Skinner’s Pub & Eatery

St. Paul, Minnesota

Field Note

St. Paul’s West Seventh neighborhood is the city’s oldest settlement, a traditionally blue collar area populated with residents drawn in by legacy businesses such as the nearby Schmidt Brewery, opened in 1855. Though Skinner’s Pub & Eatery opened comparatively recently in 2000, the St. Paul dive bar fits in perfectly with its surroundings, nestled onto a residential street corner in a building erected during the early 1900s.

Owners Peter & Molly Skinner met at St. Paul’s now defunct Tower Tap in the midst of careers in food service. Armed with a wealth of food and beverage experience, the pair and lifelong St. Paul residents decided to make the leap into ownership, purchasing a space that operated in the early 1900s as the Vogelgesang Grocery Store. That grocery store was later converted post-Prohibition into a string of dive bars under the names Novak’s, Sonny’s and Paul’s Place.

The Skinners embraced the heritage of the structure by leaving much of its exterior appearance untouched, even fashioning the bar’s illuminated sign in a throwback style befitting the structure. Appropriately, the bar’s sign that hangs from the corner of the building is quick to point out the bar’s lunch and dinner food business, featuring a square cut, tavern-style pizza that has become an area favorite.

The Skinner’s Pub & Eatery food menu is exceedingly deep and almost shockingly affordable, an increasingly rare combo even among dive bars. Nightly specials include steak night, a “Mugarita” margarita-in-a-frosty-mug night and even a kids-eat-free promotion on Sundays. Even more alluring for those of us with fond memories of childhood Pizza Hut buffets, Skinner’s Pub & Eatery offers an all-you-can-eat pizza & salad lunch buffet each weekday that flows right into a slew of intriguing happy hour specials from 3 PM to 6 PM.

Split into two main spaces, the front room houses a bar complemented by a handful of booths while the secondary area functions more as a dining room with table service and a large assortment of tables & chairs. This is Minnesota, so pull tabs are of course available just inside the front door. On game nights, a free shuttle operates between Skinner’s Pub & Eatery and the home arena of whatever game happens to be taking place in the city that evening.

Peter & Molly Skinner expanded into Skinner’s Catering in 2015, taking the food focus of the St. Paul dive bar to the next level, converting an already bustling group ordering business into a true enterprise. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the bar’s noteworthy food served a critical role in keeping the business afloat. A longstanding practice to deliver food for free to nearby residents rolled seamlessly into lockdown restrictions, enabling the Skinners to eventually maintain staffing at pre-pandemic levels before ultimately weathering the storm and resuming normal operations.

The Skinner’s Pub & Eatery 10th Anniversary Celebration featured local professional wrestling as a key attraction and a similar setup for the bar’s 20th anniversary was sadly scuttled by the pandemic. For those still thirsty for a dose of professional wrestling during a stop to Skinner’s, keep an eye out for a Mad Dog Vachon-themed mural that includes a wolf howling at a moon-themed clock found along one of the bar’s walls.