The Tank Room is now open at 18th Street and Grand
The storefront at 1813 Grand (just south of the Green Lady Lounge) was previously the Gold Exchange, a shop where people traded in their jewelry for cash. For the past several months, Dustin Racen and Chadwick Veach have been building the space into a bar called the Tank Room, which opened just before Christmas.
“That’s what they called the area of steel cases where they kept the gold – the ‘tank room’,” Veach says. “And they left the steel cases behind, so we had them refinished at an auto-body shop and hung them behind the bar.”
Veach and Racen are first-time bar owners – Veach has worked at Power & Light bars for the last five years, and Racen works for a video production company – and they’ve taken a thoroughly do-it-yourself approach to the project. “We built out the bar entirely by ourselves,” Veach says. “It was basically a year of power tools and watching remodeling videos on YouTube.”
That’s pretty impressive, given the finished product. There’s a raw, exposed-brick aesthetic, but also some nice tables with votives (it’s dark in there, in a good way), and an elevated seating area. The latter will come in handy during the live music performances they plan on hosting most nights of the week. Racen says they’ve got their schedule booked into February. It includes Whiskey Wednesdays with Bob Reeder, who performs regularly at O’Malley’s, in Weston, Missouri. “We’re booking a lot of different acts – indie, alternative, singer-songwriter,” Racen says. “We’re excited to be next to a jazz club to complement what they’re doing.”
The Tank Room (open Tuesday-Saturday, until 1:30 a.m.) is also serving pizza slices and offers shots on tap, including a bacon-infused Bulleit Rye and a lemon-cinnamon whiskey. And plans are up in the air for the basement space, which until about a year ago was an underground bondage dungeon called the Sammich Stop.
“It’s pretty wild down there,” Racen says. “The guy who ran it called himself ‘Master Richard’, and when he moved out, he left a lot of his setup. There’s medical tables and huge wooden crosses and buckets of scalpels and syringes. He even left a dentist chair. We’re still trying to figure out what to do with the dentist chair.”
