Robert Thompson is used to spending $200,000 on marketing before opening a new restaurant. But this time, he didn’t spend a dime.
“I intentionally kept this under the radar,” he said. “I am irrationally protective of this concept.”
The Denver entrepreneur, best known for founding the bowling alley-meets-restaurant concept Punch Bowl Social, opened BARna at 1201 E. Colfax Ave. on June 17. The 10,000-square-foot bar serves tapas and shows soccer games.
Thompson said it will be a “soccer-first, not soccer-stupid” establishment. Broncos and Nuggets games will be shown, but so will that 9 a.m. Premier League matchup. The restaurant also has a basement filled with private karaoke rooms and unique games like Multiball, which is like a golf simulator but for soccer and dozens of other sports.
“I’m not casting aspersions at other versions of soccer bars, but most of them, the vast majority of them, are just Irish pubs and British pubs, and that is not for this generation. The concepts that I create are always for the 21- to 34-year-old,” said Thompson, 55.
BARna replaces the Irish Snug, an Irish pub and sports bar which closed there in 2022 after 18 years in business. Crazy Horse Kitchen and Bar also briefly operated in the space from 2023 to 2025.
Thompson did look elsewhere before settling on the Irish Snug space. RiNo, he said, had high rents and lacked consistent foot traffic. He also checked out buildings near his original Punch Bowl Social location on South Broadway. But he was insistent that a Colfax location was an ideal launching point.
“I believe in the Colfax renaissance associated with this huge bus rapid transit system,” he said. “Itap a $280 million investment that can change a lot of opinions and doubts.”
Itap a fitting metaphor for Thompson, who himself faces some old opinions and doubts about his work that he’d like to change.
In 2012, he launched Punch Bowl Social. At first, it went gangbusters. By 2019, the company was doing $120 million in revenue with nearly 20 locations averaging 24,000 square feet and had received a $140 million investment from Cracker Barrel.
But then the pandemic hit in 2020, plunging the restaurant industry into chaos. Thompson stepped down as CEO in August 2020. The business filed for bankruptcy that December.
The following year, he opened Three Saints Revival, an upscale Mediterranean joint next to Union Station. It closed in 2024, and Thompson was ordered to pay $500,000 to his landlord for breaking the lease. Court records show he has not yet paid that sum.
All the while, he was working as CEO of Camp Pickle. The business launched in 2022, aiming to bring pickleball courts and restaurants under the same roof. It purchased land for a location in Centennial and publicized other future openings elsewhere, but nothing ever materialized. Thompson said he left the company in 2024. Earlier this year, its land in Centennial was foreclosed on.
“I’ve been called an a–hole plenty of times, I recognize that. … No one’s ever called me a cheat, no one’s ever called me a fraud,” he said.
Thompson, who still lives in Denver, said his Union Station restaurant failed because he believed that the pandemic would end sooner and that downtown would quickly rebound, hence the name Three Saints Revival. He noted that the eatery won Westword’s best Mediterranean restaurant title in 2022.
Camp Pickle, meanwhile, was a much larger operation with many investors. Thompson said he was just the face of the brand and received all the flak as a result.
“There’s a discipline when you have to learn to pull the plug on something earlier on,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how long you fight, if you know itap not going to work, you don’t get bonus points for the good fight.”
The idea for BARna has percolated in Thompson’s head for years. At first, he flirted with doing something much larger, with soccer fields and a bar under one roof. But he settled on something more intimate.
“Itap less than half to open up one of these than what it used to cost me to open a Punch Bowl Social,” Thompson said.
Thompson is hoping to open more BARna locations in Denver and around the country. He said Dallas, Texas, and Southern California make sense given the popularity of soccer there. Locally, LoHi’s youthful urban feel and southern Denver’s high concentration of soccer families seem ideal.
He’s 50/50 partners with British investor Luke Johnson, whom Thompson met in his final days at Punch Bowl Social. The two unsuccessfully tried to wrestle control of the business from a lender months before the bankruptcy.
Thompson said he’s operating this business a bit differently. He designed the entire interior himself, down to the color palette. The interior features a hodgepodge of antiques and soccer motifs wrapped in Spanish finishes. A large, ornate arch over the bar is based on a famous market in Barcelona, for instance.
“There’s not a fiber in this place I haven’t touched, and itap the first time I’ve done it like that,” he said.
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