Pirates Tavern Bar Rescue

Thankfully, a site called Bar Rescue Updates keeps viewers informed on how these bars are doing today. Updated on June 26th, 2021, by Lynn Gibbs: For Bar Rescue fans, Jon Taffer is the epitome of entertainment and knowledge wrapped into one genius restauranteur. What makes Bar Rescue so addicting is Taffer's personality, passion, and eye for. On September 14, 2011, Spike renewed Bar Rescue for a second season for Summer 2012. Season 2 is best known for the season premiere where Jon attempted to rescue the train wreck that was a pirate themed bar called Piratz Tavern. The bar quickly undid all of Taffer's drastic changes shortly after their episode was filmed.

• Bar Rescue Pirates Tavern Aftershow
• Pirate Tavern Bar Rescue
• Piratz Tavern Bar Rescue
• Pirates Tavern Bar Rescue Closed

• 7 Worst: Punch-Drunk And Trailer-Trashed - The O'Face Bar. A restaurant is a great place for a first job, but when the managers and staff don't care, it can be horrible. This was the case at The O'Face Bar, as the staff got drunk, started fights with one another, and much, much worse. Once Jon put them to the test, the food wasn't edible.
• Taffer’s Tavern, the franchise founded by the star of Paramount Network’s “Bar Rescue,” has partnered with Sterling-based Cuisine Solutions to open at least three new restaurants in the D.C. Up first is a location at 700Sixth St. NW in Penn Quarter, slated to open by the end of the year, though staffing shortages and construction.

In this Bar Rescue episode, Jon Taffer visits Piratz Tavern in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Piratz Tavern is owned by Tracy Rebelo.

In 2007, she hosted a successful pirate-themed Halloween party.

Tracy wanted to bring this theme into her everyday life so she launched Piratz Tavern.

From the beginning, Piratz only attracted a small customer base of renaissance faire reenactors and pirate performers.

Tracey’s inexperience first surfaced when she hired her husband Juciano to run the kitchen with no cooking background.

Her next fatal flaw was staffing the bar with the customers.

The pirates continued to act like customers while the actual customers made their way out the door.

For five years, Tracey turned a blind eye to bookkeeping and now Piratz is a few months away from being shut down permanently.

Tracy says she is $900,000 in debt.

She lost her house and her credit is shot from trying to keep the bar open.

She says she lost everything and now she needs help.

On the northern border of Washington D.C. lies Silver Spring, Maryland.

It is a middle-class suburb with a thriving central business district.

By day, Silver Spring has a large business population with plenty of disposable income.

By night, those business people go home.

Jon arrives in his SUV with his wife to watch survelience and look at Yelp reviews.

Jon asks Nicole to do the recon tonight.

Bar Rescue Pirates Tavern Aftershow

Piratz Tavern is a 2,800-square-foot linear space with an underused stretch of table seating in the front and a bar area in the back.

Nicole sits down and asks for a menu.

She says that the staff seems to be living in their own little fairytale world.

Nicole ordered a glass of wine off of the menu.

The staff seem very friendly but Nicole says they seem overly friendly as if they are covering up for something.

Nicole leaves the bar.

Jon brings in Bill and Jen to do a second recon.

They were unable to get help from the staff.

It’s obvious they helped out Nicole because they know that she is Jon’s wife.

The drinks are awful and they ordered food but this is also gross.

After an hour of being in this bar, Bill and Jen return to Jon to report their findings.

Bill says the staff made him uncomfortable.

Jon heads into Piratz Tavern.

Tracey admits that she lives in her parents’ basement with her husband and 17-year-old daughter.

Jon says she’s delusional for thinking this concept would work.

Jon says that if Tracey doesn’t admit that she’s failing then things will never get better.

Tracy says she is not ashamed of how things are.

Jon says that if she isn’t ashamed then she should close right now and he can’t help her.

Jon and Juciano begin arguing about the food being poor.

Jon meets with the staff to discuss how they got to where they are now.

The staff doesn’t appreciate how Jon is talking to them.

The next day, Jon brings in expert chef Josh Capon.

The menu is 18 pages long, which isn’t good for their business.

Josh says that they need to start tasting the food before it goes out to the customers.

For the bar, Jon brings in head mixologist for Diageo, Elayne Duke.

Elayne says that their drinks are guaranteed to cause diabetic shock.

Jon pulls the team together to discuss their findings and come up with a game plan.

Elayne says they have to start from scratch in terms of training.

Jon lays out his plan with Tracy.

Jon brings up how they need to be marketing towards their market area, the workers.

Jon tries to tell her that continuing with the pirate theme will not work for them at all.

Tracy gives in and accepts that things will have to change.

They meet with the staff to discuss the news.

Tracy tells them that they have to push more towards a corporate market.

Pirate Tavern Bar Rescue

The staff don’t like how things are going to change.

Jon asks one of the staff members if he’s going to be a part of this but he walks out.

The next day, the staff is greeting with Jon having already began taking away the pirate theme.

Jon has brought in a new cook Jason, who has just got out of culinary school.

Elayne meets with the bartenders to show them a few cocktails.

She shows them the Hottie.

Josh shows them some recipes that will be added to the new menu.

Jon brings in a third expert, Jessie Barnes.

She will teach the staff how to serve business clientele.

Jessie thinks they need to get out of pirate mindset but it’s hard for the staff.

Piratz Tavern opens for the soft opening.

The staff is swamped.

Customers begin walking out of the bar because the wait time is so long.

Juciano is oblivious to any of the issues the kitchen is having and cannot run this kitchen.

Jon tells him to get his stuff together and he walks out.

