A Sad Day for Steak Sandwiches

Another Bradenton institution is no more, as the beloved Boiler Room Bar & Grill on Manatee Avenue West–home of Manatee County's best cheesesteak sandwiches–closed its doors on Saturday with less than a week's notice. Its shuttering marked the latest in a string of local closings in recent years, all of which seem to amount to a sort of death by a thousand papercuts in terms of the Manatee County many of us would prefer to remember.

I turned 45 a couple of weeks ago, and I'll admit that few things make me feel older than the drastic rise in cranky reactions tothe way things used to be, but I suppose that's where I'm at in life. I gripe about my 15-year-old's musical selections–When was the last time you played a song with an actual instrument in it?,I recently complained. I get increasingly irritated by the way people drive, the way they seem forever buried in their smartphones, the way they spend so much time trying to "own" someone with different (if equally uninformed) political views on social media, the automated customer feedback loops I get stuck in when Amazon tries to get me to "chat" with an AI bot instead of an actual human (who would've thought we'd be pining for the good old days of call centers based in India), the list goes on.

But the thing that seems to crease me the most these days is the way the immediate space around me, mycommunityif you will, continues to lose more and more of the guideposts I've always looked to in defining it. The first big one was Ace's, the iconic live music venue that brought national-touring acts to the small, two-story barn off Palma Sola Blvd with the best acoustics in southwest Florida. Ace'sclosed its doorsin 2018 and the local music scene hasn't been the same since.

Last year,we lostMiller's Dutch Kitch'n, the only restaurant in Manatee County that made southern fried chicken in a way that would have garnered compliments in legendary yardbird cities like New Orleans, Memphis or Savannah. These days, fried chicken nights consist of a stop at Publix for some carryout. If anyone knows of a better local bird, please, for the love of all things sacred, let me know.

Like Ace's, the Boiler Room takes with it not only its delicacies but a popular community hangout, the kind of place that even without knowing its backstory, you can manage tofeelits history, upon entering. I first discovered the Boiler Room when I moved to West Bradenton a decade ago and wrote a very favorable review of their "famous steak sandwiches" in 2011. It was just the kind of neighborhood joint I grew up with north of Philadelphia, where I also developed a taste for steak hoagies and chicken Phillies. As Iwrote then, the Boiler Room was "the real deal" when it came to such delicacies.

Cheap beer and banter with the locals over pool, darts or foosball made the joint an easy place to kill a few hours after work, where everyone from lawyers to laborers bellied up to the bar for a cold one and something off the menu, which included a wide array of top-shelf bar food favorites, including an underrated burger that could hold its own with other Bradenton landmarks like Council's and Shake Pit. I could walk there from my house and so long as I threw on a baseball hat, no one would recognize me and start talking local politics after I'd turned that part of my brain off for the day.

The first time I met owner Matt Lavallee, however, someone mentioned who I was and he took the time to give me a very entertaining treatise on his own political philosophy that included a chance to read a manifesto he'd written on the subject, calling for the formation of a new Fox party (after the animal, not the network). Lavallee didn't cite a specific reason for the closure, but I'd have to imagine he may have just grown tired. It was rare to stop by and not see him working up a sweat behind the bar.

Lavallee's presence was similar to Lawton Smith's at Council's, another iconic haunt thatclosed its doors brieflyin 2016 until Sandi Wagner and Kimberly Duffy stepped in to take over the reins after Lawton decided to hang up his spatula following decades at the helm of the burger joint/pool hall his grandfather opened in 1936. The story was no different for Ace's, which fell to wrecking ball when Renee Bennett could no longer support the money-losing operation while running a separate business to keep the lights on both at the barn and at home. The reality of most mom and pop businesses is that for the margins to work, the owner has to get their hands dirty on a daily basis and that kind of grind will lead to an early grave if they don't know when to call it a day.

Another reality is that most Manatee County real estate winds up having become too valuable for such outfits to be undertaken a second time around. Banks, corporate chain restaurants and other businesses that can scale at a much more efficient level are always more likely to succeed them. There's no word as to whether someone might try to operate another restaurant at the Boiler Room's location, but one can only hope that down the road we get to publish a Council's like comeback tale. Meanwhile, the restaurant has been packed all week long as fans poured in to have one last meal.

The loss is sure to be felt by many, as the Boiler Room was a popular meeting place after high school sporting events. That became even truer following the closing of Smitty's–the only other true bar and grill on the west side of Manatee Avenue–in 2016, leaving the Boiler Room as the last place where you could grab a late-night beer and bite on that side of town. Though it will be missed by many, the community owes Lavallee an enormous debt of gratitude for keeping such a wonderful place in operation for so long.

That said, we would all do well to remember how helpful it is to such operations when we support local businesses over their chain rivals. While Manatee County continues to lose places like the Boiler Room, we still have an inordinate amount of such places remaining. From Council's reincarnation to similarly historied joints like the Shake Pit, Duffy's, Skinny's and newer local owner/operator hot spots like S.O.B Burgers and Birdrock Taco Shack, there's plenty of chances to show some love in an effort to keep more favored institutions from being relegated to our fond memories.