Edmonds pub celebrates 70 years of business

For seven decades she has sat in the same place. She’s watched familiar faces change, rough roads give way to modern concrete, and she herself has undergone a few necessary improvements.

But at 70 years old, Engels Pub has become somewhat of a legend in the city of Edmonds. Enough, at least, for people to refer to the establishment as a more personal “she” or “her.”

“Engels is a place people can walk to, a meeting place, a place of entertainment,” said current co-owner Renata Churchill, who purchased the pub with husband Richmond Churchill in 2003. “Most of our customers are regulars, and we get a lot of locals.”

Some of those locals include a group of elderly citizens who meet at Engels during the week to play Cribbage, she added.

“We’ve got quite the cribbage following,” Churchill said.

According to Churchill, in 1934, a German immigrant named Louis Christian Engels opened the pub after working for several years as a cook and a butcher in the city. Engels, whose family continued to run the place up until the early ’60s, also served on the City Council as well as Justice of the Peace.

One of Engels daughters, Eathel Engel Thayer, ran it for 29 years with her daughter, Louise Beeson Drake, who, at 92, still lives in the area.

Over the years, the restaurant and watering hole located at 5th and Main Street has gained notoriety for its secret family recipe fish and chips and allegedly serving a meal to Henry Ford II in 1948 on his way to Seattle. Records also show that Engels was the second place to earn a liquor license in Washington state the same year it opened, Churchill said.

Today, Engels is known for being a hometown bar, one that makes you feel welcome when you walk through the door.

And where, Churchill wrote recently, “everyone knows your name and the beer’s been flowing for 70 years.”

Engels Pub is located at 113 5th Ave., S. in Edmonds. The bar features local blues musicians every Saturday night from 8 p.m. to midnight.