We decided to take the plunge and buy O’Ryan’s Irish Pub mid 2017. It has been around quite a while, the building was built in 1904 and latest info we have puts it opening as a bar opening sometime in the 1930’s between prohibition and WWII. The location is great, next to Paddington Station in downtown Ashland.
Over the years it has garnered a somewhat mixed reputation but one thing has remained constant, that it has the best value for drinks in Ashland and possibly all of Southern Oregon. Our goal is to continue this legacy and upgrade the bar as we have the time and funds to do so and to make it the most inviting, non-pretentious, safe and most of all, fun bar in Ashland. So read on if you’re interested in seeing our progress.
Here were are, all smiles when at city council meeting when they approved us for OLCC:
The Pub’s vibe is casual, fun and has the best value for drinks in Ashland. That said, it was a bit tired in a couple of areas, so we looked to see what we could do to help it out with minimum down time.
Here’s a rundown of the projects we’ve undertaken so far:
We first started with the name of the bar. O’Ryans Irish Pub, while a great name, was quite a mouthful. Many of the regulars call it the IPub and thought that was a good place to start. We worked up some logos, here were the contestants:
Curty and Mike liked the top left, felt like it had a European feel and liked the shield, so after a little more work we ended up with:
Looks great, lets make our mark on it and so we etched the front window:
The entryway needed to be redone, the threadbare outdoor carpeting peppered with chewing gum. Ripped it up and found the concrete was cracked, needed to be pulled up and redone. Decided to color the concrete brown and leave it as is, no carpeting on top, just mats.
Much better:
We wanted to reconfigure the bar to make it more inviting and more flexible. The next logical step was to build a stage, this would allow us to have live bands. We laid down the platform, finished it with flooring and LED light strips up top.
One of our distributor helped out with a couple of barrels,
One of the challenges with the bar was that it was poorly lit in the middle, we thought a bit of retro lighting would help out. Edison lights are really cool, we found some LED’s lights that glow like Edison’s. Cobbling together some pulleys and weights, we came up with this:
We then moved on to redoing the guys bathroom after some pipes started to leak, it was pretty much a mess. We ordered some black FRP board to match the original black walls and after rebuilding the walls put it up. Much bigger job than we expected but turned out tons better.
That done, we felt that walking in the front door at first glance see a garbage pail, ATM and the video lottery machines was probably not the most inviting. So we reconfigured the bar, took 3 tall tables at the back out to make space for the lottery, wired up the networking and dedicated AC lines and moved them back there.
Took those tables from back, moved them to the front and rather than screwing them to the wall, we attached the pedestal legs so that we could move them around.
Although there are 5 TV’s around the bar, we thought it would be a good idea to have a really BIG screen for those big games. So, time to put up a 100” screen and a 1080p HD projector with amp and nice set of speakers to match. Game on!
Curtis came up with the idea of putting tins on the hallway wall to dress the area up, turned out great:
You may have noticed we’ve added more neon signs, the mirrors and the barrel heads. We’re happy to show off our newest signage with a couple of our talented bar tenders Piper and Savannah below. Goes great on the brick wall:
We thought the back bar could use some help, always liked the way bottles look when they are up lit. So it was time to take some spare plywood and make some shelves out of them, added lexan, led strips and a controller:
We plan to reorganize the POS terminals and add the second shelf unit soon.
Well, that’s it for now, stay tuned to see more as we get the time and funds to do more!