Arlington pub G Willickers gets a makeover. Check it out on the TV series ‘Bar Rescue’
The three sisters who own G Willickers Pub in Arlington didn’t ever exactly want to run a bar.
It wasn’t a dream of theirs. There wasn’t a moment of, ”I like going to bars. Let’s try owning one.” They didn’t even buy the place, but now they’re getting ready for their business to be the star of an episode of “Bar Rescue” on Sunday, April 10.
In May 2020, amid COVID-19 closures and restrictions that saw many bars fold before business could return to normal, Caseye Smith, Carmen Luke and Carrie Thompson’s stepmother died. She’d been the one to run the bar since the sisters’ father, Clarence Grider, died of lung cancer on New Year’s Day 2019, and now the responsibility of carrying on their father’s legacy was on their shoulders.
The sisters were thrust into the world of liquor licenses, inventory management, payroll and seven-nights-a-week karaoke.
“There’s times where, golly, I’m up at 6 in the morning and not home till 3 in the morning,” Smith said.
So when the producers of “Bar Rescue,” a show on Paramount TV where entrepreneur Jon Taffer comes to struggling bars and works with them for a week to renovate and revitalize the business, called, it was simultaneously a shock and a relief.
That phone call led to a barrage of questions, interviews and the decision to come to Arlington and tell the story of the three Arlington sisters who are working to maintain their father’s legacy in a bar they never intended to own.
That legacy, Luke said, can be seen not just in the bar and its employees but also in the loyal regulars who come by often. The impact Grider had on his community is obvious, the sisters say, when customers show up on the weekend before the bar opens to help put together new chairs or fix some sort of problem in the bar.
It’s also in the Thanksgiving gatherings hosted at G Willickers. Everybody is welcome at those, Luke said, but it’s meant a lot to the folks who might otherwise be alone on the holiday.
Smith said that because the sisters were trying to uphold their father’s legacy and weren’t just three people who decided to buy a bar, the atmosphere was different than they expected after seeing previous episodes of the show.
Because of show rules, the women said they couldn’t share any more about what that meant until the show is released on Paramount Plus.
Luke said she can say the visit by Taffer and Bar Rescue helped heal some of the strain owning the bar has put on relationships, reinvigorate the sisters and set the bar up for a long and prosperous future.
And they can’t wait for people, local and elsewhere, to see the physical changes. It’s still the G Willickers everybody loves, she said, but it’s had a bit of a face-lift that was made with some input from regulars taken into consideration.
Coming out of the pandemic, Smith said the visit by Taffer and his crew was a sort of saving grace.
G Willickers will have a watch party for the show at 9 p.m. Sunday at the bar located at 310 109th St. in Arlington, and they’re inviting the community to come out, have a couple of drinks and watch what happened leading up to the transformation.