Local bar formerly known as Cowboy Ranch is set to reopen
Bricktown’s popular Cowboy Ranch country bar, which abruptly closed in December 2022, is set to reopen as Oklahoma Ranch in 2023.
The newly titled country bar announced Monday on social media it plans to open Friday, Feb. 3. The revamped venue is set to include a 3,300square-foot hardwood dance floor and live entertainment lineups. Oklahoma Ranch also announced it would host an initial concert with country music singers Kylie Morgan and Jay Allen on Feb. 24, according to the venue’s Facebook page.
The name will be different, but much of what downtown Oklahoma City residents had come to love about the country bar will remain the same, said colandlord Brent Brewer. He said he and his brother, Brett Brewer, were approached with multiple offers from potential tenants eager to keep the venue open once the new year arrived.
“There’s a ton of good support that the community has for the place, and it seemed like it was very successful and people were missing it,” Brent Brewer said. “We fielded all of those calls and vetted everybody and decided to go with a local investment group. They chose to keep the same management staff in place, the same waitresses and bartenders, because it was important to get that place back open as soon as possible.”
Oklahoma Ranch is set to occupy the same space at 425 E California Ave. in downtown Oklahoma City as the former Cowboy Ranch. The previous iteration of the bar closed after its owner, facing thousands of dollars in unpaid debt and taxes, was evicted in December.
Brewer also said the staff wanted to rebrand the bar with a name that would sound inviting to everyone in the state. Despite the name change, Oklahoma Ranch will be operated by many of the same people who’d contributed to its success as the Cowboy Ranch, including new owner Eddie Wade, the former manager of Cowboy Ranch.
Wade told The Oklahoman he is excited to take over the lease for the rebranded bar, especially with the opportunity to again work alongside employees he has come to regard as family over the years.
“We all have our home back,” Wade said. “When it shut down, I called every employee that I had, every one of them individually, and told them what was going on and to keep their heads up because good things were still going to happen to us, and I worked hard enough to get that done.”
Brewer said the quick turnaround at Oklahoma Ranch is a testament to the welcoming spirit and fun environment Wade and his team had cultivated at the bar.
“Eddie’s been there since Day One,” Brewer said. “He’s an amazing manager. I’m not sure anybody else in the town could run a place like that. It’s amazing what he accomplished in a short amount
of time, and the staff he had put together there and the experience that he’s created. We couldn’t be happier about the choice the investors made to keep the same staff in place.”
Rich Taylor, a local investor and one of Wade’s managing partners, said Oklahoma Ranch moving forward will emphasize live music as one of its major attractions. He said the staff had wanted to host concerts often, but were not able to do so because of pandemic restrictions.
“Live music is very important to me in making this place a success,” Taylor said. “It was extremely important to me that we start off on a new foot and not only operate this as a nightclub, but operate this as a live music venue, as well as a country bar.”
Taylor, who was instrumental in helping book the upcoming Kylie Morgan and Jay Allen concert, said the venue hopes to schedule five additional concerts as the benchmark for the year.
Staff at Oklahoma Ranch also said paperwork for permits and licensing for sign changes and other work in the building were submitted weeks ago and only await approval from the city and the state. In the meantime, management has made it clear they have no intention of slowing down.
“In Oklahoma, there is a process where you can open before your licensing is approved, and that’s something that we’re doing,” Taylor said.
The most prominent change to the interior of the venue is Oklahoma Ranch’s “monster of a dance floor,” Wade said, which was being completed this week. At 3,300 square feet of hardwood, Wade believes it might be the biggest in the state, if not the region.
“Just to be back there and be able to see all of the good times, with the fun and outgoing people that I have, I’m very excited to see the community come back around,” Wade said. “Bricktown gets a bad rap sometimes, but what nightlife doesn’t have its hiccups from time to time? Here at (the) Ranch, we don’t really have any, and that’s what we’ve worked hard to make happen.”
The circumstances leading up to Oklahoma Ranch’s relaunch were not without tragedy, however.
In December, the same week that the bar first closed, its previous owner Jeff Rogers died. Wade, who graduated from Del City High School only a year before Rogers, had known him for decades, and he still has difficulty discussing his friend’s death.
“Everybody has been trying to support one another, and we make sure that we keep in touch with his wife,” Wade said. “Everything has been just taken one day at a time, like they say. Some days are good, and some days are bad, but for the most part everybody has really pulled together in helping us all get through this. But it’s all positive moving forward, and that’s my whole thing, because that’s what Cowboy Ranch was: a positive entity here in the city that everyone loved. Oklahoma Ranch is just going to continue that.”