Dan’s Irish Sports Bar Fights to Stay on Civic Drive After 55 Years

WALNUT CREEK, CA — Dan’s Irish Sports Bar has been pouring pints at 1524 Civic Drive for more than 55 years, and the man who owns it now thinks that run might be over.

Saul Tallarico started tending bar at Dan’s in 1996 and bought the place in 2011. He says he spent months trying to renew the lease in good faith, and that the terms kept shifting underneath him. His version of it: the property manager kept moving the goalposts. Then came the ask. According to Tallarico, he was told to pay an extra $500,000 on top of rent to match an offer from a competing tenant.

He didn’t write the check. Tallarico has filed civil litigation in Contra Costa County against the property manager, the landlord, and the competing tenant. NBC Bay Area reached out to the parties named in the suit and got no response. The drama has been loud enough that even the local weekly roundups are keeping an eye on it.

So the bar is doing the thing a bar does when the end might be near. It is asking people to come by and say goodbye. “Come visit us while we’re still here, come in, take your pictures,” bartender Alona Lettner told the station.

They showed up. On a recent Saturday the room filled with people who have been ordering here since they were old enough to drink, and with the friends they picked up at that same bar along the way. The kind of place where the wood on the bar is worn smooth in exactly the spots you would expect, and the TVs run a beat behind the game and nobody ever minds.

“This is our local ‘Cheers.’”

— Brittany Grinnel, Walnut Creek resident

Then Grinnel said the part that lands harder than last call. If the bar actually goes, she told NBC Bay Area, she will go too: “Walnut Creek is becoming way too commercial.”

You hear that line a lot around here, and it is easy to wave off as the reflex complaint of anyone who has been somewhere long enough. On Civic Drive it is less abstract. Dan’s has held that corner since before most of downtown looked the way it does now, while the blocks around it keep reshuffling. More homes are going up where a parking lot used to sit. A homegrown name came home to North Main the same season a national chain pulled out of a strip mall down the road. The churn is the story, and Dan’s has mostly been the thing watching it happen from behind the bar.

Tallarico is not folding up the taps quietly. He says that even if he loses the lease, he wants to find another spot in Walnut Creek and bring the staff with him. “Doors will be open here as long as we can keep them open,” he said, “and then hopefully we find this next place, and this next place will be the next magical spot.”

So there is no last call on the calendar. No farewell party with a date on it, no countdown taped to the register. Just a bar in a fight it might win, on a corner it has held for more than half a century. For now the doors are open and the taps are still pouring.

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