What Happened to St8 Pub After Bar Rescue? (Englewood, CO)

St8 Pub -- pronounced "State Pub" -- was a craft-beer bar in Englewood, Colorado featured in the February 2017 episode "Don't Tell Mom the Bar is Dead." Owner Sean had worked as a bartender for roughly fifteen years before taking over the business with a $10,000 loan, agreeing to pay $2,000 a month toward buying out his landlord. By the time of the visit, the bar owed its landlord about $25,000 in back rent on top of the original loan, and the landlord had given Sean a matter of weeks to pay or lose the space.

Sean's mother, Pamela, helped out at the bar, and Caitlin was the only remaining employee after two coworkers had quit. Jon Taffer, mixologist Shawn Ford, and chef Vic Vega found sanitation lapses in the kitchen, including food handling without proper handwashing, and inconsistent beer service despite a fifty-plus-item beer list. After Taffer negotiated a three-month rent extension with the landlord, the team retrained staff, brought on two new hires, and rebuilt the bar around a man-cave theme, relaunching it as Downstairs Bar + Kitchen. In the weeks following the episode, the bar reported sales up about 25 percent and Sean had begun repaying what he owed.

That momentum did not hold: Downstairs Bar + Kitchen closed around August 2017, roughly a year after Taffer's visit and five months after the episode aired, according to Reality TV Updates' fan-site coverage (last updated March 2023). The same coverage, corroborated independently by a Westword restaurant feature, reports that the 4386 South Broadway space is now home to The Englewood Tavern, a bar opened by members of the Bennett, Frazier, and Hagan families under different ownership than Sean's. Westword's April 2019 feature describes the building's history running from Hilda's and a bar called the Shadow through Downstairs Bar & Kitchen before the current tavern took over, making The Englewood Tavern a separate business with its own owners and name rather than a continuation of the Bar Rescue business.