Bob's Java Jive

The coffee pot is concrete, 25 feet tall with a 30-foot belly, and it stands on South Tacoma Way in the Nalley Valley, across from the old Nalley Valley factory. Tantri Wija, writing in The Seattle Times in January 2024, placed it “on a lonely industrial stretch of road underneath a web of highways.” She saw it in blue and white and allowed that it “looks a bit more like a teapot.” South Sound Magazine had warned readers in 2019 not to make that mistake. The bar’s menu has a cocktail called It’s Not a Teapot, made with reposado tequila, cold brew and Licor 43.

In January 2026 the South Sound Report found the pot painted white. The white was a temporary coat while workers made structural repairs and sealed cracks in the cement. The red body with blue trim was to go back on once the weather allowed a stretch of dry days. The bar stayed open through the work.

Inside the pot

Wija wrote that from the road the building “looks enormous for a coffeepot, but seems small for a bar,” and that once a visitor is through the door “the space opens up before you like a funhouse.” Leopard-print wallpaper hangs behind the bar. Fake tropical plants and faux-thatched overhangs trim the room, and tiki paintings by Bob Radonich, the Bob of the name, cover much of the walls of what was apparently called the Jungle Room. The laminate tile bar top went in during the mid-1960s, installed by Bob and his daughter Danette. In 2015 SouthSoundTalk reported red bar seats dating to the early days, scratched with decades of graffiti, and a jukebox from the 1940s. South Sound Magazine wrote in 2019 that a visitor can play pool on the table Keanu Reeves used.

Overhead, the ceiling is covered with signatures and dollar bills. It has not been painted since 1968. “In 1972, we were gonna paint the ceiling, and you would have thought that we were going to take a wrecking ball to the whole building,” Danette Staatz told South Sound Magazine. “Everybody was so upset, we haven’t been able to paint the ceiling since.”

Karaoke at nine, jazz on Sunday

Karaoke is the standing program. It runs every night from 9 p.m., and the bar’s own posts give 1:40 a.m. as the end. Gabe Pancho had been the Jive’s karaoke host and audio engineer for 12 years when KNKX Public Radio profiled the bar in January 2024. He also books most of the music. The bands have mostly been hard rock, punk and metal, but Pancho told KNKX he never thought of the room that narrowly: “I just feel like the vibe of the bar is…a totally different scene for different types of music, like say, jazz, even a light form of hip hop, if you will, or some reggae music.”

Jazz arrived in January 2023, when the Tacoma-based Rainier Jazz Quartet asked Pancho whether he booked it. Their set opened a jazz night on the last Sunday of the month, the first regular jazz in the bar’s history, according to KNKX. In November 2023 Casey MacGill played swing and early R&B with bassist Birch Pereira and guitarist Vince Brown. About 40 people came, aged from their late twenties to their early eighties. They sat at red-and-white checkered tables drinking red wine and got up now and then to swing dance under the party lights. The bar’s event list still carried a Jazz Sunday in October 2025.

The bill also includes a Tuesday open mic, noted by KNKX in 2024, and a Wednesday open jam from 6 to 9, first come first served, posted in September 2026. Theme nights fill in between. Mullet Night in January 2026 took 10 percent off the tab for anyone wearing one. The Lonely Hearts Valentine’s Day Party that February ran an “ex sabotage board.” On September 25, 2026, the Falling Doves played an early show, doors at 6 and 21 and over. At 9 the room filled with blonde wigs for a Dolly Parton night.

The kitchen is newer than the stage. “We used to only have burgers and corndogs and fries,” Pancho said in 2024. The scratch menu now runs to Jungle Fries, which are topped with cheese, burger sauce, bacon, pickle, onion and a chopped burger patty. It also includes the Lamp Burger, a two-patty club, the Forest Canopy, a black-bean burger on a gluten-free bun, and grilled cheese with house-made tomato soup. KNKX reported a from-scratch pasta menu on jazz nights. The cocktails take their names from the building’s past: The Cobain, Granny Go Go, Two Monkeys One Cup, I Love You to Death, Say Anything. The Jungle Passion is Coke and red wine. The house beer is Bob’s Light Lager, brewed with Tacoma’s Sig Brewing. Co-owner Richard Walden credited the idea to general manager John Samuelson: “As soon as he said it, the lights turned on and it is the perfect collaboration.”

A veterinarian’s coffee pot on the tide flats

Most sources date the pot to 1927. Revisiting Washington, the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation’s tour guide, gives 1930 and calls the building Programmatic, or Mimetic, architecture, a style that showed a building’s purpose in its shape. Otis G. Button, a Tacoma veterinarian, had it built. Bert Smyser (1893–1987), a Tacoma contractor and architect, designed it, and the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation calls it his first architectural design, according to the Tacoma Weekly. South Sound Magazine calls Smyser a local artist. According to SouthSoundTalk, the pot was made on the tide flats at the Port of Tacoma, hauled to the site in sections and bolted together. That made it one of Tacoma’s first prefabricated buildings.

It opened as the Coffee Pot Restaurant. SouthSoundTalk describes it as a working-class diner and pie shop that fed the furniture and pickle makers of the Nalley Valley. It also caught drivers on Highway 99. South Sound Magazine traces it from breakfast place to diner drive-in to speakeasy. The current owners told the Seattle Times that the cafe sat on a route of bootleggers’ tunnels and served bathtub gin with its coffee. The tunnels are said to remain beneath the building, sealed under concrete and a biergarten. The building was supposedly a brothel as well. A newly refurbished restroom stands where, the Times wrote, customers “once enjoyed some frolicking-for-hire.” The Museum of History & Industry repeats both stories with the word “purportedly.”

