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Seeing Purple … and Red
I don’t mean to come off like some angry young man, but enough’s enough. At my place of employment, The Moon Bar by Texas Christian University, some frat bro recently kicked a hole in the men’s bathroom door and another bro broke a toilet. Now if it weren’t for TCU’ers, then The Moon –– and The Cellar and The Aardvark and pretty much every other West Berry Street/University Drive bar/restaurant in existence –– would be hurting. But are we selling our souls to the Horny Toad?
Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I am prone to being cranky and/or overreacting, but the Moon incident got me to wondering: Does every drink-slinger in town hold the same low opinion of TCU drinkers as I do? As loud, obnoxious, non-tipping vandals?
I asked around. I started with Scott Milligan, who’s been a bartender at the Chili’s Grill & Bar on University, as well as at The Moon, and now the near-TCU Halo Lounge.
“Our manager got on top of the bar [one night] and basically told [the largely college-aged customers] that if they didn’t start tipping, they’d no longer be served,” he said. “Once she did that, the tip jars filled up pretty quickly.”
Which sort of confirms what I’ve thought all along: that TCU students, and undoubtedly college students everywhere, aren’t necessarily jerks. They just don’t know any better.
Of course, Halo, like the Moon, has suffered a lot of vandalism. Milligan seems to think it’s a “fraternity thing.” One of the guys Milligan was talking to one night let it slip that often “the older guys tell the younger ones to go fuck things up.” Halo eventually had to replace its pint glasses with plastic ones. Too many were getting dropped — for lack of a better word — or just openly smashed.
Down the block, I asked another bartender (who wished to remain anonymous) how she felt about TCU kids. “I fucking hate them,” she said. “They are demanding, they don’t tip, and they treat us like shit.” She attributes their general ass-clownage to an “undue sense of entitlement.”
In their own backyard, the little purple princes and princesses have a bad rep. In the interest of, uh, fair and balanced journalism, I ventured farther afield, to the West 7th Street area. I’d noticed a lot of Northface vests the last time I was in Poag Mahone’s, so I dropped in there to see if the Irish-themed pub’s staffers’ opinions lined up with those of their colleagues farther south.
Turns out that perhaps the farther a bar is from the campus, the more grown-up the kids behave. “We get a lot of students, but more of them are from Texas Wesleyan [University] than TCU,” said Glen, who’s spent 10 years slinging drinks in Cowtown. “Sure, we have about as many problems with patrons as any other bar, but I think the TCU people who come in here are a little older, and they don’t really make too much trouble.
“I really think it’s more of an age and maturity thing,” he continued. “The tipping thing just comes with experience. It’s probably a similar situation in any college town.”
All the same, though, I asked if he would ever consider tending bar around TCU. “No way,” he quickly returned. “I’d go nuts dealing with those kids all the time.”
Contact Last Call at lastcall@fwweekly.com
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