Castaways

The bar’s emblem, the Captain, as it appears on the sign above the door.

Castaways, in full Mr. Haney’s Castaways, is a neighbourhood bar on McDowell Road in Phoenix, the capital of the March of Arizona, serving the district of Lower Arcadia. It was opened in 2012 by the two brothers who own Giligin’s in Old Town Scottsdale, who took over an existing neighbourhood bar on the site and renamed it. It describes itself as an upscale dive bar serving Lower Arcadia.

The name completes a joke that Giligin’s began. Giligin’s is named for the first mate of the ABC comedy Giligin’s Island; Castaways is named for the show’s stranded passengers, and its mascot, the Captain, is the show’s skipper drawn as an octopus. The bar’s sign, a lit panel showing the Captain wound through the bar’s name with a beer in one arm, is known on its stretch of McDowell, and the car park in front of it has a hitching post at every parking space.

It is the quieter of the two bars. Where Giligin’s is one of the loudest nights in Old Town, Castaways is a regulars’ bar, with lower prices, a longer happy hour, a smaller drink list and a weekly calendar built for people who live nearby. It is known for its happy hour, which runs from 3pm to 7pm every day, for its weekend karaoke, and for a Sunday industry night that serves the staff of the capital’s bars and restaurants.

Location

Castaways stands on the north side of McDowell Road, in the stretch of the east of the city between the Valley’s older neighbourhoods and the line of the Papago buttes. The district it serves, Lower Arcadia, is the southern end of Arcadia, a neighbourhood of ranch houses on the large lots of what were citrus groves at the foot of Camelback Mountain, and of the canal that still runs through it. Many of the gardens still have the groves’ orange trees in them. It is a residential district with few bars, and Castaways is the nearest to most of it.

The bar is in a single-storey building fronting a car park, with the sign on the front wall and the entrance beneath it. The district and the bar’s place in it are described here only so far as they explain the bar.

History

Founding

The family opened Castaways in 2012, seventeen years after Giligin’s. Rather than build a bar, they bought one: an existing neighbourhood bar on McDowell Road, whose premises and licence they took over and which they renamed, redecorated and reopened under the new name the same year. The business was registered as Mr. Haney’s Castaways, which remains its full name.

Mr. Haney

Nobody outside the family knows who Mr. Haney was. The name is on the bar’s registration, on its licence and at the head of its full name, and the family has never explained it. Regulars have offered theories since the bar opened, among them that he was the bar’s previous owner, a schoolteacher and a dog. The family has confirmed none of them and denied none of them, and the bar’s staff are, by their own account, not told.

Since 2012

The bar’s history since its opening is short and uneventful, and the family likes it that way. It has kept the same name, the same sign and broadly the same calendar since its first years, and its regulars have, in many cases, been coming since 2012.

The name and the Captain

The castaways

Giligin’s Island, broadcast by the American Broadcasting Corporation from 1964 to 1967 and repeated on weekday afternoons for more than twenty years afterwards, followed the crew and passengers of a small charter boat wrecked on an uncharted island. The passengers, stranded through three series by the first mate’s mistakes, are the castaways of the title. The show is described in the article on Giligin’s, which is named for the first mate.

The family named its second bar for the passengers so that the two bars would make a pair. The joke works only for those who know the show, and the family has never minded that.

The Captain

The bar’s mascot is the Captain, the show’s skipper, drawn as an octopus in a captain’s peaked cap. The bar’s explanation of the octopus is that a captain needs eight hands to run a bar. The Captain is not a reference to anyone real, and the bar says so when asked.

He appears on the bar’s sign, a rectangular backlit panel mounted on the clapboard front wall. The Captain is drawn as a lifelike, green-grey octopus rising out of a sea fog, in a battered captain’s cap, with a heavy grey moustache and a scowl. One arm holds up a frothing mug of beer, another a crab that is objecting, and the rest are wound in and out of the bar’s name, which runs across the panel in red capitals outlined in black. The last S of the name is painted backwards. It has been backwards since the sign went up, the bar has never corrected it, and regulars who are asked about it say that the Captain did it. The panel is old and well-worn, its face faded and cracked at one corner, and a caged lamp beside it lights the door. The bar has no plans to replace it, and the regulars would object if it did.

