After saving the University District institution during the pandemic lockdowns, the owners are moving on
by Harry Cheadle Aug 21, 2024, 1:32pm PDT
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The College Inn Pub’s owners say they are moving on.
Jen Gonyer
Harry Cheadle is the editor of Eater Seattle.
The College Inn Pub, one of the University Districts most beloved haunts — literally, it’s haunted, by a ghost named Howard — will soon enter the next phase of its long life. This week owners Jen Gonyer and Al Donohue sent out a press release that served as their “graduation announcement”: After four years of running the half-century-old basement watering hole, they were moving on. If no one buys the pub, its last day of service will be June 15, 2025.
Gonyer and Donohue took over the bar at a particularly dicey moment. The College Inn Pub had been a classic campus dive since the ‘70s — dark wood, a vaguely English vibe, students and professors chopping it up in the dim light. In 2020 it joined the ranks of businesses that closed during the pandemic lockdown era. But Donohue and Gonyer (who worked there as a server and wrote part of her University of Washington dissertation there) stepped in to rescue it and reopened the following year, after extensive repairs.
“They spent the 2020-21 academic year rehabilitating the physical space with updated electrical, plumbing, more modern equipment, fresh paint and wood finishing, and a kitchen sink that holds water,” the owners wrote in this week’s press release. But they very consciously decided to change very little. After all, this is a bar in a building that dates back to 1909. “Except for the feedback that the pub is ‘brighter’ — thanks to 35-plus years of indoor tobacco use finally painted over — the space is still the well-loved pub it has always been,” Gonyer told Eater Seattle at the time.
As she put it in this week’s press release, “We did what we came to do. We reopened the College Inn Pub and restored it to the place we have loved since we were first regulars in the early ‘90s.”
But the owners never intended to make the College Inn Pub their careers. “The goal was to save the Pub from a state of permanent pandemic demise,” Gonyers says. “June 2025 will be five years for us, so now it’s time for us to focus on some of our own personal goals and projects while we are still in some state of our prime.”
As the UW academic calendar kicks off, the College Inn Pub will be launching what the owners call its “senior year” and hosting community events. For more info on that follow the bar on Instagram. The full announcement of the owners’ plan to sell can be found here.
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