Apparently one doesn’t have to travel to Boston to get the “Cheers” experience when they can go to the town of Halsey – population 950 – for a similar vibe.
Tim and Lisa Brandvold, owners of The Honey Hole Bar & Grill (at 10 W 1st St., Halsey) built up a community of friends in their newly renovated establishment, seeing a profitable increase since buying the bar more than a year ago, even though the business is something of a side hustle for – mainly – Tim.
One of the restaurant’s regular visitors, Mayor Jerry Lachenbruch, said the “vibe” there is totally different now.
“In my opinion, it was rather bland and off-putting before, and now it’s incredibly vibrant and welcoming,” Lachenbruch said. “It’s a lot of fun. You’re there once or twice and everybody knows you. And the food’s really, really good.”
For someone who knows the basics about Tim Brandvold, they might imagine a typical day for him goes something like this:
As the sun begins to shine upon the Willamette Valley, Brandvold has probably already had his morning cup of coffee and is out on his five-acre farm feeding rescued farm animals. Then he suits up and heads to a funeral home, where he spends the day performing his duties as a mortician.
After one has had time to let that sink in, the sun is ready to set and Brandvold heads to the Honey Hole to help operate his dream job, owner of a “dive bar.”
“When we bought the place, it was a dive, but I’ve always looked for a dive bar because my dad used to bring me to dive bars all the time,” he said. “So I wanted a dive bar, we found a dive bar, and I wanted to make it feel like your backyard.”
According to him, since buying Halsey’s only bar-restaurant-gambling operation in town at the end of 2023, the revenue has nearly quadrupled.
“It was just a little hole-in-the-wall place that was doing frozen hamburgers and chicken strips,” Brandvold said. “Now we grind all of our own meat, smoke all of our own meats. We just wanted to bring something to the town that was a little better than that.”
The Brandvolds also converted half the building – that was being used as storage – into a pool room, and built a fenced-in outdoor seating area with fire pits. In addition to providing live entertainment (comedians, live music and karaoke), they chucked the microwave and brought in a meat grinder and smoker.
“All of our food is very fresh,” he said. “We order and grind our own meat every single day, and we smoke all of our other meats.”
The most popular item hands-down, he said, is the Honey Hole Smash Burger, a basic burger made from two kinds of premium ground beef.
“When we bought the place, we said, ‘We can only go up from here. This is a great little place, great little town.’ And the town has literally taken us in.”
Local farmers, brewery and paper mill workers, and people coming off the highway pull in to enjoy the food and camaraderie at the small establishment. Brandvold added that he learned a country radio station in Eugene “adopted” the Honey Hole as their burger place and has been talking about it on the radio. The perk has lured customers to the tiny town of Halsey to try out Brandvold’s food.
As Halsey supports their business, the Brandvolds in turn try to do their part investing back into the community by supporting things such as the fire department, library Book-It fundraiser run, and little league baseball team.
“We’re trying to make a little bit of an impact ‘cause we really do enjoy it, and it is something that the community’s kind of brought us into,” he said.
Before they started the Honey Hole, the Brandvolds had already established their careers in the funeral industry (Tim) and accounting (Lisa). Then they officially organized their rescue farm, Faux Farms (so named because, Tim said, they are “fake farmers”), in Independence where they take in unwanted animals – such as pigs, goats and chickens – and let them live out the rest of their natural lives.
The pair wanted to add a pet crematory to their operation, but were curtailed by the county, so they moved on to the next plan.
“I’ve always wanted a bar. That was always my first option. But we thought it would be nice to have a pet crematory ‘cause we love animals so much,” Brandvold said.
Operating the Honey Hole has been an “amazing” experience, he said, likening it to a Halsey-sized version of TV’s “Cheers” establishment, where the community is very close and there are “hardly” any problems.
“I wanted to make it feel like you’re at home, where you’re like, ‘yeah, I wanna go out and do something where I feel like I’m at home but I’m not at home.’ So that was kinda my goal,” he said. “It really is kind of a staple in the area now. We’ve had a really, really good turnout.”