HATCHET JOB
Ax bar opens in Somerville
Alcohol and axes. Who says they don’t go together?
“A beer and ax throwing? I was like,’Yeah! We’ve got to do that!’ ” Stacey Lantz, a 32year-old program manager at MIT, said last night after she and Jess Alder became the first customers at Urban Axes, the newly opened ax bar in Somerville. “We just like to do ridiculous things together.”
The Union Square bar — which doesn’t yet have a liquor license, so the alcohol portion of the entertainment is still to come — is the fifth Urban Axes to open in the U.S., after Philadelphia; Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Md; and Durham, N.C. A sixth is scheduled to open in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the next few weeks.
Krista Paton was a finance manager for Gillette in Toronto when she first read about a bar there that served up ax-throwing on the side.
“I was like, ax throwing? Ax throwing and beer?” said Paton, 36. “Then I got invited to try it at a friend’s birthday party, and I was like, why don’t we have this in the States?”
She, her husband and two friends opened the first Urban Axes in Philadelphia in 2016. By last year, they had set their sights on the Boston area, she said, but the insurance alone took almost nine months to secure.
Customers are required to sign a lengthy waiver releasing Urban Axes from liability, agreeing to drink responsibly and acknowledging that throwing axes “may result in the risk of serious injury, scarring, loss of an important bodily function, permanent disability or death.”
“It’s something most people have never done before and feels a little delightfully forbidden,” Paton said. “But you’re doing it in a very controlled environment.”
One “coach” is assigned for every two players, who throw axes at bull’s-eyes from a distance of about 14 feet in lanes separated by chain-link fences.
A one-hour session costs $25 per person, while groups of six or more can play for 2 1/2 hours for $25 each. Starting next month, leagues will be able to play for eight weeks at a cost of $140 per person.
But if your aim is lacking, or if you simply can’t get the image of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” out of your head, you can watch from a safe distance as men and women in de rigueur plaid shirts and jeans take aim.
“I am fabulous at throwing axes and can do this in my sleep,” Alder, 35, a program director at the Boston Public Health Commission, concluded after hitting the bull’s-eye each time, although her ax stuck only once. “Take from that what you will.”