A sign of the past

The easily recognizable sign has been casting neon light along Lower Greenville since 1933 when Greenville Bar & Grill (GBG) opened shortly after prohibition ended (it is rumored to have one of Dallas’ oldest liquor licenses) and quickly became a neighborhood staple.

“Over the years, GBG has consistently been a bar and grill that catered to the neighborhood worried about the neighborhood first and worried about the outsiders who come into the neighborhood secondarily,” says Shawn Foley, who identifies himself in his LinkedIn profile as “chief bottle washer and owner at Greenville Bar & Grill.”

The bar first won Foley’s heart in the ’80s, when he and his friends would frequent Lower Greenville and rotate through their favorite bars and restaurants.

In 2010 a well publicized fire destroyed GBG along with Terilli’s, Nick’s Café and Hurricane Grill. Terilli’s rose from the ashes, but the others didn’t.

GBG’s sign survived the fire, but the space turned into Rohst, a Korean barbecue joint. It soon closed, and the Londoner opened in its place, turning the space into a dark pub, but that didn’t last long either.

“I was looking for an investment, and I kind of happened to run across this place last spring,” Foley says. “I realized, if I was going to do this, it wasn’t going to work as a pub. I needed to turn it back into the Greenville Bar & Grill.”

The original sign outside was not working at the time, but Foley had it restored. He cleaned up the building’s interior and made better use of its natural light.

Then he opened the doors to Greenville Bar & Grill once more in October, serving “comfort foods” such as fried chicken, shrimp and grits, and rib-eye.

The historical sign out front continues to shape the restaurant’s future.

Virtual chivalry

In a world where love letters have been replaced by text messages, and meeting someone new means scrolling through a seemingly endless supply of internet profiles, four East Dallas men are asking the question: Whatever happened to romance and good old-fashioned chivalry?

We can’t go back, obviously. The digital age is here to stay, so these young entrepreneurs — brothers Alex, Peter and Adie von Gontard, along with Hunter Coffey, who are roommates as well as colleagues at APAA Sports Group — want to find a way to teleport the good ol’ days of courting to the future.

Their solution? A new dating app called Courtem, born of their frustration with the phone app Tinder, which has garnered a reputation as “the hook-up app.” Their goal was to create something that reveals more dimension than so many of the looks-focused apps on the market.

“We narrowed it down to what we thought made sense from a dating perspective, and allowed people to actually put themselves out there, so it wasn’t just based on appearances alone,” explains Peter von Gontard.

To do this, the Courtem experience centers around “date proposals.”

After scrolling through the profiles (there’s pretty much no way around this on any dating site), a user can propose a date to another user based on common interests. The receiver can then reject the proposal, request the sender improve his or her offer using preselected responses, accept the proposal, or ask to bring along a wingman/wingwoman for a double date instead.

The hope is that the date proposal interaction allows users to gauge various characteristics of the other person. Is he or she romantic, funny, clever?

Once a date proposal is accepted, the chat feature between the two users is engaged. Dates can be canceled at any time. After each date, Courtem invites users to rate other users to ensure they are being courteous during their dates.

Chivalry is not dead, at least in the digital realm. —Brittany

Nunn