Crystal Wise
It’s a challenge faced by most bars that also double as live music venues: When you have a ticketed show, what happens to your regulars if they just want to drink and hang out with their friends?
For Jason Suder, owner of one of the city’s premier music venues, Tulips FTW in the South Main area, it meant turning people away — something no business owner wants to do.
“As soon as we started doing ticketed events, we watched our bar business drop off,” he says. “Because we have capacity limits, I’m not able to let in our regulars, who just want to have a drink, at the same time we’re having a ticketed show. We just don’t have the room.”
Suder and his business partners, Matthew Harber and Annette Marin of Spune, had access to a small building adjacent to Tulips, a 900-square-foot space they were using for storage and sometimes a VIP room for bands. It was the perfect spot, they thought, for what Tulips needed: a sibling bar that could accommodate Tulips’ regulars when they didn’t want to foot the bill for shows.
“The intention was always there, to have a music venue and a bar,” Suder says. “A bar is the only way to keep a music venue afloat.”
Crystal Wise
For a name, Suder and his partners landed on “Low Doubt,” a play on “load out,” an industry term describing the taking down and packing up of show equipment after a performance. Load outs typically take place in the back of a venue, and given Low Doubt’s location — right behind Tulips — it was the perfect moniker, Suder says.
Opened in January, Low Doubt may have been born out of circumstance and necessity, but it’s hardly a dashed-off, hobbled-together money grab. Rather, Suder and his partners have put together a cool neighborhood bar that is as thoughtful and smart as it cozy and alluring.
You enter, speak-easy-style, via a wood-planked alleyway next to Tulips. Follow the string lights and vibrant mural of a tulip, painted by New Yorker-turned-Fort Worthian Jana Renée. Hang a left at the end of the walkway and you’re there, facing a room bathed in dusk-colored lighting and decorated with antiques, knickknacks, and other decor components that illustrate the bar’s eclectic aesthetic.
“There are old boxing gloves that belonged to my grandfather, some show art posters from Tulips, and some other little things that one of us has picked up,” Suder says. “Separately, these things may not have anything in common. But together, here, they represent the diversity and community and inclusion that we’re all about.”
Above the bar are rows and rows of vinyl records — a sure sign you’re in a place that caters to music fans. Two vintage refrigerator doors are put to clever use: Each displays the bar’s menu of beers, drink specials, and classic and craft cocktails. And what became of the rest of the fridges? They’re in the bathroom, repurposed as shelves.
Crystal Wise
The cocktail menu, developed by local award-winning bartender Omari “Mars” Anderson, may be, at the moment, the city’s best. At the very least, they have the best names: No Sympathy for the Devil, The Mad Ones, Only Truth, and Grace Under Pressure, all of which are references to theater productions, albums, or books.
The must-try drink, your bartender will probably tell you, is the one called All God Does Is Watch Us and Kill Us When We Get Boring, named for a passage in Invisible Monsters, a 1999 book by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. Brandishing a fairly potent mix of cherry limeade and vodka, it’s as fun to drink as it is to order.
The room’s showpiece is a curvy, mid-century-inspired, half-moon booth that looks like something out of “Mad Men” or “Swingers.” A dozen people can easily squeeze in. Which, Suder says, is the whole point.
“We see Tulips as a creative cultural center — a bar, a music venue, a wedding venue. It’s a space where people make memories under the banner of love and community,” he says. “Low Doubt operates separately, and it has its own identity, but with the same idealogy: to bring people together as a community.”
