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SHORT ORDERS
[ S T. L O U I S S TA N D A R D S ]
Bar Time Pat Connolly Tavern has kept generations of St. Louisans in beer and fried chicken Written by
CHERYL BAEHR
W
hen Joe Jovanovich took over Pat’s Bar & Grill in 2015, he did so not because of some longstanding desire to get into the restaurant business. Instead, he upended his life and took on the place out of a responsibility to his family, his neighborhood and his city. “At the time, I was involved in nonprofit work, but the place had fallen on hard times, and it came down to a question of whether or not it was going to keep going,” Jovanovich says of the bar and grill. “It was definitely a leap of faith, but I felt that taking it over was a way to save and preserve it. It felt like an important piece of my family’s history, but also of the neighborhood’s and city’s history, and I felt that I had to keep that going as a small little slice of St. Louis culture.” Now operating as the Pat Connolly Tavern, the bar and grill on the corner of Oakland and Tamm avenues has been a part of St. Louis culture for 79 years. Though the place was likely a bar before his grandfather, Pat Connolly, bought the building, Jovanovich traces his family’s involvement back to a bill of sale dated 1942. He’s not sure why his granddad decided to get into the bar business; a native of a small village outside of Galway, Ireland, Connolly had no background in pubs. Instead, he worked in the fields around his family’s home until he immigrated to the United States in 1927. Family connections and an established Irish community led him to St. Louis, where he got a job in one of the city’s many downtown shoe factories until he purchased the Dogtown bar. Why he did, as well as the details of his life between 1927 and 1942, remains a mystery. The building’s history is a little
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RIVERFRONT TIMES
The Pat Connolly Tavern has been part of Dogtown for nearly eight decades. | ANDY PAULISSEN clearer. Built in 1918 to be a general store, it soon morphed into a soda fountain and apothecary and stayed as such through Prohibition. Jovanovich isn’t sure when the place changed into a bar, but he found a photo from the 1930s that shows a sign on the building reading “Tamm Oak Tavern.” He doesn’t know the details of that iteration, but he is confident it was a bar when his grandfather bought it, since the bill of sale contained details about bar equipment. For the first several years, Connolly kept the place as it was — from photos, Jovanovich says the scene looked like a soda fountain that someone turned into a bar. However, in the 1950s, Connolly added a kitchen to the back of the building, renovated the existing structure and converted the place into a bar and grill, ushering in a new era that defines the Pat Connolly Tavern to this day. “At the time, this was one of the first bars and full-service restaurants in the neighborhood,” Jovanovich says. “In the post-war era, it became the trend to have more of a bar and grill in one place; before that, bars and restaurants were mostly separate. When he
JUNE 30-JULY 6, 2021
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There have been a few updates, but the tavern remains a neighborhood standard. | ANDY PAULISSEN made the change, he came up with the core staples of the menu the fried chicken, the fried fish, the burgers all get traced back to then. We still have some of the old menus from then, and not much has changed.” Connolly ran the bar and grill until 1962 when he sold the business, but not the building, to a longtime employee. That proprietor changed the name to McDer-
mott’s, which became well known as the place to go before and after Blues games. In 1980, the owner sold the place back to Jovanovich’s mother and father, who changed the name back to Pat’s and ran it throughout Jovanovich’s childhood. He loved growing up in the bar and relished the mini-celebrity status it gave him in the neighborhood; his basketball team would have its post-
