Well spaced and comfortable seating of four tops and built in high tops are spread out around the pool table that serves as the great room’s nucleus. The inviting air of breezy warmth exists during the day and late at night. Great glass and an open, tall beamed ceiling counteract the darkness often created by wood paneling. A good sized and well striped parking lot. He left Anvil to take the cocktail and wine reins of the Pappas restaurant group but then walked away from that prestigious position to partner with local Heights-centric Agricole Hospitality to open a bar immediately prior to the pandemic lockdown that many now pretend did not occur that destroyed so many small businesses and so many lives in the restaurant industry.Īfter two trying years on hold and struggling through a host of the roadblocks that have plagued so many small businesspeople in Houston in the wake of the COVID outbreak, EZ’s Liquor Lounge has finally opened on White Oak Drive. But his natural genius for hospitality led him away from his kit down the pathway to entrepreneurship. I met Matt years ago when he was a young bartender at Anvil still chasing a rock drummer dream. But the fake wood paneling, dive bar neon and 70’s and 80’s ephemera of his new Heights neighborhood bar EZ’s Liquor Lounge feels curated and comfortable and not at all forced.

When Matt Tanner conveyed his vintage vision grounded in Texas beer parlours of the early 1980’s, I had doubts. Commercial attempts to recreate a yesteryear aesthetic for a new business almost always ring inauthentic and kitsch.

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