Owners in the 1930s included Rufus Terri and William Baumgardner. Harold Elrod took over by 1940. According to the bar’s own history, he made it a full dance hall, tripled the kitchen, and brought in a Hollywood actor, whom the bar names as Harry Lloyd, to open the remodeled place. Elrod added apartments upstairs, a larger dining room and a liquor license. SouthSoundTalk records the names Harold Elrod’s Coffee Pot and Geneva’s Tavern from these years. The bar’s history says Bing Crosby dropped in. The Tacoma Weekly and SouthSoundTalk add the film stars Harold Lloyd and Clara Bow.

Bob, Lylabell, and two monkeys

Bob and Lylabell Radonich bought the place in 1955. (The Tacoma Weekly spells the name Randovich.) The bar’s history says they named it after hearing the Ink Spots’ “Java Jive” on the jukebox. The Tacoma Weekly says Lylabell suggested it from the lyric, which South Sound Magazine gives as “I love coffee; I love tea. I love the java jive, and it loves me.” They added a pool room, booths, and a fireplace made from a Dodge car visor. MOHAI calls what followed a jazz club and tiki bar; KNKX calls it a Polynesian-themed nightclub.

The bar’s history says the Ventures played there for $40 a night before “Walk, Don’t Run” took them national, and SouthSoundTalk puts them there in the late 1950s. The Fabulous Wailers played too. Go-go dancers worked the stage, among them Danette, whom the bar’s history calls Danny, and a dancer known as Granny Goo, who kept dancing into her 80s. Danette’s son, Rich Staatz, slept as a baby in a bassinet in the kitchen beside the cups and dishes while his mother danced. In the 1970s and 1980s Bob’s son Bobby Floyd played organ. The Radonichs added the Jungle Room, murals, and a pair of monkeys named Java and Jive. South Sound Magazine says they were macaques, a mother and daughter. SouthSoundTalk, citing the History Channel’s “Hit the Road,” says they were chimpanzees named “Jave” and “Jive” who apparently liked to play the drums.

In 1969 Interstate 5 was built over the pot’s spout, according to South Sound Magazine. Traffic left Highway 99, and business suffered. A 1985 photograph in the MOHAI collection shows a neon sign over the door reading “Dine & Dance.”

Nirvana appears in several versions of the bar’s stories. The bar’s own history says that in the late 1980s Bob turned down an unknown band called Nirvana as “too loud.” The Seattle Times reported that a pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain was supposedly kicked offstage and told he would never make it. KNKX called the bar a favorite hangout of Cobain’s in the 1990s and repeated the rumor that Nirvana asked to hold the release party for Nevermind there. The Tacoma Weekly says bassist Krist Novoselic came by often. Neko Case tended bar in the late 1980s, and the Tacoma Weekly says she also worked as fry cook. The Seattle Times records that the pot was for some reason known as “the home of surf rock.” Derek Walden summed up the lore: “It’s a lot of he said/she said and, ‘You had to have been there.’”

The pot appears in the films Say Anything and Three Fugitives (both 1989), I Love You to Death (1990) and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). Keanu Reeves, who acted in I Love You to Death, offered $1 million to move the building to Hawaii, and Bob turned him down. It is said that D.B. Cooper and Elvis Presley each stopped in. SouthSoundTalk adds the rumor that Cooper arrived after his jump with bundles of cash strapped to his chest.

A fire in 1996 damaged the back rooms. In 1999 the artists Teddy Haggerty and Dan Richholt, with James Bledsoe, repaired the main building and painted a jungle motif on the rear addition, which faces the parking lot. Bob Radonich died in 2002 at 83, and his family kept the bar open. The Tacoma Landmark Preservation Commission put the Jive on its list of historic places in 2003. Four years later the city closed it for fire code violations, and people rallied to save it. In 2014, by the Tacoma Weekly’s and SouthSoundTalk’s account, it joined the National Register of Historic Places. The bar’s own history dates the City of Tacoma’s landmark recognition to that year.

The brothers Walden

When the pandemic cut the bar’s income, it nearly went under, and community donations saved it, according to KNKX. Derek and Richard Walden bought it from Danette Staatz. The Seattle Times and MOHAI date the purchase to February 2021; the bar’s own history and KNKX say 2022. Richard had been a regular “like five days a week,” and a friend of Danette’s for years. He told the Tacoma Weekly that she still “grilled me”: “She interviewed me constantly. Even though I had known her for years, she wanted to be able to look into my soul and know that I would maintain this for her family.”

Derek brought restaurant and bartending experience, and the Seattle Times called him manager and burgermaster. Richard brought a background in construction. He rebuilt walls so rotten that only the concrete stucco outside was holding them up, and he reconstructed the window awnings from old photographs. The owners replaced the plumbing and the roof, rebuilt the back patio, and in the summer of 2023 obtained the license to pour hard liquor. KNKX called it a first for the bar. In 2023 and 2024 they held a summer rooftop show and parking-lot party, with bands on the rooftop stage. Danette Staatz died on October 29, 2023, at 77.

Richard has thought about replacing the bar top but has left it alone. “I’m letting things sit and feeling things out as far as what I can change and what I can’t,” he said. He described the people who come in: “It’s really rewarding when a 90-year-old guy walks through here and his face lights up because it still looks the same from 1960 when he was here the last time. We have 22-year-old newlyweds coming through that are looking for their grandparents’ signatures from their first date.”