MR Onions pub will go out with a bang tonight as loyal customers pile down to toast their favourite watering hole which is shutting after 23 years in business.Based in Atlantic House, which is earmarked for office development, the pub’s managers Phil and Lori Talbot have reluctantly decided not to extend the lease for another two years.

MR Onions, in Par-la-Ville Road, employs 15 full-time staff and around four part-timers but business pressures squeezed out any profit.

Already reeling from the ban on gaming machines, the prohibition on smoking in bars was the death knell as the pub has no open area. Customers who nipped out for a smoke often never came back.

Despite the sadness about the pub closure Mr. Talbot promised tonight would be special. “It’s the last night of lobster season so the restaurant will be rammed.”

And the bar will be packed with loyal drinkers remembering the good times.

Mr. Talbot said: “I have come to terms with it now, it’s hard to lose it.”

After 30 years in the pub business he is casting around to find a new spot but no one has space. He said the upstairs venue was a magnet to a diverse group of people.

“The restaurant was pretty much all locals while the bar was a real mix. People come in week in, week out. I will miss that sort of thing.”

The pub sponsored three football teams — two in the Commercial League and one Sunday side. MR Onions Real Men FC manager Jason Roberts said he was “gutted” by the closure of his favourite drinking venue.

“It was first place I went to on the Island. I played for the team since day one and my son was nearly born there.

“Bizarre place for a pub wasn’t it? Second floor of an office block above an estate agents — walked passed it three times the first time I went there.”

Mr. Roberts, from England, said it was the only place that really reminded him of a bar back home.

“Terrible beer, always football — no sunlight let in — I loved the fact that we had all come half way across the world to a sunny island just to sit inside in a bar. What a bunch of losers.

“The look on my visitors’ faces — expecting my local to be a beachside bar with no roof and they get MR’s — a geezer from Swindon serving me Heineken whilst watching Portsmouth vs Fulham — like drinking in the Red Lion when you go to Spain — quality.”

The pub became practically a second home and a club house for the team but even hardened regulars maintained a distinctly love-hate relationship with the place. “Worst food ever,” said Mr. Roberts. “We had a lad bring in a can of soup and ask Phil to warm it up for him once rather than eat there.”

But he said the bar had some great staff over the years. “Sonny, Caroline and Charlie.” The better bar staff always knew how to treat the customer with respect — but not too much.

Customers who had the audacity to order light beer might find the bottle delivered to them with a disdainful comment and added Scotch tape round the cap.

Another regular core of clientele were Royal Gazette journalists.

Veteran Mid-Ocean News assistant editor Ivan Clifford will miss tucking into bulldog breakfasts at weekends while watching English football games. “Even though I ended up needing a quadruple heart bypass at Johns Hopkins last November,” he said. Legendary Royal Gazette political reporter Raymond Hainey was also a fixture at the bar before he left the Island in 2000.

“MR Onions — or Mr. Onions as I thought it was until my Bermudian colleagues put me right — was the closest thing I ever found to a Scottish pub in Bermuda. Which is not necessarily a good thing, of course.

“MR Onions became a Friday night ritual, following a hard day in the House of Assembly, an experience which would drive even the most hard-line Scots Presbyterian to the demon drink.

“Like all good pubs, it attracted a cross-section of Bermuda society, with a few expat suits thrown in for good measure.

“But it wasn’t all fun. MR Onions fostered at least one office romance — now a marriage with a couple of kids.

“It might have lacked the homogenous slickness of other bars, but you tolerated its eccentricities the way owners Rick and Phil tolerated ours.

“And bartenders Adam and Alphonso treated us all the same — with the sort of world-weary courtesy you generally only see in old Humphrey Bogart films.”

But in some ways the bar belonged to a bygone age increasingly out of place as Par-la-Ville Road, once a backwater of Hamilton, which is now rapidly turning into Bermuda’s version of Wall Street.

Mrs. Talbot is also devastated about losing the bar. “We are looking forward to the celebration but other than that it is a very sad day.”

And she is glad to welcome back legendary customer Eric Brooke who was a stalwart and even had his own plaque mounted in his favourite corner of the bar when he left for a job in Caymans last year.

She said: “We could not ask for a better customer. They have all been great.”