The Moon and Bars: Lunar Lounge, Barkeep Supply and the story of Julia McLish

Photography by Kennon Bryce

Some stories have details that seem completely extraneous, like the friend who can’t remember if he got the burger on Tuesday or Wednesday, and after 30 seconds of his stammering, you just have to ask if it matters. On the other hand:

It’s 2011, and Julia McLish is driving through Edmond on her way to or from a pizza delivery. Yes, once upon a time, today’s undisputed cocktail queen of Oklahoma City was driving around beneath a Pizza Hut cartopper. “I saw a sign at The Garage on Bryant and 2nd: ‘Hiring bartenders. No experience required,’” McLish remembers.

Why that matters is important in the past and present, because of who she has become, and because she and her college friend — and now business partner in Lunar Lounge — Zach Armfield had been sitting at The Hi-Lo having drinks and discussing their planned future as bar owners a couple of years before she saw the sign. Neither had ever worked as a bartender, but they very much wanted to own a bar. The audacity would be comical and perhaps sad if they had never gone on to be bar owners … but here we are.

“I was wearing my Pizza Hut delivery uniform the first day, and I just walked in without thinking about how I looked,” she says. “Somehow I got a second interview, so I dressed more like someone who isn’t delivering pizzas all day, and I got the job.”

This is where we normally insert “and the rest is history” or some other trope, but the truth is the path from “no experience required” to Barkeep Supply and Lunar Lounge, McLish’s two concepts in Midtown, is not a straight line. The year she got her first bartending gig was also the same year she lost her father; they were very close. He was an entrepreneur, like his daughter has turned out to be, and a father who encouraged his very curious, very bright daughter to try sports, science and entrepreneurship with equal enthusiasm.

“I didn’t know I would love bartending,” she says. “I tried sports before high school, and really enjoyed them. And like a bunch of kids, I wanted to be a marine biologist because I loved animals. My childhood in Norman was great. On game day I got to use parked cars in the yard — we lived near Campus Corner — for extra money. But deciding what to do with my life was hard. I changed majors three times in college, because I think I was crippled by the finality of the decision.”

She took to bartending, though, thanks in large part to two skills she likely didn’t know she had at the time: a remarkable palate and the rare ability to abstract flavors. The latter is something that great chefs have, too. They don’t need to cook every iteration of a recipe; they simply “taste” the flavor combinations as abstract concepts. Truthfully, it’s a combination of a natural ability combined with tasting hundreds or thousands of ingredients over a career, but the former has to be there to make the most of the latter.

McLish’s career put her behind the bars at The Garage, Drum Room, VZD’s and The Criterion, but ultimately she wanted her own thing. She was pregnant with her daughter Luanna (now 6) at VZD’s, when the “What am I going to do now?” moment set in. It was actually her father’s early death that made possible her path to ownership of Barkeep Supply.

Her paternal grandfather had played, coached and taught in Major League Baseball from 1944 to 2005 — and for the baseball fans: Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish, or “Bus” to his friends, at one time had the longest name in MLB history — and he set aside some of the money he made for his kids. The portion that would have gone to Julia’s father was suddenly left to her at his death.

“It was a struggle to know what to do with that money, but I believe my dad would be happy with what I did with it,” she says. “It allowed me to open Barkeep without taking on outside investors.”

Barkeep Supply opened at 1121 N. Walker in Midtown in July 2018, and the shop was busy right away, both the four-seat bar and bar supply store.

“I knew nothing about merchandising or retail,” McLish says. “I had to teach myself that part. Bartending I knew, but running a store was different.”

She still doesn’t love that part. She didn’t say that, but wander in on a Wednesday, and you’ll notice right away that she loves people way more than merchandising. She has a huge cast of regulars — full disclosure: I am one of them — and like every Cheers-esque ensemble, they are an assortment of types, some of whom get along and some of whom barely tolerate each other’s presence at the bar. (Four stools do not allow much isolation.) McLish sees what’s good in them, so she never referees, choosing instead to emphasize each person’s good attributes. Hang out at the bar long enough, and you start to view them through her lenses, even if you don’t want to.

She opened Lunar Lounge in the same building two years ago this July. She and Armfield finally got their bar together, and it’s become one of the city’s drinking destinations, with cocktail competitions, Taylor Swift Night, Emo Night, Western Wednesday and so on, based on the creative team McLish has assembled. She’s a collaborator at heart, so her team gets to put cocktails on every menu, and they get a great deal of input into the processes.

“I don’t have to worry much about either spot now,” she says. “Zach and the team do a great job with Lunar, and while it feels good that they don’t need me to be there, I also still feel a little guilty about it. Ultimately, though, I’m happy the two spots have become what they are.”