Sherri and I have had a standing Friday night tradition… date night.
The problem isn’t finding somewhere to go. Around here there are plenty of restaurants, breweries, taverns, and sports bars. We’ve tried a lot of them. Most were perfectly fine. The food was good, the drinks were good, and we’d have a nice evening.
But what we were really looking for wasn’t a restaurant.
We wanted a place.
A place where you could sit at the bar and actually talk to people. A place where the staff had time to get to know the regulars. A place where you felt like part of what was happening instead of just another customer passing through.
For a while, we thought we’d found it at a local tavern. There was a bartender there who knew our drinks before we even sat down. We’d walk through the door and he’d already be reaching for a glass. It felt like we’d finally found our spot.
Then one day he was gone, and before long we found ourselves looking again.
That’s eventually how we ended up at the 2SP Tap House.
At first it checked all the obvious boxes. The food was good. The beer was good. Sherri approved of the Orange Crushes. It seemed like a place we’d probably add to the rotation.
Then we kept going back.
Over time we got to know the staff. Then we got to know the regulars. We started recognizing faces when we walked through the door. Conversations picked up where they left off the week before. We found ourselves choosing the Tap House not because it had the best menu or the biggest beer list, but because it felt comfortable.
Somewhere along the way, it became our place.
That’s a strange thing when you think about it. On paper it’s just a bar and grill. But in reality it became part of our routine. It’s where we celebrated birthdays, unwound after difficult weeks, talked through work frustrations, made plans, and spent time with people we probably never would have met otherwise.
At some point, a couple of the bartenders stopped feeling like bartenders and started feeling like friends. When Sherri and I got married, we invited them to the wedding.
In fact, we would have invited even more of the staff if we could have. One of them laughed and pointed out that somebody still had to be at the Tap House to work.
That’s probably the simplest way I can explain what the Tap House became to us.
A few months ago we found out the brewery wasn’t renewing the lease. The Tap House would be closing.
At first it was just “sometime in June.” Then eventually there was a date attached to it.
June 28.
Now it’s almost here.
The funny thing is that I don’t think I’ll miss the building itself. What I’ll miss are the people. The familiar faces behind the bar. The regulars we’d end up talking to every week. The feeling of walking through the door and knowing exactly where we wanted sit.
The older I get, the more I realize that life is made up of places like this.
Not the places where huge milestones happen. The places where ordinary life happens. The places you return to often enough that they quietly become part of your story without you noticing.
We went looking for a place to have dinner on Friday nights.
What we found was a community.
And while June 28 may be the last day the doors are open, I’m grateful we found it while it was here.
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