07/09/2025
Concur. Basically you’ve got three or four neighborhoods over there — Carter-Riverside, Oakhurst, Slyvan Heights, and Bonnie Brae. You nailed it on socioeconomics. All those neighborhoods are also starkly divided between older, half-retired, fixed income and younger with 1-2 kids who got in there because they were some of the last affordable neighborhoods near downtown-ish. Neither of those segments necessarily goes out a lot. But while I liked Victor V. and his seafood place that lasted about a year on Race, no one is going out to buy a $27 shark board on Race St. They might not even do that in Westover Hills. If we can get a place on Race that has five dollar beers and maybe a 4-6pm happy hour some days and decent TV coverage, I think it can last a few years. Meanwhile, one street over is The Office, a windowless dive bar on Belknap that is perpetually full on weekends. It’s a pension check bar, plus some bikers and service industry, but the fact that it seems to do pretty well and Race can’t hold a pub has always been fascinating to me.