A staple of Irish-themed warmth, late-night grub and live music for more than 15 years in Boca Raton’s Mizner Park, the Dubliner will close its doors shortly after one final St. Patrick’s Day farewell.
The pub is making way for a new restaurant from Sub-Culture Group, an elevated pizza bistro called Shaker & Pie, named for its devotion to craft cocktails and pies made in a wood-fired oven imported from Italy.
The new restaurant will open after a major remodel and expansion of the current space, at 435 Plaza Real, including a substantial increase in outdoor seating and an indoor-outdoor bar.
Closing day for the Dubliner is contingent on those plans receiving final approval from the city, but Sub-Culture Group expects the pub to shut its doors 30 to 60 days after St. Patrick’s Day on March 17.
“In 2006, we had this crazy idea to open an Irish pub in Mizner Park,” says Scott Frielich, vice president of Sub-Culture Group. “Hundreds of thousands of Irish whisky shots, pints of Guinness and great conversations later, it has come time for us to evolve and write the next chapter.”
The change is among several chess pieces being moved in Mizner Park by Sub-Culture Group, a prolific Palm Beach County-based dining and nightlife firm. Its properties range from Dada restaurant and Honey nightclub in Delray Beach to legendary rock club Respectable Street in West Palm Beach.
Across the terrace from the Dubliner, Sub-Culture’s Kapow Noodle Bar is getting ready to move to a much larger space on the other side of Plaza Real in the former location of Blue Fish and Rack’s Downtown Eatery and Tavern.
The new Kapow is under construction, with an opening likely in the middle of May.
The current Kapow space will become Penelope, a New Orleans-style brasserie, which will open about 45 days after the Kapow move.
On the other side of the Dubliner, a new location of SubCulture Coffee is days away from opening.
Sub-Culture Group partner Vaughan Dugan says times and tastes have changed since the Dubliner opened.
“That heavy kind of bar food isn’t necessarily the demographic anymore,” he says.
Shaker & Pie will be a model of the contemporary pizza eatery, says Dugan, whose wife, Angela, is a renowned cocktail trendsetter at Kapow.
“We’re really going to focus everything we do in there on that wood-fired oven, with really chef-driven pizza ingredients,” he says. “But we are still going to be every bit of that Sub-Culture, casual, fun place to come.”
Live music programming, a staple at the Dubliner, will not be ignored at Shaker & Pie, but likely in a more limited form, Dugan says.
“That will always be in our DNA, supporting the local music community,” he says. “It’s an element that people are attracted to, especially being in a beautiful, open-air area like Mizner Park.”
The Shaker & Pie concept has been years in gestation, its earliest iteration planned in 2014 for a storefront near Mizner Park’s IPIC movie theater.
After focusing on other projects for a few years, Sub-Culture changed course and started developing plans for the theater-adjacent space to be home to an outpost of its iconic West Palm Beach billiards-and-beer bar Lost Weekend.
“We thought it was a missing element in Mizner Park. Then COVID came,” Dugan says. Lost Weekend Boca is on the back burner, but could be revived, he says. “We love Mizner, obviously.”
Staff writer Ben Crandell can be reached at bcrandell@sunsentinel.com.
