The Dahlia, a little less edgy, lives again

It would have been very difficult for anyone from somewhere else to come to Lynchburg and try to revive the Dahlia. There is, after all, a long local tradition involved.

For even though you won’t find the funky little Bedford Avenue restaurant/bar listed on the National Historic Registry, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had a long and fascinating life. The legends and stories have been accumulating ever since Roy Godsey first opened the place in the 1940s, naming it the Blue Dahlia after his favorite movie.

Sorting through all these tales, one begins to see a split personality — the Good Dahlia and the Bad Dahlia.

The Good Dahlia still provokes warm and fuzzy feelings in longtime Lynchburgers who made it their final stop on a Friday or Saturday night romp. Or with generations of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College students for whom it was a guilty pleasure. The Good Dahlia always sponsored a car in the All-American Soap Box Derby as it rolled down Bedford Avenue, and functioned as the event’s unofficial headquarters.

The Bad Dahlia was blacked-out windows, cracked leather booths and a famously adverserial relationship with the ABC enforcement board. It is a story James West heard about “this guy who walked into the place one day and said: ‘I don’t want anything to eat or drink. I just wanted to see the place where my Dad was shot.’”

As the newest owner of the Dahlia (the “Blue” was dropped from the name decades ago), West now finds himself the keeper of all the legends and stories. It’s a responsibility he takes seriously.

Yet he is also a businessman, and so he must pick and choose. His goal is to attract a new crowd to the refurbished Dahlia while still welcoming the old crowd. So far, so good.

“It’s funny,” he said last week. “We’ve had a lot of people in here who wouldn’t have been caught dead in the place before.”

A few coats of paint, some new windows, a new bar and chairs, and presto! The Dahlia has changed from dive to diva. It even has a real menu, ranging from “pub food” to seafood from the Blue Marlin just up the street, also owned by West and his wife, April.

In a month or so, the Wests hope to have a pool table and big screen TV downstairs.

“I love the Dahlia,” James West said. “I’m originally from Bedford, but I lived along Rivermont for years and came in here a lot. Then, when I went to work at the Blue Marlin, I came in here even more because it was so, uh, convenient.”

Despite the aforementioned shooting story, the Dahlia was never really a scary place — just a little rough around the edges. It was a workingman’s bar, a late-night college hangout and a repository for local characters. Even during the day, it was so dim inside that it was difficult to see the food you ordered. At times, that was a good thing.

The interior is still dominated by the bar — no longer circular, but solidly anchored in its former place of honor. The old neon “Dahlia” sign twinkles behind it, and West sees that as symbolic.

“I definitely wanted to keep the sign,” he said.

The Dahlia shut down a couple of years ago, and West bought it on the cheap. It was over a year, however, before he was able to begin its reclamation. By then, neighborhood kids had broken out the windows and the place was beginning to resemble a decomposing mercantile corpse.

“There was really no choice,” West said. “It was either overhaul or the wrecking ball.”

It’s still a small slice of Lynchburg, seating only 45 if all the bar stools and booths are filled. Yet ever since Christmas Eve, the Dahlia has been jumping.

“It’s hard to get a table in here between 6 and 8,” West said, “and lunch has been pretty busy, too. I like having a small space, because it really seems to have a pulse even if there are only a few people in here.”

He calls it a “gastropub,” based on a British model, and notes proudly that all the furnishings he provided were “ first-class.”

One recent afternoon, savoring the lull between the lunch and dinner crowd, West cocked an ear to the background music and smiled.

“This being the Dahlia,” he said, “we had to play the blues.”