Irish pub Trinity Hall closed quietly in Dallas’ Mockingbird Station last week. Proprietor Marius Donnelly purposefully didn’t tell the thousands of soccer fans, Irish ex-pats, vegans and whiskey lovers who have perched on the barstools in the dark, cozy pub over the past 20 years.
“That’s not how we wanted to go,” he says.
He didn’t want anyone to raise a glass in mourning. He didn’t want his customers to leave feeling sad. So he closed before many of them would even know it.
It was an Irish goodbye, with good intentions.
Donnelly did not renew Trinity Hall’s lease at Mockingbird Station. He had planned to, but the coronavirus got the best of his business, he says. Imagine the whiplash: The pub closed in mid-March 2020 because of the pandemic. It reopened in May 2020, then closed a month later when all bars were forced to close a second time. Trinity Hall finally made its triumphant return nearly a year later, on June 5, 2021, and Donnelly was thrilled to welcome back regulars — even if they’d missed two St. Patrick’s Days together.
Some 12 weeks later, Donnelly closed the pub permanently, right near its 20th anniversary. What happened?
He hoped to get money from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund — a grant from the Small Business Administration that pumped $28.6 billion into independent businesses. About 101,000 restaurants and food companies applied nationwide, and just 6,406 from Texas received money, our Claire Ballor reported.
Trinity Hall wasn’t one of them. And that was that.
“It would have dramatically changed the economics moving forward,” Donnelly says.
Open 362 days a year
Nobody accidentally stumbles into Trinity Hall. It’s on the second floor of Mockingbird Station, up a set of stairs and around the corner. It’s a great location, if you ask Donnelly, because it’s an easy walk to the DART stop and the Angelika movie theater next door. Thirsty professionals work in the office towers surrounding it.
But Trinity Hall still felt like a little bit of a secret.
“I’ll miss the fun of surprising someone with something they don’t expect,” Donnelly says.
Donnelly, who grew up in Ireland, hired several Irishmen over the years who had “the gift of gab,” as he calls it. The bar eventually expanded to 200 beers and 300 whiskeys. His bartenders were asked not only to pour drinks but to provide warm company while they taught customers “to taste whiskey, not drink whiskey,” Donnelly says.
The bar developed a reputation for being a watering hole for an eclectic group of Dallas drinkers.
On Sundays, Irish musicians would meet up and play while young Irish dancers performed, their parents sipping pints. During happy hours and at dinnertime, Trinity Hall became a meet-up spot for vegans because of the vegan shepherd’s pie and other no-meat, no-dairy dishes on the menu. Eventually, the vegan menu blossomed into 25% of the pub’s food sales.
The pub was also a middle-of-the-night soccer hangout. Starting with the World Cup soccer matches in 2002, Donnelly occasionally opened the pub at 3 a.m. so fans could drink water and soda — no alcohol allowed after 2 a.m. — and watch their favorite team. The bar continued to be a popular soccer spot for the next decade and a half.
The bar was open 362 days a year — not on Christmas, Thanksgiving or Fourth of July. The busiest day, by far, was St. Patrick’s Day.
‘Pubs are a good place to remember someone’
Just two stools in Trinity Hall are adorned with customers’ names.
There’s James “Doc” Oldham, a Navy veteran, tuba player and a local college professor. And there’s Gary Kennedy, a regular bargoer who had a heart condition.
Kennedy took his last breaths in the pub, after suffering a heart attack during dinner with friends. Oldham was at the pub the night before he died at home.
Instead of being overly sentimental about their deaths, Donnelly says the stools serve as a way to honor two friends of Trinity Hall.
“Pubs are a good place to remember someone,” Donnelly says.
But what will regulars do to remember the pub itself — the place that served pints of Guinness and plates of fish and chips to anyone who cared to climb the stairs?
They’ll have to think about the good times, Donnelly says, wiping away a tear.
I had to wonder whether he has plans to open another pub, in another neighborhood.
“I don’t expect to,” he says.
