After nearly 40 years in operation, a beloved downtown San Antonio dive bar shut its doors indefinitely in 2025. But almost a year later, the iconic Texas T Pub is finally open again — with a few noticeable changes.
New owner and general manager Michael Dean Williams told MySA that the bar has been unofficially reopened since March 1, though no public announcement was made while they got things off the ground. It’ll be back with a bang this weekend, however, as they host a concert by the Rick Rice Band at 9 p.m. on Friday, March 13, on a newly-built stage — and the revamped live music space isn’t the only thing that’s changed since Texas T Pub shut its doors.
The original red bar top is still there, visible under a layer of bottle caps and resin. Other additions aren’t glaring — mainly the new TVs along the walls, new pool tables and lighting. Williams said he and his business partners, Rick Rice and Chris Dupree, wanted regulars “to come in and say, ‘Oh, they did it justice. They did the family justice. They kept a lot of the warmth and everything that we all appreciated.'”
“We wanted to respect the bar itself, because it had been open for 40 years. That’s a feat in itself, believe me,” Williams said. “And so we didn’t want to change a whole lot. We still wanted to be a dive bar, but we wanted to be a clean, newer dive bar, let’s say, and not just your standard, hole-in-the-wall, dark space.”…