Handsome Daughter, undaunted Spunky bar raising a glass to its bright future By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:35 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024

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This article was published 28/08/2024 (706 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The shelves behind the bar at the Handsome Daughter tell the story of a West Broadway business that refuses to tap out.

Above the Sour Puss and Triple Sec is a peanut gallery of Snoopy memorabilia and toothy alligator skulls, not far from VHS copies of Homeward Bound, The Wedding Singer and a pristine box set of Twin Peaks.

Over the bartender’s shoulder, a greeting card fronted by a shrugging infant is propped up behind a Magic 8 ball. “Barely Keeping it Together” it reads. Hanging tenuously from the ceiling are eight American dollars.

Since it opened in October 2014, the Daughter, a concert venue with a 110-person capacity, has been a scrappy, indefatigable locus for independent performance, with a DIY approach to event booking that allowed it to become a divey haven: for punks who liked their drums loud, for standup comics who liked their beer cheap, and for newbies who weren’t yet sure what exactly they liked, but knew that at the Daughter, they had a chance of finding out.

The venue’s staff and ownership shifted, as often happens, but the show went on, while the Daughter adjusted its approach to accommodate the whims of a turbulent and notoriously difficult industry, expanding its business to include a restaurant called Magic Bird in 2017.

Mike O’Connell, who heads up the Daughter’s kitchen operations, says the uptake on fried chicken was so strong that the Daughter considered opening a second Magic Bird location.

Then, on the verge of its sixth year in operation, the venue, like every one of its kind, was taken to the mat by COVID-19 — an indiscriminate heel that silenced the music. For a long time, the 34-year-old O’Connell says, crispy poultry was the bar’s lifeline, keeping the business afloat long enough to allow the Daughter to greet the other side of the pandemic and to stave off what felt like the opening paragraph to an inevitable obituary.

Against most odds, the Daughter is now in the midst of a triumphant rebirth.

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Last winter, the Winnipeg independent music scene was rocked by the closure of the Good Will Social Club on Portage Avenue. That caught Lana Winterhalt by surprise.

The singer-songwriter had the 10-year-old venue pencilled in as the ideal spot for the release show for her latest album, so when the doors closed, Winterhalt looked toward 61 Sherbrook St., built in the 1930s as a Piggly Wiggly grocery store.

The Handsome Daughter was a fitting choice for the expectant mother, who took to the stage on the first Saturday night in April with her own mom for a duet of Amos Milburn’s Milk and Water that nudged the packed room into fits of slightly drunken laughter.

Right after Winterhalt’s variety hour ended, Rory Ellis and company got set up for an evening of live-band karaoke. There was very little room to move; it felt like a return to a pre-pandemic world.

Behind the front bar, Jessee Kowalski darted back and forth like a jackrabbit, pouring vodka sodas and grabbing Pilsners. Kowalski, a longtime punk musician and promoter originally from Dauphin, worked at the Daughter for two years in the mid-2010s before leaving to work on the oil rigs in Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

“It was the best job I’ve ever had, and the worst,” says Kowalski, 31, of his time on the rigs. “I didn’t mind getting dirty or being outside, but being away from home was the worst part.”

When Kowalski returned to Winnipeg in 2023, he returned to the Daughter’s fold. Alongside the bar’s longtime owner Jay Evaristo, the staff itched to emerge from the pandemic’s shadow.

They developed some short- and long-term goals, including a renovated patio, expanded bathroom facilities and a renewed commitment to marketing. During the pandemic, the venue’s social media presence dwindled, and inside the bar, the 10-year-old paint job was in desperate need of a touch-up.

Inane bathroom stall graffiti notwithstanding, the Daughter family feared its own writing was on the wall.

“We figured now was the time,” recalls O’Connell, who has lived at three addresses along Sherbrook, giving him a deep institutional memory of businesses along West Broadway’s busiest corridor that now exist only in Polaroids and nostalgic anecdotes. “That was basically it. Do or die. There was no sitting back. We just had to push as hard as we could.”

After a decade of resisting an increase, the Daughter raised its rental fee to $350. The bar struck a partnership with Little Brown Jug Brewing Co. to make its house lager. The front room got a ’70s-inspired paint-job, with a wave of mustard, orange and chocolate brown covering the wall. From a shuttered Corydon cafe, the bar purchased an espresso machine to run a daily coffee service, and owing to persistent fryer problems, Magic Bird gave way to a cheekily named frankfurter spot called Doggy Style.

“I don’t want to romanticize it too much, but this place has been open for 10 years. It’s almost an institution.”–Jessee Kowalski

Meanwhile, Kowalski, his mother and his stepfather spent their weekends in May renovating the patio, which is fronted by a panelled garage door that opens up to Sherbrook Street.

“Like Mike said, it’s been do or die,” Kowalski said in May. “When we put all our eggs into this basket, we have to make it succeed, because we don’t have anything else. If this doesn’t work, then I don’t know what the options are. From a personal sense, as someone who plays in bands, who books shows — if this place is gone, I think about what bands would do.

“I don’t want to romanticize it too much, but this place has been open for 10 years. It’s almost an institution.”

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In February, the Daughter it added to its roster a potential MVP in Jessa Johnson, a 29-year-old e-commerce and social media expert who left a full-time job as a product specialist at Shopify to become the Daughter’s marketing co-ordinator. For more than a decade, the Winnipeg-raised Johnson had worked as a booker and grassroots promoter on a freelance basis.

The hire paid immediate dividends, effectively reintroducing the venue to an audience that wasn’t of legal drinking age when the pandemic struck. A party last Saturday celebrating Charli XCX’s Brat — the album of the summer for any generation toward the end of the alphabet — sold out, filling the Daughter with the inescapable hues of the album’s chartreuse colour scheme.

The venue has also remained committed to live comedy and trivia nights, and has used the patio for a well-received free Sunday-afternoon concert series (next up is Paige Drobot on Sept. 15).

At the same time, Johnson, Kowalski and booker Corey Hykawy have made every effort to make space for local artists in need of a room and for touring bands who’ve decided to make a pitstop in Winnipeg, including Louisville, Ky.’s Doom Gong, who play with Winnipeg’s Heavy Visions and Virgo Rising on Saturday night.

“We doubt ourselves sometimes, and at times things can seem bleak,” says Johnson, “but things are so much better now than they were before.”

 

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com