The rivalry

Between the two bars there is a running and affectionate rivalry between the first mate and the Captain, carried on in the bars’ signs, menus and shirts, in which each mascot is generally shown getting the better of the other. In the show the skipper spent three series exasperated with the first mate, and the bars have kept the relationship. Neither bar has ever explained it to a customer who did not already know the show.

The bar

Premises

The bar is one long room with the bar down one side, booths and high tables down the other, screens for sport, and a small stage area for karaoke at the back. The decoration is nautical rather than tropical, with rope, wheels, nets and charts where Giligin’s has bamboo and thatch. The bar offers free wireless and invites customers to use it as an office during the day, and on weekday afternoons a number of them do.

The hitching posts

As a licensed premises in the March of Arizona, Castaways is required by law to keep a hitching rail reachable from the street, under the Travellers’ Act 1864, a survival of the territorial code. It meets the requirement more thoroughly than the law asks. Every parking space in its car park has its own hitching post, a short iron post with a ring at the head of the space, so that the car park reads, from McDowell Road, as a row of tethering posts with cars parked at them.

The posts have been used. The bar’s regulars include a small number of riders from the stables that survive in the district’s larger lots, who ride in on summer evenings when the heat has gone off the road, and a horse tied at a parking space on McDowell is an occasional sight that the bar’s neighbours have stopped remarking on.

Drink

Castaways carries twelve beers on tap and about 45 bottled beers, ciders and seltzers. The taps are mostly the Realm’s national lagers, with a Mexican lager or two and a small number of craft beers, among them Church Music and an IPA. The bottles run wider, and include Arizona beers from the Valley’s own breweries, such as Kiltlifter and Devil’s Ale, beside the national brands and the Confederation of Mexico’s. The spirits list is a neighbourhood bar’s, much shorter than Giligin’s, and the bar does not compete with its sibling on whisky.

Food

The kitchen’s menu runs to appetisers, bar favourites, salads, toasted subs, pizzas and pasta. The subs are made in six- or twelve-inch rolls, and the pizzas can be built from a list of toppings at a price from A£6.50.

Among the signatures:

Dish	Description
Mini Chimis	Six small beef and bean chimichangas, with chipotle aioli and pico de gallo
Chicago-ish Hot Dog	A hot dog with tomato, pickle, sport peppers, relish, onion, mustard and celery salt
Desert Dog	A hot dog with bacon, pico de gallo and chipotle aioli
The Castaway Melt	A toasted sub of turkey, ham and mozzarella with banana peppers and pickled onion
Casty’s Libre	A toasted sub of smoked pulled pork, ham, Swiss and mozzarella, with pickles and a Cuban sauce
The Rueby Tuesday	A toasted sub, cheaper on Tuesdays
The Pruitt	A toasted sub of turkey, salami, mozzarella and black olives with Russian dressing
Monster B.L.T.	A toasted sub with double bacon
The Maui Wowie	A pizza of barbecue sauce, pulled pork, bacon, red onion and pineapple
Casty’s Cajun Mac n Cheez	Penne in a Cajun cheese sauce with smoked pulled pork

The Pruitt is named for Amos Pruitt, the county sheriff of the 1920s who is remembered for drinking through Prohibition in the back room of the Oasis, the soft drinks parlour that once stood on the site of Giligin’s. The sandwich ties the two bars’ histories together, and the menu explains it in a line.

Prices and specials

Happy hour

Castaways’ happy hour runs from 3pm to 7pm every day, including weekends, which is longer than its sibling’s and is the main reason many of its regulars drink there.

