A peek at Pancha’s, preserving authenticity
I grew up running around Yountville; so did my mother who is now in her 80s. Do the math on that! Later on, I began my early wine industry career at a Yountville winery in the early ‘90s and then raised my daughter who is now in her mid-20s in this town.
While not as much as my mother, who rode the Greyhound bus from downtown Napa out into the countryside in the 1950s to spend the weekend with her bestie in Yountville, I have still witnessed vast change in this tiny town.
Over the years, one of the mainstays for locals was Pancha’s Bar until it closed in 2019. Rustic, rough, owned by a local family, never updated, an “enter with no expectations” kind of place with Rose as the matriarch, Pancha’s was an only-in-Yountville, iconic space.
When it was announced that Ren and Marilyn Harris and Paul and Suzie Frank, the new owners, had promised to preserve and renovate Pancha’s, my thoughts were positive. The last thing, I felt, that we needed in town, was a spot once meant for locals to be redesigned to appeal more to tourists. We had already lost Hurley’s (I will never get over that). We needed a longstanding establishment, a place that has long been here, just for us.
My prayer was that Pancha’s would remain Pancha’s. No glitz, no glamour, no pomp, nothing trendy, no brunchy influencers, no frosé drinks. Give me a jukebox, give me a pool table, give me a cold beer, give the people what they want: Pancha’s, tried and true.
So, I started to ask questions. And while I asked for a sneak peek, apparently the time is not yet right. Sandblasters are blasting, and painters are painting. From what I can see, the exterior remains historically intact. From the outside, the newly renovated Pancha’s looks like it’s smiling, like it has just been given new life.
Like youngsters awaiting a gift on a special occasion, we, as locals, cannot wait to find out what’s happening inside. The “wrapping paper” around the building has consisted of a chain link fence and dark tarp for many months.
I recently walked around the site, and crunched the familiar gravel in the parking lot beneath my feet. Just being there made me a bit thirsty. I yearned for the tastiest food truck burrito in the Napa Valley (yes, I would like the radish and the cilantro please!), I felt like chalking a pool cue, and I wanted to call all my rowdy friends who have hung out with me there, often late at night, over the years.
Instead, early one morning I called Scott Lewis, partner and manager of V Wine Cellar and managing partner of the new Pancha’s. “What is happening at Pancha’s?” I asked?
Lewis said that the refurbishment of the building ended up being a much larger project than anticipated. “The foundation was gone. The roof was gone. Support beams were not stable. So, it’s turned into more of a full-time, a full project. We essentially had to build a bar from the inside out, keeping within the permits of what we could do.”
Pancha’s, built in the late 1800s, is way more than 100 years old.
Along with the process of reinventing and restoring, came much more time, labor, construction and investment than originally anticipated. Still, Lewis is optimistic that Pancha’s will reopen in this fall season. Guess what? It’s now fall. The renovated Pancha’s may be coming soon!
Lewis reports that there has been some sort of new delay nearly every day, delays on the roof, the doors, “I’m not going to open it up, unless it’s completely done and people are trained,” he said. “So that’s the other part of it.”
I wondered what we could all expect. I still want it to feel like Pancha’s. “It was such an iconic place, but it was really in shambles,” Lewis said; everything needed to be replaced, refurbished and brought up to code.
One of the most frequent questions he has been asked is, “Will Pancha’s be turned into a fancy cocktail bar?”
Lewis answered adamantly, “No, it is not. And I think people are concerned about the pricing, and so there will be very fair prices for things for locals. We will also have a lot of the old memorabilia. The bar layout and everything is pretty much the same, with some surprises. I’ll leave it at that.”
Surprises? I am in!
“There will be one pool table from the original day,” he said, adding that he has had it refurbished.
The new Pancha’s will also have an outdoor, street-facing patio space, due to the revision of the portion of northern Washington Street that also created outdoor patron space for neighboring Ciccio.
Lewis also said that there were windows on the exterior of Pancha’s many years ago that were boarded up, “We will be bringing those windows back to life. So that’s exciting. And we are redoing the back garden as well, so it will be a nice area to sit and enjoy a glass of wine or a beer.”
“We are building something for the locals, so that they can hang out, and that’s my goal,” Lewis said. “A lot of the same memorabilia will be in there. While the Solis family did take some of the memorabilia, we will be rehanging the old stuff as well as some new stuff. Keeping it within the theme of Pancha’s and what it was.”
Lewis has encountered many delays, from town council approvals to keeping the colors authentic and taking Pancha’s back to what it used to be before it was plastered over.
“We want to keep the neat parts of Pancha’s, within the theme of what it always was, which is a bar. There won’t be food, but we will still welcome food trucks outside. We are permitted to use a microwave. So, we will have snacks. But there won’t be any food made or prepped in the bar,” he said.
Finally, I asked him about the gravel parking lot. For me, driving or walking into that lot is a sensory experience that I did not want to see paved over. “There are no intentions of hard topping it,” Lewis said.
“We are trying to build something for the community. We want to have space in the back where people can sit and just take a breather. Have their lunch, have a coffee, have a glass of wine, have a beer, whatever. We are not getting into the fancy cocktail regime. We will be doing Bloody Marys, Negronis, Manhattans, Martinis, Irish Coffees. There will be a niche for everyone.”
While the official hours have not been announced, Pancha’s is set to be open earlier on the weekends for televised sports, and the plan is to keep closing hours relatively the same, shutting down around 1:30 a.m.
“We are going to gauge the level of business,” Lewis concluded, “Everything is an improvement. Pancha’s is really for the locals. We appreciate the love that the town has given us.”
