Down the Hatch: Greaser bar

Downtown Lounge

When I asked Downtown Lounge bartender Austin Bryant if he thought his place of employ might be Tulsa’s modern-day Greaser bar, he said they would never discriminate against the Socs, but, yeah, Greasers probably spend more time in there.

The bar is dark and cool—you can feel the air circulating but it’s not Antarctic, movie-theater cold. Illustrated concert posters line the painted black walls, floor to ceiling. Christmas lights hang above the blacktop bar, and a blue-felt pool table sits in one corner of the single-room bar. If you stumble in off the hot street, you too might envision a slick-haired Patrick Swayze or leather-jacketed Matt Dillon bent over its top, aiming for the cue. 

Bryant went to Will Rogers High School where, he said, “The Outsiders” was required reading.

“If ‘The Outsiders’ was filmed in 2016, those guys would fit right in at our bar.”

Downtown Lounge celebrated its seventh anniversary this summer. Bryant said a lot of rat rod racers come through, and the Mustang show/meet-up earlier this summer brought hundreds of Mustangs in front of the bar.

“Whenever they do those classic car events, they drive right down Archer in front of us.”

The bar is a pretty no-frills affair—mostly beers, shots, and your basic mixed drinks. 

“I’ll put frills on it if you want,” Bryant said. “We can do frills. But nine times out of 10 there are no frills. It’s beer and a shot. Jack and Coke. We don’t have cheap booze—we have the labels people like—but we sell it cheap.”

We talked about the intimidation factor surrounding the idea of Downtown Lounge (it’s next to a tattoo shop, it’s known as a punk/metal bar, you can’t really see inside of it from the outside) and that which surrounded S.E. Hinton’s Greasers.

“Sometimes the people—even the owner Jake—look gruff; but they’re the sweetest people I know. They may not have the collared shirt and the cologne, but they’re good people.”

In “Down the Hatch,” assistant editor Liz Blood offers a look inside Tulsa’s many bars, pubs, saloons and gin joints. Send suggestions for future columns to liz@langdonpublishing.com or @lizblood on Twitter. For another sip, read Liz's article on drinking downtown.