![]() ![]() “I’m not going to stop doing anything,” he confided. The Hollywood film studio owns the rights to Beetlejuice, and according to Neil, he received a cease-and-desist letter from their reps this week. “Daddy’s getting sued by Warner Bros.,” he told them. Before Neil and I could speak about the bar, he was Facetiming with his daughters back home in Pennsylvania. However you’re planning to get through the door at Beetle House, we suggest you do it quickly. Walk-ins for the bar are still welcome, and to be honest that’s where all the fun was to be had last night anyway. “We’ve taken 5,600 reservations so far,” he smiled.ĭon’t be too intimidated by the Beetle House’s immediate popularity, though– it’s not exactly an exclusive joint. He wore a black chef’s jacket and puffed furiously at a cigarette. According to Neil, he and Link offered to go into business with her and revamp the restaurant according to their ideas while she maintained part-ownership. (A Facebook post from March says that Confessional actually plans to reopen, just in a new location).īeetle House only started taking dinner reservations this week for their soft-opening, which started on Wednesday, but Neil said they’re already booked solid. “We’re sold out on reservations for many, many weeks,” he explained to me outside the restaurant last night while on a quick break from his kitchen duties. In their search for a space, the duo met the owner of Confessional, a struggling “Latin fusion restaurant,” who was trying to sell the place. “I don’t want to do the movie-theme thing forever, but if we’re going to do another one, let’s do Tim Burton.” The partners figured– why not keep it going? “We were like, what else do we both like? Oh, we both like Tim Burton,” Neil explained. “And that’s how it was initially received, and then a lot of the locals who hated it came in and said, ‘Wait, actually this is really fun.’” “We figured people are probably going to shit on this, it’s the Lower East Side and everybody’s too cool for school and they don’t want our commercialized bullshit,” Neil recalled. Despite the odds, that venture’s still going strong. But lately, he’s shown himself to be pretty good at this theme-bar thing, too– Neil and Link happen to be the same guys behind Stay Classy New York, the Lower East Side’s very own Will Ferrel-themed bar that opened last October. This is the punk rock area of the Lower East Side– why is everything so fuckin’ swanky?”Īs a former partner at Tobacco Road, a “grimy bikini bar” in Midtown that’s won a number of “best dive bar” distinctions, Neil knows a thing or two about gritty bars. Everything is either too cheap, so you know something’s wrong, or it’s too expensive and you’re not going to pay for it. The atmospheres are drab and everyone’s trying to be way too fancy. “There are the standouts, but for the most part it’s McGillicuddy’s Irish Pub, Dave’s Irish Tavern– it’s the same shit. “We scouted probably about 40 bars around the city, and what we found is that they’re all the same,” Neil said. People come in, they hang out, you drink, hang out, everything’s good.” “Bars are fun, it’s like having a birthday party every night. “I was like, ‘Why don’t we open a bar?'” co-owner Zach Neil recalls telling Brian Link, his business partner and BFF who was suffering from “massive depression” last year. Which hasn’t stopped it from getting smacked with a cease-and-desist from the director’s minders. The idea of a Tim Burton theme bar opening in the East Village is so weird on so many levels that I started to drive myself bonkers unpacking the implications of this so-called Beetle House. Would this be an ironic ode to Tumblr culture and fan fiction? A comment on how themed consumer culture has reached bizarre peaks? As it turns out, Beetle House is actually just a completely earnest theme bar and restaurant dedicated to the beloved, oh-so-spooky-creepy films of Tim Burton. ![]() Meet your host, “Juice”(Photo: Nicole Disser) ![]()
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