Part of thefun of watchingBar Rescueis seeing the amount of work that hostJon Taffer, alongside his trusted bartenders and renovators, puts into revamping bars that are down on their luck. The rest comes from the sheer, unfiltered chaos that accompanies those revamps. In the over 250 episodes ofBar Rescue, there have been kitchens that violate nearly every rule, unspoken or otherwise, of food preparation. There are bars that act less like bars and more like a seedy club. There are owners that gave up on their business, and owners who fell on hard times and needed a hand getting up. But there’s one episode that stands out, mainly becauseit’s the only time thatBar Rescuehas visited the state of Iowa.
The Season 3 episode “Punch Drunk and Trailer Trashed” saw Taffer attempting to renovate the O’Face bar in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In trueBar Rescuefashion, O’Face was chock-full of problems, including bar brawls that interrupted Taffer’s planned recon, and the staff getting drunk constantly. A customer literally has to make their drink due to all the chaos going on! But the final straw comes when Taffer looks into the background of ownerMatt Overmyer. It turns out thatOvermyer had a history of violent behavior,including assaulting a former employee. Disgusted, he walks out — a first inBar Rescuehistory, as previous episodes had featured similar behavior yet managed to turn things around in the end.
Taffer remains resolute that O’Face wasthe worst experience he ever hadonBar Rescue. “Council Bluffs' one was probably one of the worst I’ve ever had,” he said ina news interview in 2016. “This was an owner who was violent with his employees, and it is the first time ever inBar Rescuehistory that I walked out and never remodeled their bar.” But while Taffer never set foot in O’Face again, he did end up sending one of his recon teams to see if it has made any progress in Season 4.While things were less chaotic, a bouncer who had supported Taffer was fired shortly after the O’Face episode aired — and it wasn’t the only problem the bar faced.
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Jon Taffer may have walked out on the O’Face bar, but his decision was light compared to the state of Iowa.The Council Bluffs city council voted to revoke the bar’s liquor license,saying that Matt Overmyer’s behavior caused “irreparable harm” to their city’s reputation. Eventually, Overmyer was able to file an appeal and get the liquor license back, claiming that theBar Rescueproducers staged most of the fights on “Punch Drunk and Trailer Trashed.” Overmyer would run afoul of the law again, but this time the charges were far more serious than a drunken brawl. In 2016,he was arrested on charges of abuse, then re-arrested in 2017. Even though O’Face is still open, it’s still a magnet for crime asa shootout took place at the bar in 2021. Despite his experience in the bar, Taffer is open to returning to Iowa — he just admits that thelogistics of shootingBar Rescuemake it tough to plan out a return visit. Hopefully, if he returns to Iowa, it’ll be a bar that’s less of a hotbed of villainy.
