Owner: ‘We were just tired.’ Popular downtown Lexington bar and restaurant closes.
A popular Lexington cocktail bar that built a reputation for top-notch food as well as drinks has closed. The owner said that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic just made it too hard to keep going.
“We just had a heart-to-heart and we were just tired,” said Jonathan Laurel, owner of West Main Crafting Co., which opened at 135 W. Main St. four and a half years ago, as part of a wave of new downtown bars and restaurants that also included the Seltzer Club, Bourbon on Rye, School Sushi, Corta Lima and Lussi Brown Coffee Bar.
“It’s definitely a sad day for everybody,” Laurel said Monday. “This really was a huge labor of love for us, and people really reacted to the earnestness and the work.”
West Main specialized in craft cocktails and a shareable menu of “re-imagined bar favorites.”
The bar served drinks with housemade sodas, syrups, tonics and bitter, and the kitchen served inventive dishes done well.
In a Sept. 19 Facebook post, the downtown Lexington bar and restaurant announced that it had closed.
“We’ve enjoyed our time preparing authentic drinks for you all and sharing a bit of cocktail culture with the Bluegrass,” according to the post. “We’ve appreciated everyone who’s visited over the years, but we have some specific words to those barflies, regulars, and precious friends we’ve gotten to know personally: Thank you, specifically. We set out to make and share something special, and your visits at the bar were the all-too-brief but reliable moments we felt seen, appreciated, and joyful about what we do. Thank you for driving in from all over or for walking down the block to see us; thank you for the short visits and long nights; thank you for always being willing to try new things and for the general nerdiness; thank you for the laughter and quick wittedness you’ve shared with us.”
Laurel said on Monday that “it was nothing really dramatic or anything like that.” Instead, the grinding daily stress just became too much, he said.
“It is a lot harder than people think it is right now,” he said. “It’s hard on staff, the management, it’s psychologically arduous. ... Everybody’s tired of hearing about the pandemic as an excuse but that’s just the way it is right now.”
He said that like many restaurants and bars, West Main had become “leaner” during the pandemic which meant fewer people doing about the same amount of work.
Every restaurant closure is different he said.
“For some they can’t get product, some can’t pay the bills, some can’t get out of bed,” he said. “For us, we just didn’t know if we could go on, with the stress.”
And on the patron side, the business model has shifted. “It has changed the way people go out,” Laurel said. “People used to come out late. Now they come out early and go home.”
And patrons they used to see two or three times a week now come out once, at most, he said.
“We just thinking about socializing differently,” he said.
