The Office Bar buys space right next door

In what is seeming to be a developing trend, another Bannock County resident has made a chain of purchases in the Old Town area of Pocatello.

Matt Spencer and a group of investors purchased the Office Bar and Grill in Old Town last year. Recently purchasing the former Shanghai Chinese Restaurant, which sits directly next to the Office, Spencer said the new side property will open sometime in the next 45 days.

Spencer and company now own six Pocatello properties. It wasn’t long after he purchased the Office that he found out his bar was connected, through a kitchen door, to the vacant restaurant next door. That’s when the decision was made to annex it.

A piano from 1894, Pocatello’s first elevator, and other reminders of the past are things you can find in all of Spencer’s six Pocatello properties. He previously owned an old paper factory and had plans to put the bar in there, then the offer to buy the Office came up.

“We’ve owned the old Gem State Paper over on First here and we initially were planning on putting a bar and kind of an event center, concert hall type thing where it’s a split parcel there…the opportunity to purchase the office came up and in that process,” Spencer said. “The original process kinda took the back burner and we started on this at the office.”

Spencer sees the opportunity for growth in the area and has a desire to see Pocatello’s nightlife flourish again. He also loves the history associated with the properties he owns.

“This home, you know and I think there is a good opportunity for things to grow and to be different. And I think down in the historic district, down here, it’s a cool place,” Spencer told me. “It has an energy and a life kind of unto its own and these old building are different.”

Like the building the Office is in. The upper floors once served as a hotel and boarding house. And the walls bare evidence of a different time, some even giving a reminder to a time when a brothel sat there.

Now, with a connection to the building next door, Spencer has big plans to expand his bar.

“We’re gonna remove our kitchen and use our kitchen in the Shanghai and have a dining side and have kind of a bar side be more loungey.”

One side of the bar will be a classic bar environment, while the other side will be a quieter, more sit-down friendly environment.

Sometime in the next two months, lively eating and drinking will be the norm in a place that sat vacant for nearly 20 years.