Neither cancer nor COVID-19 could stop Tacoma bar from becoming a great restaurant, too

Some bars have cheap drinks, others have good beer. Some have good food, others have genial service. A few have just the right atmosphere, the right mix of tables, reasonable sound levels and flattering lighting. It’s rare for a single space to successfully, simultaneously, nurture all of these traits.

It’s extraordinary to be a neighborhood bar that attracts a waiting list on weekends, but they come for the loco moco and the crab cakes, a Thai burger and a slice of homemade key lime pie, and they stay for the first-name-basis hospitality.

I first visited Thirsty Hound Drinkery in February 2020, then under two weeks old. It was a funny location, I was told, in a small plaza next to India Mahal, a teriyaki joint and a Domino’s on the Tacoma-University Place border, where Jackson Avenue becomes Bridgeport Way. How would it ever stand out?

For one, there are few places where family Thai recipes like peanut sauce chicken over jasmine rice and larb na (superior to the average Thai restaurant’s version) mingle with chili and jalapeno poppers (superior to the average bar’s offering). But owners Malaty Lim and Rik Filion, inspired by her Thai roots and decades in the industry, were on a mission to create a space that would be “whatever you need in your neighborhood.”

With high-top tables lining floor-to-ceiling windows, adorned with soft curtains, and an L-shaped bar with 10 seats leading to a tiny galley kitchen, it was built very much to be a bar — one that felt like home. A low-top table in the back leads to a TV nook with a leather couch and coffee table, the convivial backyard ambiance set by bistro lights strung from the ceiling. Monochrome photos of South Sound scenes hang in black frames on gray walls, a solid rock-not-pop playlist leaves volume for conversation with your date or the stranger next to you.

“We have kind of a couple of philosophies,” said Filion, a financial analyst by trade and self-described introvert who now is a bit of a beer nerd, “and one of them is: Treat your customers like friends. Hopefully, one day, they become friends, and we’ve become friends with a lot of our customers.”

Even early on, it seemed the bar was attracting return visitors. Twenty months later, it most assuredly has.

Fighting cancer and COVID

The couple has managed to create one of the city’s loveliest bars — and, to their surprise, restaurants — in the face of adversity that many businesses have faced since March 2020, and the kind that every year affects more than 150,000 people, their families and friends.

Lim was diagnosed in October 2019 with Stage 4 breast cancer, two years after defeating her first bout with the disease. Relegated to a wheelchair, in deep pain that required spinal surgery, her husband accepted that she would never walk again. They had been planning to open Thirsty Hound at the same time, after leasing the former bakery and café that summer. Suddenly, they weren’t sure if it would ever happen.

“You’re hoping for the best,” Filion reflected recently. “We had to completely change how we think.”

Though lower on energy than before the cancer returned, Lim started walking again, and the bar was a go, buoyed by Lim’s sister Stephanie Keov in the kitchen and brother Eric Lim at the bar. A few weeks later, restaurants shuttered, and the couple found themselves scrambling to serve bar food in takeout boxes and cocktails in mason jars.

“When the pandemic hit, I think it looked pretty bleak,” said Filion, adding that their neighbor LAON Teriyaki closed and the owner moved out of state. “But we held on. There was just so much uncertainty.”

Those initial regulars? They would come by every week, especially for the pomegranate margarita with house-infused tequila. Filion began posting regularly on Instagram: coconut shrimp, pad kra pao, musubi bowl, spiked vanilla iced coffee, blackberry whiskey smash, the current tap list of mostly Washington and Oregon beers. He honed his voice and always stayed personal, something lacking from too many business feeds these days.

Those three months of the initial shutdown “forced us to focus on being a restaurant instead of a bar,” said Lim, the menu blossoming into fresh and eclectic food from scratch wherever possible. Now, their rush happens at dinnertime, from 5:30-8:30 p.m. With room for about 40 seats, it quickly fills up, especially on Fridays and Saturdays when you can relish a cup of Lim’s nuanced tom kha gai.

“The pandemic actually made us even stronger. We’ve learned so much, and found customers to be so extremely loyal,” Lim said.

Its success also gave her purpose, she said. “I was always the go-go-go type of girl. You’re kind of that invincible thing, but I’m reminded, I live from scan to scan.”

Every three months, she learns whether the treatments are working to elongate her life, or if the cancer has spread beyond her bones and deeper into her organs, as happened two weeks before Thanksgiving 2020 — which coincided with the state’s second restaurant shutdown of the year.

The situation looked dire for a few months, they said, but she again bounced back and returned to the bar, which yields “mixed feelings.”

“I love this place,” she told me this week, “but it doesn’t give you the same gratification. Cancer rears its ugly head and says, ‘Hey!’ But to see how people packed this place, it does make me so happy. I’m so happy about that, but it makes me so sad.”

The joy is that people have embraced Filion and Lim’s little bar that could, and it has given them an outlet to bring awareness to late-stage cancer. Compared to detection and prevention efforts, metastatic breast cancer receives far less funding and research, she says, leaving women (and men) like her feeling alone and unsupported. They have run a few campaigns to raise money for organizations like METAvivor.

The sorrow, she continued, is that she can’t give it 100 percent because there are “so many other important things in life,” and sometimes, your health comes first.

Filion chimed in: “She is the best cook, the best bartender, the best server.” If she could run at 100 percent, “This would be the best bar in Tacoma.”

Perhaps it is.

THIRSTY HOUND DRINKERY

▪ 1905 Bridgeport Way W., University Place, 253-302-5606, thirstyhounddrinkery.com

▪ Wednesday-Saturday 4 p.m.-close (midnight or later on weekends)

▪ Details: Thai and Hawaiian-influenced bar food with cocktails, wine and PNW beer; takeout available by phone, follow instagram.com/thirstyhounddrinkery for daily specials

This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 5:05 AM.