As Channel 24 moves in next-door, low-key Sacramento bar adjusts to the spotlight
After 23 years, Daniel Delagnes is working late shifts again, pouring drinks at his beloved Sacramento bar well into the wee hours of the morning.
Two or three times a week, lately, tour buses pull in just up the block from his bar on 24th Street. Then hundreds to thousands of people flood the streets and sidewalks, funneling into the music venue that opened in April, a stone’s throw from Delagnes’ door. Many of them duck into his establishment before or after shows for food, drink and atmosphere.
“I worked last night, got home at 2 a.m.,” Delagnes said on a recent afternoon in his cramped office behind the bar, desk piled high with receipts. He had spent the evening checking IDs, after his door person called out. “Still got up at 6:30.”
The Round Corner Tavern has been a steady, quiet, Sacramento institution for decades, and regulars say it is considered one of the city’s best bars for billiards.
“If you want a challenge, this is the place,” said Scott Carrington, who has frequented Round Corner since the 1990s.
The arrival of the concert venue, Channel 24 — with a capacity of 2,150 and a slate of crowd-pleasing acts like Jack White and Sierra Ferrell — has brought throngs of new patrons to the Round Corner, a typically low-key establishment.
It’s been a welcome boost for the bar, which has survived tough times and sits on the edge of a primarily residential section of Sacramento. Many of Delagnes’ new customers tell him that they never knew Round Corner existed.
“They love the food, they love the environment, and they’ll end up coming back on a non-show night,” Delagnes said. “It gives us a lot of exposure that we would not have ordinarily had.”
Still, Delagnes has to cover his pool tables on some nights to accommodate the new crowds. And, at least for now, he is working late shifts again.
But he said Round Corner won’t lose its local sensibilities.
“On non-show nights, it’s the same bar it always was. And I want it to stay that way,” Delagnes said. “It’s just a family, neighborhood bar, in the old, traditional sense. There’s not that many of that style of place anymore.”
A microcosm of Sacramento
The Round Corner Tavern has anchored the corner of 24th and S streets for at least three-quarters of a century, though Delagnes thinks it may date back even earlier, to 1940.
“I’ve been told that a few different times, by people in the know,” he said.
The Round Corner first appears in the Bee’s archives in August of 1950, when the paper ran an advertisement for a grand opening under new management.
Round Corner has had a couple of flashes of notoriety over the decades: For a period of time in 1982, Dorothea Puente, the midtown landlady later convicted of killing three people, ran the bar’s kitchen, and one morning in March of 1986, a van crashed through the wall and into the bar. No one was injured. A photo of the incident ran on the front page of the Bee, and is memorialized today on T-shirts urging the reader to “get wrecked at the Round Corner Tavern.”
But mainly, over the years Round Corner became known as a neighborhood hangout for people seeking casual food, drink and camaraderie.
Delagnes moved to the area in 1985 to study criminal justice at Sacramento State. He’d played pool for most of his life, after picking up the hobby during junior high at a rec center in his hometown of Mill Valley. He started playing at Round Corner, and in 1987 he took a job as a bartender to help pay for school. In 2001, he took over full ownership.
“I loved the bar industry,” Delagnes said. “And it’s something I’m good at. I could earn a living — a good living.”
Pressmen and production workers from The Sacramento Bee used to come over for lunch from the newspaper’s former complex at 21st and Q streets, and for a time Round Corner was the bar of choice for the local chapter of the hospitality workers’ union, Delagnes said.
Today, he added, it’s still a blue-collar, working-class bar with a diverse group of customers.
“We’re all eclectic,” said Reggie Zertuche, who began lunching at Round Corner about 20 years ago, when he worked at a nearby hospital data center. “You have interesting conversations… opinions that run wild.”
The friendships among the regulars have come to extend beyond the block of 24th and S streets. Some don’t drink alcohol, but still stop in for food and fellowship. That evening, Zertuche planned to host “Misfits Dinner,” a tradition among some of the regulars. They planned to play cornhole and listen to music.
“It’s like a brotherhood,” Zertuche said. “We all sync up and exchange ideas.”
Making up for worse times
When word came that a concert venue was moving in up the street, it was welcome news for Delagnes, who had nearly lost the bar to the pandemic a few years earlier. He’d managed to hang on because his landlord allowed him to pay reduced rent for a time.
“Now it’s kind of making all that up,” he said.
Regulars knew that the venue’s arrival would likely bring about some changes, and some have been frustrated that the pool tables are covered on show nights. But generally, it seems the venue and the bar have established a symbiotic relationship. Besides, during the days and on non-show nights, Delagnes said, it’s business as usual.
“I was a little worried,” said Carrington, the customer. But it seems like the concert venue has been good for Delagnes, he said.
Even months before the venue opened, new faces began to trickle in.
The construction workers who built the venue used to walk over to Round Corner at the end of the day, and now the bar has become the go-to after-show spot for Channel 24’s staff, said General Manager Jon Gunton. Performers and their crews occasionally stop in after shows, and Delagnes pops over to Channel 24 regularly, to chat about upcoming acts.
Round Corner is the only nightlife option by Channel 24, so the relationship between the venue and the bar has been especially close, Gunton said.
“It’s local, true Sacramento — in that people are actually very nice and friendly,” Gunton said. “Killer pool table. Good food. Stiff drinks, and friendly people… And Danny, he’s top-notch.”
Delagnes said a couple of people have expressed interest in buying the bar. But he wants to keep going until he’s ready to retire.
“Down the road,” Delagnes said. “Not anytime real soon.”
