Bainbridge natives Jen and Erik Kelly are deepening their hometown ties by taking over a bar a historic downtown building where community and good food and drink come together.
The pair reopened Backdoor Bar at 11 W. Main St. in Bainbridge, known formally as the Willsey Hall, earlier this year.
Jen Kelly said she and her husband purchased the space in January. The bar opened in 2020 originally.
She credited commitment to community, and happenstance, with facilitating the purchase.
“We both just have a real passion for the history of Bainbridge, and the building itself is a really old building, built in the early 1900s,” she said. “We were given the opportunity by the previous owner. It wasn’t really up for sale, they just said, ‘Hey, we think it’s time you guys come in here. You’re regulars and do you have any interest in it?’ We did, especially because we’re both previous business owners, and the rest is history.”
They held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the bar’s opening in late February.
Despite the quick turnaround time, Jen Kelly said, they’ve renovated much of the bar’s interior space and menu. Erik Kelly, she said, is a member of the Bainbridge-Guilford Central School District’s Building and Grounds team and runs his own contracting business.
“We had about a week of downtime, because we entirely redid the place — gutted bathrooms, put a new vent system in the kitchen and just gave it a nice little facelift,” she said. “We added some new beers and gave it some new touches, but we’re still keeping the previous owner’s vision and honoring the history of the building itself, while including our vision of what we wanted for the new place.”
Jen Kelly, who brings years of entrepreneurial and bar experience to the venture, said that it’s like “a small-town, hole-in-the-wall bar.”
“It’s like the perfect place if you just want to swing in for a couple beers, or bring your family, or have a Friday night out with your friends,” she said.
Jen Kelly said top-selling food items include the Backdoor burger, chicken wings and Cajun chicken sandwich.
“We have a full restaurant,” she said. “Fried food, grilled chicken sandwiches, our burgers are phenomenal, and quesadillas. We are one of the only bars in the area with Genesee Light on tap.”
Jen Kelly said their hometown approach is yielding “a really good mix” of customers.
“We’re definitely not a 21-year-old bar, we’re more along the lines of your older, blue-collar crowd to the younger crowd,” she said. “It is a place for everyone, which is why we love it. It truly is, there’s a seat for everyone here, whether it’s someone bringing in their family on a Tuesday night for dinner, or our card leagues on Wednesday nights, or somebody coming in to watch football or swinging in for a beer after work. It’s been great.”
Jen Kelly said they hope to expand with seasonal changes while continuing to emphasize community.
“We’re going to be doing a little more expansion on our deck, so we have a lot more outdoor seating come springtime,” she said, “and we’re having a St. Patrick’s Day event with Jerry’s Inn, across the street, on March 15.”
Jen Kelly said that she envisions working with many of the other businesses of Bainbridge.
“We are doing as much as we can with other businesses, and that’s one of my biggest things,” she said. “We buy our buns from Erika’s (Cakery), and I really like to keep anything I can as local as possible, on purpose, so that people can recognize flavors and businesses working together and get that smalltown, hometown feeling.”
Backdoor Bar opens at 11 a.m. daily. For more information, menu specials and upcoming events, find “Backdoor Bar” on Facebook.