Restaurants and Cafes

BAR-J Coffee Bar 1963.

Photo from the private collection of Brian & Evelyn Parker

BAR-J Menu

Photo from the private collection of Brian & Evelyn Parker

The owner Evelyn Parker (front centre) with customers of the BAR-J

From the private collection of Brian & Evelyn Parker.

Brian Parker with his two daughters Penny & Fiona.

From the private collection of Brian & Evelyn Parker.

The BAR-J Coffee Bar

By Brian & Evelyn Parker

My wife and I were married in 1962 and lived in a rented flat in West Hampstead.  I was doing a sales job in the Brighton area and the weather always seemed so much better here. I remember the October of that year leaving Brighton in glorious sunshine and arriving into London to thick fog and drizzle. So our decision was made, we wanted to move to Brighton. I lost my job not long after so we looked at other options of employment.  We decided a coffee bar would be an interesting way to earn a crust for the both of us.

Besieged by a Scout Troop
We bought the Bar-J as a going concern, although not a very busy one.  At the time there was stiff competition in the town with over thirty coffee bars in the Brighton area.  Nevertheless, we were undeterred and decided that with hard work we could make a good living from it, and opened on Good Friday 1963. The first order at the Bar-J took us completely by surprise, we were besieged by a visiting Scout Troop who promptly ordered 30 egg & chips and as many Pepsi Colas as any healthy lads could drink in the quickest possible time.  Not a bad start for day one we thought.

Student customers
Most of our immediate customers came from the local catering college in Richmond Terrace and in addition there was two schools (Fawcett & Pelham) just around the corner. Most of the kids became regulars and were treated as friends rather than customers, and many ended up working for us part-time out of school hours.   Walking around Brighton today I still see many of our old customers who are probably grandparents by now.

Monster coffee machine
No coffee bar worth its salt would be without the ubiquitous 'GAGGIA' coffee machine. This monster machine breathed and hissed steam and sat there growling on the counter and was the centre point of the coffee bar, as I expect it was in many other coffee bars in Brighton.  Frothy coffee was dispatched in the standard 'Duralex' coffee cups and burgers and chips were accompanied by tomato sauce, squeezed from the familiar tomato shaped plastic bottles.

The Juke Box
Possibly the most important item in the coffee bar to the kids was the Juke Box (preferable a ROCK-OLA one) which belted out music (Beatles, Animals and the Rolling Stones) morning, noon and night!  By the end of the day my wife and I normally went to bed with a headache as we opened at ten and closed when there were no more customers...usually some time after midnight or one- o'clock at the weekend.

Famous customers
The Bar-J had two floors and the 'Rockers' occupied the basement whilst the 'Mods' were happy with the ground floor.  We lived above the shop so to speak and both of our daughters (Fiona & Penny) were born there. As a popular coffee bar we were not without our visiting personalities, a very young Adam Faith was a regular visitor as was Gary Farr who had a local band called the 'T-Bones'. Bobby Samson could be seen most weekends and normally with a new attractive girl on his arm.

Motorbikes and Lambrettas
Every weekend the road outside, which had no yellow lines then, was packed with motorbikes and Lambrettas and not a hint of trouble to be found anywhere.  Most of the kids used to flit between the Bar-J and the Little Chef coffee bar that was next to the 'King and Queen' pub. After the first year of trading at the Bar-J we did so well we took ourselves off to Majorca for Christmas for a much needed break, my wife being pregnant with our first daughter, Penny.

Couldn't get away from the music
On arriving at the hotel the only music I wanted to hear was Spanish, guess what was on the Juke Box?  You guessed it!  'I wanna hold your hand' by the Beatles which was No 1 at the time.  This was played incessantly by the 'Brits' staying in the hotel. Happy days and great memories of the 60's when things were a lot more simplistic as opposed to today's coffee bars with a myriad of coffee served in a dozen different ways.  Just one type of coffee back then, black or white!