The Oarhouse is Dead. Long Live the Oarhouse!

For a brief moment, it seemed our favorite pub was doomed. Word traveled by text on December 28th that it was the last night of the Oarhouse, hangout extraordinaire in Malate. Too see how long Stephen has been frequenting this place, check out this photo:
Whoa, is that hair on Stephen's head? Yeah, that was 1992. He was in Manila "studying Tagalog" during college. In fact, it was this lot that got Stephen involved in photojournalism in the first place, being sort of a hangout of self- (read un-) employed photographers. Thanks...I think.

So obviously when Stephen and I heard that the Oar was closing that very night, it was quite a blow. We were already in town having a nice Middle Eastern mezze dinner with friends at Shwarma Snack Center on Salas Street (which, by the way, serves the most authentic shwarma I've had in this country). Forgoing the temptations of the argileh (tobacco water pipe--and, yes, it's just tobacco), we rushed back to the beginnings of a bittersweet send-off party. If that had in fact been the Oarhouse's last night, it would have been one to be proud of.

But, hark!, in fact the bar reopened under the new management of Reg Hernandez, here pictured at the "soft opening" this past Wednesday.

(Writer/musician Anabel Bosch, photographer Ben Razon, me, and Stephen)

Tonight is the grand opening. It could get sorta rowdy, so watch out. By the way, in tracking down some of the pictures for this post, I stumbled upon a very prescient post from the Oarhouse blog about Stephen's visit last year. Pay particular attention to Ben's predictions of our return (before it even occurred to us).