Tracy goes after Juciano.

Chef Capon thinks that Jason is a very talented chef.

The servers are dropping glasses and everyone is overwhelmed.

The bartenders slowly pull it together, gaining confidence.

The customers are loving the new food.

At the end of the night, Tracy returns without Juciano.

Jon meets with the staff to discuss what went wrong.

Juciano walks into the bar.

They make Juciano a runner for relaunch.

Jon begins remodel on the bar.

Meanwhile, the staff begins promoting their new bar to targeted demographic.

Thirty-six hours later, Jon brings the staff to see their new bar.

Piratz Tavern has been renamed and is now called Corporate Bar and Grill.

The staff does not like the new concept.

However, they do like the inside of the bar.

Jon has installed a Smart Bar.

Jon says he is very happy with the bar and has no doubt it’ll be successful if run properly.

Corporate Bar and Grill opens up for relaunch.

On relaunch, the food looks beautiful.

Customers are having fun and are enjoying the new vibe of the bar.

Tracy is struggling with the change and says she is going to sleep on it for a couple of days.

What Happened Next at Piratz Tavern / Corporate Bar and Grill?

The Corporate Bar and Grill remained open for only a few days.

Tracy closed it and officially reopened as Piratz Tavern just weeks after relaunch.

Tracy still lives in her parents basement with Juciano.

Piratz Tavern closed in April 2015.

They blamed the closure on the negative backlash from appearing on Bar Rescue that led to vandalism and prank calls at the bar.

They also blamed constant repeats of the episode and their lease was not renewed.

Tracy claims that she was promised a re-rescue in Back to the Bar but it was an interview instead.

She opened a new bar called Bar Refuge in 2016 and the bar was sold to new owners in 2018.

Piratz Tavern Bar Rescue

Pirates Tavern Bar Rescue Closed

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This post was last updated in September 2021.

Last week I posted about how Jon Taffer’s so-called “Most expensive Bar Rescue ever” was a massive failure. Shortly after posting that story, the website Barrescueupdates.com hit me up with a follow-up to another Bar Rescue failure mentioned in that article: Piratz Tavern in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Piratz Tavern episode of Bar Rescue from the show’s second season is one of the most legendary Bar Rescues of all time. Taffer and the bar’s Jolly Rodger-loving owners, Tracy Rebelo and her husband/bar chef, Juciano, clashed immensely over the course of the episode. In the episode, Rebelo claimed she was in the hole $900,000 and forced to live in her parents’ basement with her husband.

Because the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland is the LAST place on the world you’d expect a pirate-themed bar (…seriously, go to Ocean City or something, idiots), Taffer turned it into a swanky after-work hangout for white collar office drones called “The Corporate Bar And Grill.” The Rebelo’s hated Taffer’s attempt at rescuing the bar and converted it back to Piratz’s Tavern just one day later. After a mutiny against Taffer and quit a bit of fall-out, the bar briefly claimed to be doing well three years ago when the episode originally aired.

Then things soured. The bar lost its lease and its last day of business was Saturday, April 4th. According to the Washington Post, the owner’s continue to take their frustration out on Taffer and Bar Rescue, YEARS after the episode originally aired:

The owner’s frustration stems, in part, from her own fateful decision in early 2012, when she and her husband, Juciano, did something very un-pirate: They asked for help to rescue Piratz Tavern, where the sharks were circling. The couple requested a makeover from Spike TV’s “Bar Rescue” and its host Jon Taffer, who’s something of a one-eyed swashbuckler himself. Tracy and Juciano hoped Taffer would plug the holes of their listing ship and save it from a rendezvous with Davy Jones’ Locker.

…

If Tracy Rebelo had a broadsword in her hand when she first saw the renovated operation, she might have sliced Taffer in half, right on the spot. Instead, she and Juciano wasted little time dismantling the Corporate structure of their new place. They even burned the business logo in effigy, caught in an elegiac video, complete with its own sea shanty soundtrack. Within a few weeks, the couple relaunched their pirate ship, although Spike TV’s endless re-airings of the infamous Piratz Tavern episode continued to cast a long shadow on the business, Tracy notes.

“Unfortunately, the aftermath of reality TV has became an unbearable burden,” Tracy wrote via e-mail. “The constant airing of our episode of ‘Bar Rescue’ has had a widespread negative effect on our social media presence. Especially recently it seemed John Taffer was doing his best to personally provoke me on his Facebook page. I can honestly say there were no positive gains by our participation on the show, only negative, and as a result the decision was made not to renew our lease.”

What a bunch of cry babies. Taffer’s solution wasn’t exactly great for Piratz, but at least it was a solution to help them out of the silly hole they dug for themselves. In true passive-agressive form, the bar’s owner then decided to put Taffer and company on blast on Facebook:

Facebook

I can’t believe they had the balls to even ask Jon Taffer back. What a bunch of assholes:

Last night on a clip show catching up with old Bar Rescues, Taffer put the owners of Piratz on blast for burning down everything he set up for them as The Corporate Bar And Grill:

Taffer clearly has no use for these jabronis. I’m happy to see him laugh these clowns off:

@matt_gnatowski If he came in with the right attitude, yes. #TafferTalk

— Jon Taffer (@jontaffer) April 6, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAnd why wouldn’t he re-rescue Piratz Tavern?

@TommyPacak Honestly, I find them incredibly unlikeable and did not want to spend 5 minutes with them. #TafferTalk

— Jon Taffer (@jontaffer) April 6, 2015

Shut it down. Once and for all. Good move, Taffer. You’re better than this ship of fools.

Ship of fools on a cruel sea, ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter, ship of fools.