An Oral History of Dubsdread and the Tap Room

You may hear the Tap Room described as a place where “everybody knows your name,” except everybody is really Steve Gunter and Barabara Teal, and “Cheers” doesn’t take place on a golf course. In the building adjacent to land that can be described only as ‘historic,’ the Tap Room has succeeded where others have failed. We celebrate the College Park cornerstone restaurant with an Oral History of the community’s personal golf course and how it developed a restaurant with a heart.

Our story starts in the ‘20s, with Carl Dann and a golf course much different than the Dubsdread we know today.

Steve Gunter, Owner: From 1924 to 1978 it was a private country club, much like Country Club of Orlando, owned by the Dann Family. In ‘78 the City of Orlando bought it. The room that is now the Tap Room was a bar and they had bands in there. It was kind of loud and rowdy, but it had a good following. From ‘78 to ‘90 it was kind of the place to go. But it was a bar, it wasn’t anything fancy. The City was interested in Dubsdread and renovated the whole building in 1990, and they opened it up in ’91. A series of restaurants kept opening and failing. They had the same space we have now but most of them kept the bar, used the middle room as a restaurant and the end room was a banquet room, but it never worked out. The reason they failed is because they tried to run it like a restaurant. To succeed in a building like this, you have to throw all of the old formulas out.