We’ve been here before: A beloved shabby-but-comfortable dive bar closes because of apparent avarice on the part of the landlord and the beer-and-a-shot crowd bemoans the loss of not just $2 domestics but also a piece of the community’s “soul.”
It’s happening again in Arlington. Joining the ranks of other shuttered dives — the Keyhole Inn (spicy chili, Cissy the waitress; gone in 1989), Dr. Dremo’s Tap House (movies, pool tables, donut beer; gone in 2008), Jay’s Saloon (the house wine was Jägermeister; gone in 2015), and countless other down-on-their-heels taverns that have shuttered since Arlington was an ungovernable bastion of bars and pawn shops — is Westover’s Forest Inn.
News broke earlier this month that the beloved neighborhood tavern was — finally — locking the glass doors on June 26, and that’s it, no turning back now, we’re out, done and dusted (which it hasn’t been in decades).
The second iteration of the bar, which originally opened in what is now the Westover Post Office as the Black Forest Inn in 1981, moved up the strip into a slot between Toby’s Homemade Ice Cream and Ayers Variety & Hardware in 1994, when, presumably, they stopped painting the walls.
General manager Ken Choudhary said the landlord, Van Metre Commercial, refused to renew the lease despite the bar’s surviving a devastating flood in 2019 and the business interruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
“I just think they want something new over here,” Choudhary told hypernews website ARLnow.com. “Something that’s not a bar.”
The best quote in that report is from an unidentified Forest Inn patron, who sums up the whole “lost a piece of the community’s soul” ethos: “They don’t want dive bars,” said the man, who declined to give his name. “They want everything to be bougie and foo foo.” (A great name for a band!)
It’s hard to think what Van Metre could put in the location. The space had (we’re using past-tense now) a bizarre, somewhat challenging L-shaped layout, with a long hallway between two entrances, one on Washington Boulevard and one in the rear of the building. If you came in the Washington door, you might seat yourself and go unnoticed until someone came around the corner to use the bathroom and found you.
The bar itself was … well, a bar, with the requisite stools, high-top tables, and a few booths you need in a bar. Simple, straight-forward.
As for decoration, there were some yard sale elephant figurines and a row of liquor lined up on a shelf, most of them in plastic “handles” (gallon-sized jugs); a row of ghastly green LCD string lights crowned the top of the bar. There seemed to be three beers on tap, but the Devil’s Backbone lager was out so we defaulted to a Longhammer IPA, a not-so-divey beverage choice. It was $9, another no-so-divey surprise.
Here’s the bottom line: The feelings of the regulars who kept the Forest Inn in business and found a home-away-from-home there each day (it opened at 9 a.m.!) will sting for a while but like the denizens of Jay’s, Dremo’s, and the Keyhole before them, they’ll find a new watering hole that suits their sensibilities and budgets. Granted, those are diminishing but there are a few.
- A. Bar on Columbia Pike; L.A. stands for Lower Arlington. Motto: “Keeping yuppies out of South Arlington.”
- Galaxy Hut in Clarendon; a vegan-friendly dive? Yep. The bohemian 48-seater opened in 1990.
- Cowboy Café on Langston Boulevard, opened 1991; classic, full-service bar that acts like a family friendly restaurant. (No one bemoans the closing of the 1948 Clam House it replaced.)
So raise a pint in memory of the Forest Inn to lift your spirits, if not heal your wounded soul.
Buzz McClain is a longtime Arlington resident and is a former professional bars, saloons, taverns, pool halls, and bowling alleys critic.
For more stories like this, subscribe to our Food newsletter.