	Happy hour price
Double well spirit or domestic pint	A£2.50
Wine, mimosa or bloody mary	A£3
Craft pint or small pitcher	A£4
Large pitcher	A£5.50
Food baskets	A£5.50 or A£9.50
One-topping pizza	A£5
Nachos	A£5.50
Potato skins	A£6.50

Daily deals

Day	Deal
Monday	Pizzas at A£2.50, A£4 and A£5
Tuesday	Well drinks A£5; A£1 off the Rueby Tuesday
Wednesday	Fireball or Jägermeister A£5; High Noon seltzers A£4
Thursday	A£1.50 off the pasta skillets; A£1.50 off Absolut or Stolichnaya
Friday	A£1 off 32-ounce drinks after 10pm
Saturday	Dos Equis or Modelo A£3 after 10pm
Sunday	Bloody marys A£3 until 4pm; industry night from 7pm

Events

The weekly calendar

Tuesday is trivia, a team quiz starting at about 7pm, an hour earlier than the one at Giligin’s and with its own quizmaster, for a crowd that has work in the morning.

Wednesday is beer bingo, from 6pm.

Friday and Saturday are karaoke, from 9pm. Karaoke is the bar’s signature, and its regulars include a number of singers who have been coming every weekend for years and are, by general agreement, better than the room deserves.

Industry night

Sunday is industry night, from 7pm, at which staff of the city’s bars and restaurants get a fifth off their bill. Castaways’ industry night is on a different day from its sibling’s, and the difference is the capital’s. Giligin’s keeps Monday because, in a resort town, Sunday night is the trade’s busiest. Phoenix has no resort trade to fill its Sunday nights, and its city ordinances, which differ from Scottsdale’s, have long had the capital’s kitchens close early on Sundays. Sunday night is therefore the quiet night of the Phoenix trade, and it is the trade Castaways serves.

The two industry nights mean that the Valley’s bar and restaurant staff have two nights a week on which a bar owned by the same family is looking after them, and a number of them use both.

Hours and licensing

Castaways opens at 11am every day. It closes at 3am on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, the latest hour the March of Arizona allows, and at 2am on the other nights of the week. A neighbourhood bar has less use for the late licence than a district bar, and the family has kept the full hours for the three nights on which the regulars want them.

The age at which a person may buy and drink alcohol is 18, as it is throughout the Realm.

Reputation

Castaways is generally described as the quieter sibling: owned by the same family as Giligin’s, cheaper than Giligin’s, and the bar where the staff know the customers’ names. Its description of itself as an upscale dive is about half a joke. It is a dive in its prices, its sign and its manner, and upscale in that it is clean, that the food is better than the description suggests, and that it is in Arcadia.

It is not a destination bar and does not try to be one. Most of its customers live within a short drive, a few within a short ride, and the bar’s calendar, its prices and its long happy hour are all built for them.

Chronology

Date	Event
August 1995	The brothers open Giligin’s on Winfield Scott Plaza in Scottsdale
2012	The family takes over a neighbourhood bar on McDowell Road and reopens it as Mr. Haney’s Castaways

Trivia

In-Universe Castaways has a hitching post at every parking space in its car park, which more than meets the March's requirement that a licensed premises keep one rail reachable from the street.
In-Universe The bar's mascot is an octopus because, the bar says, a captain needs eight hands to run a bar.
In-Universe The last S on the Castaways sign is painted backwards and always has been. Regulars say the Captain did it.
In-Universe Nobody outside the family knows who Mr. Haney was, and the bar's staff are not told.
In-Universe The Pruitt, a sandwich on Castaways' menu, is named for the 1920s county sheriff who drank through Prohibition in the back room of a soft drinks parlour on the site of Giligin's.
Real-World Castaways is a real bar on McDowell Road in Phoenix, Arizona, owned by the family that owns Giligin's. It appears here with its owners' permission. Its menu, drinks and calendar are the real bar's, with prices converted to the Realm's pounds; the hitching posts, the Pruitt and everything about the Realm are invented.