Always, A Great Notion

I think I first went to A Great Notion in 2009. Back then, unless you lived on the West Side and/or came of age in the last quarter of the 20th century, the Ridgmar Boulevard neighborhood pub was something of a secret — so much so that the friend who took me there simply called it “Secret Bar.”

While it was not exactly hidden, its location between a florist and a salon in a ’70s-era strip mall was somewhat off the well-trodden stumbling grounds of Fort Worth’s larger nightlife scene, so for me, it did kind of feel like a place where you could hang around and enjoy a drink without anyone bothering you, the kind of joint that was dim and quiet, conducive to both silent ruminations and conversational contributions usually informed by cheap drinks and in response to the ambient chatter of the bar’s gregarious regulars.

At the time, I had mostly taken over a recurring column for the Weekly entitled Last Call, a series of bar reviews that former editor Gayle Reaves more accurately (and with equal parts concern and dismay) referred to as “drunken travelogs.” In that space, I wrote about that bar more than a few times, and here I am again, 15 years later, still enthused and effusive about it.

Certainly, I wrote about it a lot in part because I lived within walking distance for nearly eight years, and every time I dropped in, there was always someone who said something that sent my eavesdropping-brain down a rabbit hole to the Fort Worth of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. But mostly I wrote about the place because I just loved it.

I’ve been to neighborhood dive bars all over America, from Los Angeles to D.C., Las Cruces to Rochester, Portland to Birmingham, Galveston to Chicago, and all over Arlington and the Mid-Cities. And out of all those places and the ones in between, A Great Notion is still tops. There’s just something about it that hits the spot.

Perhaps my affinity for this retreat stems from the fact that its environs have remained relatively unchanged since it opened in the early ’70s. You can see where the space was extended at some point in the bar’s history, but otherwise, the shingles around the back bar and the half of the bar top made of decorative acrylic tiles illuminated from below hold fast to the decade that birthed it — if you’ve been to Down ’N Out on the Near Southside, these are the old vibes that that newish bar unabashedly replicates. The vibes are cozy, the staff is nice, and the crowd is affable.

It’s also a popular place to play darts, and it’s one of the bars included in the Fort Worth Dart Association’s list of official venues. While I am uninformed about the size and import of Fort Worth’s dart-playing community, I do know that A Great Notion is expanding physically to accommodate it. In a recent post, the bar announced that a planned expansion had been successfully permitted.

I stopped in during happy hour and asked the bartender, a woman named Ali, about these renovations, and she said they’re going to be knocking down the west wall and moving the dart area into the part of the property that used to house the salon, adding a beer bar so that players don’t need to walk so far to get a drink. The construction will hopefully begin in a month.

But even if the only dart you’ve been interested in is the train that takes you around Dallas, A Great Notion is worth dropping by for a drink or three. Whether you turned 21 in the last century or this one, getting a beer at this gem of a dive bar should be on your Fort Worth bingo card, if for no other reason than to see what I’ve been going on about all these years.