New owner, new concept for West Plaza restaurant and bar

After 17 years in the restaurant industry as an employee, Gordon Roberts is ready to be an owner.

He is purchasing the Standard Pour, at 1511 Westport Road, from owner David Sederholm. The Standard Pour is scheduled to shut down after business Sunday, Oct. 1, and then reopen as The Pressed Penny Tavern in late October or early November.

The name is in homage to a story about Ernest Hemingway.

According to the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum in Florida, costs at the Key West house surged when workers put in an in-ground pool, digging through solid coral, “an extraordinary luxury for a residential home in 1930s Key West,” and the only one within 100 miles. The final costs in 1938 dollars was $20,000 or more than $335,000 in today’s dollars, according to some estimates.

The museum says that few people know that even though Hemingway protested, he was the one who planned the pool. Still, Hemingway, purportedly exasperated at the expense of the venture, flung down a penny on the half-built flagstone pool patio and shouted to his wife, “Pauline, you’ve spent all but my last penny, so you might as well have that!” A penny is now embedded in cement at the north end of the pool to memorialize Hemingway’s purported outburst, the museum said.

The Pressed Penny name “embodies everything I like about the industry and what I want to do here — classic and casual, something old and new,” Roberts said.

He plans some classic cocktails and new menu items, while keeping some customer favorites.

Boozefish Wine Bar opened in the spot in late 2001 but by 2014 the owner was looking for a buyer. Sederholm, a portfolio manager, purchased the business and opened a gastropub called The Standard Pour in 2015.

This story was originally published September 29, 2017 at 8:53 AM with the headline "New owner, new concept for West Plaza restaurant and bar."