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Bar Fly $128,818
Ojos Locos $121,500
Twin Peaks $ 86,619
Cabo Joe’s on Zaragoza $ 86,068
Cantina Malolam $ 71,948
Bar Fly? Never even heard of it. But I don’t go to bars as much as I used to. Nobody goes to bars as much as I used to. For me a big night is a decent bottle of wine, cheap, and pesto pasta. I only go to bars when summoned. Still, I gutted it up and went to Bar Fly.
The east side a whole nuther city. It’s sprawl. Strip malls on major arteries, restaurants, mom and pops and fast-food chains, big box stores, and medium and little boxes, and at least one of everything, laid out in a grid with enough curves and diagonals to make it challenging.
Inside, Bar Fly is an almost vacant space dominated by big screen teevees. There are five monitors on each side of the island bar, and one or two more on the ends. The bar top is naked concrete. The floor is naked concrete, pitted. What used to be an arched doorway to the tattoo shop next door is a window into the tattoo shop.
I was in a bar in Denver one time that only sold draft beer in plastic cups. The clientele was junkies and drug dealers and casually predatory petty criminals. It was a desolate warehouse of sadness.
Yeah, well Bar Fly isn’t like that at all, but they might have hired the same decorator.
The other thing Bar Fly had was hot chicks in skimpy tops working the bar. (The bar in Denver had a fat guy with a shaved head, dressed in a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and steel-toe boots.) There were only two women behind the bar when I was there on a Wednesday afternoon, but it looked like you could fit four or six if you had to.
Of the top five highest grossing bars for December, four are predicated on the attraction of barely clad women. Also, all four are on the east side.
Back when I used to pay attention to who sold how much alcohol, two or three of the top five sellers were always strip clubs. Things change, but not a lot. But these days everyone is carrying a smart phone, with instantly uploaded stills and video. Bad behavior has the potential to be instantly memorialized. Secrets aren’t so secret anymore.
When I was there, five of the seven people in the bar (including both bartenders) were on their smart phones, either texting or checking in or posting to Instagram. Bar Fly has a significant Instagram collection because Bar Fly is cyber-friendly. Near the entryway, a frame, with feathered wings backdrop, offers an interesting set for photos, many of which are displayed on Bar Fly’s account on one of the Instagram clones.
Instagram. Because pictures are easier than words, especially if you don’t know a lot of words, and at the going exchange rate, one picture is worth a thousand words.
According to their Facebook page, Bar Fly celebrated soft openings in the middle of September. In December, less than four months later, they’re one of the biggest sellers in El Paso county. Where did they come from?
It’s the guy from Three Legged Monkey, the bartender told me.
Mike Armstrong?
Yup.
Mike Armstrong ran for the City Council seat that Eddie Holguin gave up to run for mayor. He’s suing the City after El Paso wrangled to have him evicted from the city-owned property where the Three Legged Monkey was located.
I guess now he’s got money to chase that lawsuit.