Bar Scenes: The Fat Pelican

It’s no big secret that Wilmington and the surrounding areas host their fair share of bars. In downtown, for example, you can’t walk ten feet without passing one… literally. But some bars are more eclectic than others, and to them I raise my glass.

In this series, the Grove pays tribute to the Cape Fear region’s more unique and particularly notable watering holes. These are the places most locals cherish above all others and pray that tourists never discover. They are the stuff of frothy legend. They are small and dirty. There are generally at least two drunks on rotation who’ve seen too many moons and just as many years either at sea or behind a hammer—regulars, battered but not broken, damn beautiful people. No chair or barstool is alike, and cigarette smoke flows—regrettably for some—as freely as the alcohol. There are centuries-old ballast stones…somewhere. And, most importantly, unlike many restaurant bars on the planet these places celebrate their stature by operating in complete autonomy. Cheers to that…

The Fat Pelican (map)

We start at the Fat Pelican in Carolina Beach. Approaching the Pelican’s teal façade and wooden door from the road, you’d think you were walking into any other bar. Nothing special—a couple of neon signs, mock-parking signs with the catchy little sayings like, “Hippies Use Side Entrance.”

What hits you first is the odor of dust and old wood, smoothed and sanded down by resting hands, elbows, and 21 years of the bottom of a beer bottle. There is smoke. There is always smoke. The bar is on the left after the entrance, and when I came in, there stood a charming older lady with silver hair eating a single-serve bag of pretzels. Surrounded by old beer bottles, scattered trinkets, and pictures of everything from fishing trips to family portraits and drunk folk (young and old alike) wearing funny hats and memorable outfits, she’s watching golf. A young girl leaving as I come in says, “Catch ya later Suzie Q.” Perfect.

I ask Suzie a few questions about the bar—how old it is, who opened it, etc—and she rapidly points me to a patron playing arcade-bowling in a small alcove between the bar and the sitting room. Though the Pelican looks like its been there forever, he tells me the place opened in 1988, and that it started off as a small beer and wine shop that sold minor food items like baguettes and other sandwiches. He also tells me that the original bar was much smaller. It’s easy to identify where it was because it’s the only part of the overall place that has solid flooring. Everything outside the original space, which is more like a tunnel than a room, boasts mostly earth, scattered bricks, wooden boards, and badly worn carpets as ground cover.

I ask the guy a few more questions and in true bar-style he says he’ll talk with me more after his bowling game is over, so I make my way back the true heart of the Fat Pelican: the tractor-trailer beer fridge.

Now, the story I’ve been told by some locals is that the trailer had been on the property long before the bar ever existed—stranded by some poor trucker who got it stuck in the sand and decided to leave it—and that, miraculously, somebody started serving beers out of it like some magic fridge you see in football commercials.  The truth, according to another source, is much more logical: the original owner backed a refrigerated tractor trailer on to the lot for the very purpose it serves and the Pelican is built around it.

End to end and floor to ceiling, the trailer is slam packed to the gills with six packs. Many are fine micro brews in multiple fermentations and flavors you might only find from a couple of states—Cottonwood, Belle’s, Dogfish and the like. There are also your standard mega brands and international beers—Miller, Budweiser, Dos Equis, Stella, and so on. After a few minutes I decide on an Oberon, a wheat beer from Belle’s Brewery in Michigan with the slightest tint of orange in the finish.

Outside, the colorful exterior and patio is filled with dozens of old graying plastic lawn chairs both weatherworn and cracking from the weight of too many beers, I hardly expected to find an abandoned game of chess, four or five moves deep—just one more of a thousand glorious surprises that hang out in back of the Fat Pelican. Half of an old boat acts as a late night bar. Old golf clubs line and help hold together the fence protecting the place from the street and alley that flank it. There are scattered umbrellas, an old furnace standing by itself, and at least a dozen other icons of what it means to be at the beach: paddles, a water-logged surf board or two, wooden pelicans, wooden tuna, and flags of all kinds.

When I finally sit down to soak it all in, a chubby black lab walks slowly out the side door and, grinning, lays down right beside me in the sun for a few minutes. His name is That-a-Boy… “Boy” for short. He’s happily a bar-dog, and sits there briefly before he begins to scratch and lick. After a moment or two of typing, I hear him reach out with a calm, Sunday afternoon yawn, and that’s it. He gets up, shakes, walks back to the door. And then, he stops to look at me. No sooner do I get up to open the door for him than Boy mouths a rope hanging from the door handle, gives it a tug, swings the door open all by himself, and trots back inside. What that means to me is simple: Boy says, “Come on back inside… you need another beer.”

Before leaving, I stop at the bar and pay Suzie $4 for my “premium.” A pretty standard price… hefty. Though somehow, buying a beer at the Fat Pelican is like buying an experience. And though this can only come out somewhat redundant, the truth is simple: you don’t go to the Fat Pelican just to drink a beer… you go to drink a beer at the Fat Pelican.