In the Bar Rescue episode ‘Momster’s Ball,’ Baseline Sports Bar owner AJ Hunter is featured. When she bought the Tempe, Arizona bar, it was making $60,000 a month, so putting a $250,000 lien on her home to buy the bar didn’t seem like such a crazy idea. AJ bought it and rebranded the bar with an all-female staff of bartenders known as “Baseline Babes” including her two daughters. AJ knows her daughters are “terrible employees” (they tend to ignore female clientele) but she relies on them and spaghetti wrestling events (two women wrestle in a kiddy pool of cooked spaghetti) to draw in a crowd. Baseline is now losing $4,000 a month and is facing $190,000 of debt. If AJ loses the bar, she loses her house.
[Left: Bar Rescue’s Jon Taffer wrote the business book, Raise the Bar:An Action-Based Method for Maximum Customer Reactions]
Bar Rescue’s Jon Taffer gives AJ and her daughters a chewing out and a makeover. Baseline is now called Brick and Barley and the female bartenders are now known as the Barley Babes. After the makeover, the bar’s Facebook page described Brick and Barley: “it’s like Baseline’s more mature big sister, the one who went off to college…(and is partying and barfing her guts out completely unbeknownst to her parents who think she is a little angel)…Brick and Barley…we aren’t THAT wholesome…” Bar Rescue airs Sundays at 9pm on Spike.
