MIDLAND, TEXAS – 2026

There is a saloon in Midland, Texas that has formed such a cohesive bond with the oil workers of the Permian Basin that it can get away with simply being called “The Bar”. I don’t think I have ever been to a bar in the world that gives a more emphatic nod to the working community it serves. This is codependency working at a real estate level as opposed to a personal one.
 
Of course, there are bars in lower Manhattan that cater to Wall Street types and bars in northern Massachusetts that cater to commercial fishermen, but I can’t imagine that the decor on show will have the archival breadth that is on offer here. It is a museum to the history of oil in Texas with the occasional nod to the state’s love of sport. This is the hydrocarbon capital of the world and the walls most certainly talk.
 
The recipe for success here is not highbrow or noteworthy; no one is breaking the atom at “The Bar” in terms of culinary refinement or cocktail mixology. But the owners are friendly, the service is quick and big contracts are agreed on handshakes over lunches that cost less than a barrel of oil.
 
If local patrons arrive smelling of Christian Dior, they will leave smelling slightly more of crude oil. There is nowhere Greta Thunberg would less like to spend an afternoon than The Bar and I suspect that everyone in Midland is delighted about that.
 
Like any good bar in Texas, we needed a cowboy and a horse and then some reference to college football. Since so many of the people we met out in the Permian had connections with Texas Tech in Lubbock, we favoured that option.