken over Blue Lagoon, a 45-year-old institution whose proprietor was in her 70s and ready to retire.

Across the country—from Lucy’s in New York City to Gilly’s House of Cocktails in San Diego—career bartenders and restaurateurs are preserving longstanding neighborhood bars, continuing their legacy. For Heugel, taking over these establishments isn’t just about maintaining the spaces and satisfying the regulars, but also ensuring that the life’s work of the previous owner continues past their own retirement. “It happens with other businesses all the time, but I think we’re just so used to bar turnover that we don’t think about the bar industry the same way,” he says.   

Here, Heugel shares, in his own words, the importance of preservation over redevelopment, how to win over skeptical regulars and the best way to “Robin Hood” your way to cheap beer prices.

Blue Lagoon [has] been a bar since 1968, which is quite old for Houston. We don’t have a lot of bars like that. Our landlord at our restaurant, Squabble, in the Heights, was the landlord there, and he had gone month to month with the lady who owned it. She was in her seventies and he kept trying to find someone to lease it for something new. He kept trying to get us to turn it into a fancy cocktail bar. And at some point I was just kind of like, you know, things have gone really well for us at Catbirds—what started off as just an attempt to preserve a bar that we love turned into what I think has become one of the more popular bars in the city—so we kind of thought that we might be able to do the same thing with Blue Lagoon.

I’d say the big three things are: Keep the staff, as long as they’re good people and they’ve been there that long—they probably really love the bar and that’s the hardest thing to get staff members to do. Everybody that works for us [at Blue Lagoon] worked for the bar beforehand, we didn’t lose anybody. Be price sensitive—if you’re gonna take over a bar like this and you know you’re gonna bring new people in, use that money to keep the prices lower for the people who have been there for so long. And really try and focus on the origins of the bar and make the bar feel like it’s from that period.

Bars like this are just inherently price sensitive. They just are. So when we took over Catbirds, we lowered the prices on things that were there before, and then we introduced new things that cost more—like bringing in more spirits, you know, giving people the option to spend more money on whiskey if they wanted, and teaching people how to make some really basic cocktails with fresh lemon and lime juice. We call that Robin Hooding, when we can take your cocktail money and use it to keep the beer cheap. We’re trying to sell one out of every 20 drinks as a cocktail. That’s really, really low volume as opposed to Anvil, where cocktails are 90 percent of our sales.

We definitely carry stuff that we would never carry in our other bars because it’s something that’s really important to people at these establishments. We carry pickle vodka and Pinnacle Whipped Cream Vodka and other things like that, which certainly don’t have a home at Anvil, but have a home here.

We didn’t do a lot of renovations at either place, but we did declutter them. We did bring some new decor in, not a lot, but maybe a third of what’s hanging in each bar is new. One of the rules I have is: No white light in the bar, it’s all colored. At Blue Lagoon there’s no LED neon, it’s all period-specific neon. So all things that would come from that era. When we were cleaning up Blue Lagoon in the back, we found old unused neons from the 80s. And I was like, why didn’t anybody ever hang these up?

The regulars were very, very skeptical of us at first, which I think is extremely reasonable, both because of our background and because so much in Houston is going away. We talk about gentrification pretty much in every major city in the United States, but I think Houston is on an entirely different level because there’s no zoning. I think Houston is just so disposable for every developer. There are certainly problems with gentrification, I’m not trying to downplay that, but I think everything is up for grabs, not just lower priced areas, and because of that, people who go to older establishments are consistently worried that they’re going to go away. 

You really, really, really have to let people talk about what you’re doing right and wrong in a way that I have never experienced before. We hung up a bunch of lights in the backyard of Blue Lagoon and Peter and I walked away, and when I came back two of the regulars were on the ladders inspecting our work. It’s just kind of part of it—these people care about this place that you now think you own, but it is in a lot of ways their second home, and so you just have to really be receptive to all of their very, very, very endless comments about what could and could not be more ideal for their purpose. I’m really not complaining, they’re just very protective of their bar. And that’s the first sign that it’s probably a great bar if people care that much about it.