No one ever mistook Duffy’s Shamrock Bar for some semi-precious, small-plate wine bar – it’s always been a real place for real people. Sometimes a little too real, down the the real cheap House Recipe Fancy Ketchup and the real food splotches on the booth backs.
And where else could you catch not one, but two, butt cracks peeking out from the stools, as we did on closing day Nov. 30, when it was six-deep between the bar and the dining room as regular folks, all salt-and-pepper hair and worn jeans, fought to get the last, best Irish coffees this town has ever had, while Ken and Frank Lombardi raced around giving thanks the best way they know how – free drinks to the familiar faces, and handshakes and smiles to the rest.
“I started here when I was 21,” said Kat Hendrickson, our waitress, who hasn’t worked at Duffy’s in ages but came in for the last day to help out because she knew it would be a mob scene. “It was no easy job; I didn’t just learn how to be a waitress, I got a backbone.”
She said “Kenny” and Frank were the sweetest people she knew, and the closing just made her sad. When she said that, about a dozen people behind her turned around and nodded, and raised their glasses, and grimaced.
Ken Lombardi said he doesn’t know what he will do next. “After you’ve gotten up at 5 a.m. for 45 years straight, it’s hard to imagine what the next day will be like,” he said. “I’ll wake up at 5 a.m., and then what?”
A long time ago, he owned a coffee farm in Costa Rico, and he sort of wishes he still did. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll buy down there. It’s so great there.”
As happy hour kicked in, it became clear this would be more like bittersweet hour. “I just hate goodbyes,” said Bruce McMann, who had been eyeballing our table for a while and moved in to grab it as we got up. “I came here 10 years ago when we first moved here, and it’s always been my favorite bar. I don’t know where I’ll feel quite this comfortable again.”
He’s not the only one. By the time we left, one of the guys at the bar had figured out that he was giving a bit of a show from the rear and hoisted up his boxers and his jeans, but the other one clearly was blissfully content with letting it all hang out, loudly buying his buddies beers and flaunting his bulbous flesh on a brown vinyl stool.
And once again, we’ll pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
Former food critic Kyle Wagner started eating and drinking at Duffy’s almost as soon as she moved to Denver in 1993.
