They bring anywhere from four to six to eight more people with them. I have a lot of customers that came in the first week we were open, now they come in every weekend. They say, you got a nice place here, and somebody else is sitting next to them, saying, "I'm so and so, I live over here.' Before you know it, they've made a friend and they've made more friends and they come back. And I say, is it your first time here? They say yeah. They sit in here like the new kid in school, not talking to anybody. New people to the area, new people to the neighborhood come in here and they sit down here and you can tell. "You come in here by yourself, but you're not by yourself when you come in here. They communicate."Īnvil's the kind of place where it's really easy to make friends. Nobody's better than anybody and nobodys' worse than anybody. But people come in here and everybody's held themselves on the same level. People that don't make that much, people that make a whole whole bunch of money. We have a lot of people that come in here. It is good, kind of middle-upper-upper class food. It's not your five-star restaurant, but it's way much better than some of the other restaurants. We've got 'em used to the type of food we have. People come in here and they don't expect frills. What does "Anvil" mean in terms of the blue collar ethos of the bar? We put the names out there, and Anvil won." So Jeremy threw out 'Anvil.' We took six or seven people that worked at other bars, we said let's take a vote.
We were pitching around names, and we wanted a one-word name, when someone leaves a bar, people say 'Where you going?' and they say, 'We're going to such and such.' One word. And I said the blacksmith was really the head of the common man, the blue collar workers back then. I said, you go to Western shows, every Western show, you'll hear the ping of an anvil, or you'll see it. I was telling the boys, a pub is a place for the common man. "When we were trying to come up with a name, we said we wanted a one word name that everybody could relate to. He and I would go during the summer, three or four weeks at a time, camping in the back of his station wagon. Some people thing it's strange, they go, 'That must have been a bummer,' but it wasn't. My granddad and I shared a room from the time I was 12 to when I left home at 19 to get married. When my dad got to where he wasn't stationed in other places, I spent time between Fort Sill and the blacksmith shop. I learned blacksmithing at a very young age.
My dad was in the service so he wasn't home a lot and we stayed with our grandparents. What's that about?īridges: "He was a very big part of my life. This place was built in honor of your grandfather. We sat down with Bridges to chat about Deep Ellum camaraderie, his family's blacksmith history and what bar ownership looks like one year in. But a year later, he says, he'd do it all over again. Seven nights a week, the Anvil Pub opens its doors to neighborhood folks, Uptowners, Downtowners, bikers, bicyclers and anyone else in need of some upscale bar food and a cold drink.īridges says he'd never have imagined opening a bar in Deep Ellum-especially not one he'd cashed in his live savings and retirement to build. The arrival of the Anvil Pub has jump-started the regrowth on Elm, thanks to owner Patrick "Pop" Bridges and his sons Joshua and Jeremy, who opened the bar in honor of a family patriarch as a place for the common folk to come and have a beer, a sit and a lively conversation. Last fall, there were a few bars open on Elm Street in Deep Ellum-La Grange, the Black Swan Saloon, the perennial July Alley-but oh, what a difference a year can make.
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