\nBlue 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\u2014what 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\u2014so we kind of thought that we might be able to do the same thing with Blue Lagoon.<\/span><\/p>\n
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I\u2019d say the big three things are: Keep the staff, as long as they\u2019re good people and they\u2019ve been there that long\u2014they probably really love the bar and that\u2019s the hardest thing to get staff members to do. Everybody that works for us [at Blue Lagoon] worked for the bar beforehand, we didn\u2019t lose anybody. Be price sensitive\u2014if you\u2019re gonna take over a bar like this and you know you\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n
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<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section>\n\nBars 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\u2014like 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\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n
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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\u2019t have a home at Anvil, but have a home here. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n\nWe 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\u2019s all colored. At Blue Lagoon there\u2019s no LED neon, it\u2019s 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\u2019t anybody ever hang these up?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n
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<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section>\n\nThe 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\u2019s no zoning. I think Houston is just so disposable for every developer. There are certainly problems with gentrification, I\u2019m 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\u2019re going to go away.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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You really, really, really have to let people talk about what you\u2019re 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\u2019s just kind of part of it\u2014these 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\u2019m really not complaining, they\u2019re just very protective of their bar. And that\u2019s the first sign that it\u2019s probably a great bar if people care that much about it. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n