Nolan Hare Brings The Dalles’ latest bar offering — It’s Powerful

Nolan Hare’s latest venture turns local power-grid history into a playful bar concept built around good drinks, vintage records and face-to-face conversation.

Nolan Hare brings The Dalles latest bar offering, the Converter Backdoor Den, which riffs on our local energy production and blends the idea of converting yourself into a more relaxed state of mind.

By Tom Peterson

The Dalles, Ore., Oct. 15, 2026 — The Dalles has long helped keep the West Coast plugged in. Starting Saturday, one downtown bar hopes to do just the opposite — at least when it comes to your phone.

The Converter Backdoor Den, Nolan Hare’s newest venture, opens Oct. 17 behind Café Enza at 418 E. Second St., Unit C. Its mission is to convert strangers into friends, long days into relaxing evenings and screen-scrolling into something increasingly rare: an actual conversation with the person sitting across from you.

Hare has wired the whole idea into the brand. The food menu is called SubStation, with sandwiches such as the Switchyard, a turkey-bacon-ranch, and the Conductor, featuring ham and provolone. There’s vintage audio, a wall of records and an old library card catalog repurposed as a phone-check station. Drop off your device if you like, take a Scrabble piece and give your thumbs a break.

“Power and connection” is the tagline. The goal is to make the human kind of connection a little easier.

For Hare, a familiar face around the local music scene, the bar is another creative enterprise in a career that has rarely followed a straight line.

“I've always had several things going on at the same time as just one cut and dried career,” he said.

Hare has worked in hospitality since high school, starting as a busboy at the Baldwin Saloon. He later moved into event production, music and web design, among other pursuits. He helped launch The Dalles’ Fourth of July concert and festival, handling the grounds, bands, production and staffing during its first five years. At its busiest, the two-day event involved about 200 staff members and volunteers.

He also helped build the entertainment program at The Bargeway, where he remains involved, and continues to perform with the local country band Cascade High and the traveling band Brewer’s Grade. In Arizona, he has a hand in HiTank’s Brewing Company, part of a larger operation combining a brewery, restaurant, music venue, campground and event center.

The Converter came about less as a lifelong ambition than a well-timed opportunity.

Lightning Strikes

During a power outage and lightning storm a few months ago, Hare went downtown to help his cousin, David Sullivan of Café Enza, rescue refrigerated food. Looking through a pass-through window, he noticed the small bar space behind the restaurant, furnished and equipped but sitting idle.

“It’s so close to just being able to be open again,” Hare recalled thinking. “I kind of had the idea that night to see if I could put my mind towards putting a little concept together.”

The concept took its inspiration from the region’s energy infrastructure. Hare initially considered a river-and-wind theme, but it felt too generic. Then he focused on the Celilo Converter Station, a key link in the electrical grid that carries power between the Pacific Northwest and markets farther south.

The name offered a broader idea: a place that could convert one state of mind into another.

“I was just trying to come up with a concept that fit our local community and what kind of drives us here and what brings us together here,” he said.

The electrical theme runs through the menu, cocktails, decorations and branding. But the central idea isn't industrial nostalgia. It's slowing down.

Hare wants guests to feel welcomed rather than processed through a rapid-fire ordering system. The bar will serve craft cocktails, regional beers and wine, along with sandwiches and other food prepared through a partnership with Café Enza. The drinks lean on classic recipes, premium spirits, fresh-pressed juices and house-made syrups, with ingredients such as cherries from Cooper Orchards.

The vintage Magnavox stereo console, dating to about 1968, is another centerpiece. Hare found it at the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore and had it repaired. Many of the records came from his family's collection, including albums left behind by customers of his grandfather's rental business.

Guests are encouraged to bring a record to share, too. There won't be streaming music or live performances. The room is intended for listening, talking and meeting people.

You can check your phone in the old card catalog and go another 5 feet and put an album on the console for a night of conversation and analog bliss. Partake in a Bonneville - a double-oaked bourbon with orange and local cherry - and listen to that beautiful crackle from the needle.

The phone-check station makes that intention tangible without turning it into a rule. Guests can hand their phones to the bartender, who places them in the old card catalog with a matching token. The devices remain accessible, but out of sight and out of hand.

Hare said he isn't interested in policing people's screen time. He simply wants to offer an alternative.

“We want to facilitate connection and conversation,” he said. “We just want people actually looking up and speaking to each other.”

Getting the doors open has taken a team. Hare credited his brother, Al, along with Bargeway owners and colleagues Steve and Stacey Kane, Sullivan and the Café Enza crew for helping turn the idea into a working business.

For now, Hare has focused on reviving the existing space rather than making major physical changes. If the community embraces it, further investment may follow.

The Converter Backdoor Den opens at 3 p.m. Saturday and plans to open daily at 3 p.m., with expanded weekend hours. It is a 21-and-older establishment, tucked behind Café Enza with its main entrance in the alley.

At a time when a room full of people can still feel like a room full of separate screens, Hare is betting that a good sandwich, a well-made drink and a record spinning in the background can help change the current.

The power is already here. Now comes the conversion.