They would call the next morning to get something in their chest.
Tens of thousands of women have taken off their bras while drunk.
But some withdraw their support and ask to pick up their discarded underwear by phone the next day.
“It was almost like ‘Call of Shame’: ‘I let go of my $90 Victoria’s Secret bra.’ It’s, you know, 34C. can i buy this ” explained bar owner Liliana ‘Lil’ Lovell, who celebrated the honky-tonk’s celebration. 30th anniversary it’s January. 27.
“So they would come back to take their bras, get drunk again and leave the bra they were wearing.”
When the original lounge on First Avenue between Ninth and 10th streets was renovated in 2014, the brassieres were placed in a bag and then misplaced by the bar’s doorman.
“He actually went to bring them to the cleaners or something like that,” Lovell, 55, explained. “And all of a sudden we’re going to reopen, and I’m like, ‘Where are all the bras?’ So we had to start from scratch.”
Now they hang on the back wall of the honky-tonk Moved to East 14th Street in 2021.
The brunette beauty first opened Coyote Ugly in 1993 with then-business partner and now-ex-husband Tony Piccirillo.
He decided to make it work with all the women wearing cowboy boots and dancing at the bar.
“Women made more money … it’s as simple as that,” she said. “I’d like to pretend it’s some feminist agenda, but it’s not true.”
Back then they had to serve food to have a liquor license.
“We put a microwave behind the bar and … put a jar of chili,” he recalled. “We just did it [an inspector] came.”
The place is so hot that fire used to come out of Lovell’s mouth.
“I was a good shot… you drank [151-proof Bacardi Rum] and you spit on the flame and it catches fire,” Lovell said.
Elizabeth Gilbert, the former coyote who penned the 1997 blockbuster-turned-memoir Eat, Pray, Love, wrote. GQ essay full of stories from behind the bar. It inspired the 2000 Hollywood classic Ugly Coyote.
Starring Maria Bello as Lovell, the film grossed more than $113 million and sparked worldwide interest in the bar. Concierge now operates in 27 locations worldwide, and the brand has generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
“I opened in Kyrgyzstan,” he said. “I didn’t even know where Kyrgyzstan was”
After more than three decades in the bar business, he made some interesting observations.
In New York, bartenders never call in sick because their rent is $2,000 a month,” he said. But its New Orleans barkeepes can be creative.
“They’d call in sick: ‘Lil, I can’t come in today.’ I had rough sex with my boyfriend and one of my fake breasts came off,'” she said. “I had a girl … say my boyfriend locked me out of the apartment and I’m naked and he cut my fingers.”
The Westchester native and NYU graduate started pouring booze in his 20s while working day jobs at a brokerage firm. Bartenders at Village Idiot to the night.
“I was making $250 a week on Wall Street,” said Lovell, who now lives in San Diego. “But, you know, as a New York City bartender, I could go home with $1,000 a night.”
He says the film is not entirely accurate.
“There’s one part … it takes the whole bar one round. I’d cut my finger off before doing that.”