Bar’s fate: Death, then glory

Delray Beach’s Death or Glory bar just staged its own funeral. It will be reborn as The Falcon

On the night of Death or Glory’s “funeral bash” in Delray Beach, 130 patrons showed up in black veils and black dresses and jotted names into a funeral guest book, ready to celebrate the life of the dearly departed. Owner Annie Blake put on waterproof mascara, the better to bawl her eyes out without looking a complete mess. Even Buddy the bar’s resident mascot — Blake’s white half-Havanese, half-toy poodle — looked gloomier than usual.

It was just the kind of tonguein-cheek sendoff a cocktail haunt like Death or Glory deserved.

Blake, who is not above throwing a funeral party for no good reason, had one very good reason this time: After five years of kitschy fun and stiff cocktails, Death or Glory, a decadently dark and gothy drinking den, was closing for good. The bar’s last day was April 25.

“All my friends were talking in hushed tones, telling me, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss,’ really playing it up,” Blake recalls with a laugh. “It had whimsy but it was bittersweet. I drank so much tequila.”

Even if Death or Glory is gone, the bar named after a punk song by the Clash won’t stay dead for long. Within a month Blake and her new business partner, Sean Iglehart, plan to rebrand, fix up and revive the bar as The Falcon, a new craft cocktail spot and global street food gastropub debuting as soon as late May.

Blake admits that one month will be a fast transformation for her bar at 116 NE Sixth Ave. She’d only shared the news of Death or Glory’s demise on April 22, three days before the funeral bash, but even so, the strong last-minute turnout felt “encouraging,” she says. “It was so packed and so nice. We’ll go out with a bang now

and regroup with something fun and sexy.”

She decided to close Death or Glory after her business partner, Ayme Harrison (formerly of Fort Lauderdale’s Kreepy Tiki Bar & Lounge), sold her stake and moved to the U.K. three months ago for family reasons, leaving Blake to operate the bar by herself. Her friend Iglehart, who runs the successful Sweetwater Bar & Grill in Boynton Beach, a kitchen with craft cocktails and rare whiskeys, stepped in to help consult.

“I was like, ‘Maybe you should do this full-time,’ ” Blake recalls telling Iglehart. “And he did. He was excited to take on an extra project. I trust everything about him — his cocktails, his food, his design sense.”

The Falcon will be a

“2.0 revival” of the Falcon House, a bygone gastropub in that space that closed in 2011, she adds. (Before opening Sweetwater, Iglehart was a barback and later head bartender at Falcon House.) The name is also a reference to the historic 1925 Falcon House that Death or Glory had occupied since 2017.

Over the next several weeks, Blake and Iglehart plan to rip up and replace the house’s 100-year-old flooring (“it’s about to cave in”), repaint the walls and brighten the bar area so that it’s “a little more sexy inside, a little more house party outside,” she says. About half of Death of Glory’s former staff will return to work at The Falcon.

“It’s a facelift that’s needed anyway at this old house,” Blake says. “Atlantic Avenue has gotten very corporate lately, and it’s still important for locals to have a place to call their own. This is a Delray place for Delray people.”

And that means Death or Glory’s unabashed kitsch will stay. For those wondering: Yes, Buddy will remain the mascot of The Falcon. So will the bar’s annual holiday tradition of transforming into Halloweenand Christmas-themed pop-up bars, filled with tacky decorations such as inflatable humping reindeer and IV blood bags.

The Falcon, at 116 NE Sixth Ave., in Delray Beach, will open in late May.

JOHN MCCALL/SUN SENTINEL Co-owner Annie Blake, left, pictured during Death or Glory’s annual transformation into the Christmas pop-up bar Miracle, has closed her popular cocktail haven and gastropub in Delray Beach. It will reopen in a month as the Falcon, and the pop-up bars will continue.

DEATH OR GLORY BAR Death or Glory bar permanently closed on April 25 with a “funeral bash” closing party, but its owners plan to rebrand and reopen the bar within as month as The Falcon, a cocktail den and gastropub specializing in global street food.