Celebrated Cocktail Bar the Houston Blacklight Is Closing

Sad news for people who love psychedelic bathrooms, murals of sultry horses, and overall good vibes: The cocktail-fueled fever dream that is the Houston Blacklight will sling its final dinosaur-garnished cocktail on Saturday, November 2. From restaurateur power couple Thomas and Mariah Pisha-Duffly (Gado Gado, Oma’s Hideaway), the nationally celebrated bar will close just a few months after its first anniversary.

The Pisha-Dufflys are hesitant to identify a single reason for the Blacklight’s impending shutter, but generally blame bouts of perilously sluggish business. During the summer, visitors flocked to its spacious, colorful booths and wide patios for slushies, whimsical Jell-O shots, and a rotating menu that ranged from grilled cheese roti sandwiches to smoked fish tacos. But during the rainier months, things were a different story.

“We had two really good summer seasons and really slow falls and winter,” says Mariah Pisha-Duffly. “It wasn’t financially sustainable. We believe in the concept, we believe in the team, I love that location…but its season has come to an end.”

The Houston Blacklight opened in the summer of 2023 on SE Clinton, in the former Night Light Lounge space. The Pisha-Dufflys had already developed a dedicated following for their Indonesian-focused Gado Gado in Hollywood and Oma’s Hideaway, a restaurant with Malaysian and Chinese influences and serious party vibes. While Mariah’s 70s psychedelic artistic and personal expression flickers at both of the couple’s other restaurants, the Houston Blacklight was where she felt the most engaged and playful. “I wanted to foster this concept of ‘radical self-expression’ with the Houston Blacklight,” she says. “You slowly create a community of like-minded people who are into the same shit, and that’s so fun to me.”

Mariah named the bar after a company that produced trippy, fantastical blacklight posters in the 1960s and 70s, posters that she has been collecting for years: A portrait of two scantily clad, gloriously coiffed warrior men still hangs in the Gado Gado bathroom. It was that irreverent aesthetic that she brought to their new space, with a vivid interior filled with beaded curtains, a Flash Gordon pinball machine, and wild Day-Glo wallpaper and murals illustrated by local artist Kate Blairstone. The defining piece: a backbar mural with anthropomorphic animals, including a curvaceous horseperson reclining seductively in the foreground.

The cocktails and food matched the vibe, opening with neon green slushies, cocktails with house-made touches like coconut-washed bourbon or corn-based horchata, and retro highballs; the cocktail menu was perhaps the couple’s boldest, compared to the other, already playful Pisha-Duffly spots. When it opened, the Houston Blacklight joined a cohort of fun-loving, maximalist cocktail lounges emerging around the city, places like G-Love sister bar the Love Shack and the very short-lived, Italo-Disco fantasia Icarus. The bars offered an alternative to the ultra-serious approaches to cocktailing that dominated the aughts, the same way contemporary Portland chefs have championed high-brow, low-brow tasting menu courses and fast-food makeovers (see: the Pisha-Dufflys’ own Filet-o-Fishball).

Originally, the Houston Blacklight’s food menu—designed by Thomas Pisha-Duffly—featured a mix of American house-party fare with the couple’s pan-Asian influences: mapo gravy fries, grilled cheese roti, french onion ramen, and an indulgent bone marrow burger that Portland Monthly’s own Karen Brooks predicted would be the city’s best new burger. In the summer of 2024, Michelin-starred restaurant alumnus Adàn Fausto moved his celebrated pop-up Mariscos con Onda into the space, taking over the culinary program with Mexican seafood dishes like fried shrimp flautas and albacore crudo. While planning a more robust fall and winter menu, Fausto kept things humming with a smaller, taco-centric interim menu. But then fall came, and sales dropped off precipitously, far more so than at Gado Gado or Oma’s. “Looking ahead at eight months until next summer… it was too long to sustain the levels of business we were doing,” Mariah says.

The Pisha-Dufflys aren’t planning a replacement for the Houston Blacklight, instead renewing focus on their other ventures—focusing on two spots is a relief in some ways, Mariah says. And she’s proud of what they accomplished. “I feel like a much better business owner than I was, Tom and I are better collaborators, there’s a lot about that experience that was super valuable and important to me and I’m proud of,” she says. “What we achieved with the Blacklight on a lot of levels is really satisfying, but capitalism wasn’t working in its favor. Which makes sense, but also… bummer.”

The Houston Blacklight will host its final service on Saturday, November 2, with a blowout party. Everyone is invited.