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Bar Frida 4.0 celebrated its 22nd year in business on June 1, 2023 to a full house with owner Tom Finley on hand to thank customers for their support.
The evening included offering customers $22 pesos Frida’s Tequila shots, $55 peso Bloody Mary, César or Mimosa and the Special Drink of the Day was the Margarita de la Casa de Limon/Sabores $50/$60 or Margarita de la Casa de Limon/Sabores (Chabela) $100/$110.
Bar Frida 4.0 and Frida’s Kitchen opened in its current location on Oct. 31, 2022, at the corner of Venustiano Carranza and Naranjo street.
Bar Frida 1.0 opened where the current Reina’s bar is now – on Lazaro Cardenas. A bar called Frida’s had operated there and was closing. So Tom arranged for a traspaso (a Mexican term for moving a business license from one owner to another) on May 31.
On June 1, 2001 he took over and became an instant bar owner. He kept the name, and – at the time the area appeared to be “very straight” but Tom knew he’d have success. The entire area at the time was not so welcome to Canadians, Americans, or gays.
Bar Frida 2.0 opened on Insurgentes and was there for 11 years. The space is now an empty lot, as the building owners would not renew the lease and had hoped to build condos there. That forced Tom to look for a new location, and Bar Frida’s 3.0 opened at Lazaro Cardenas 481, in 2020. He had secured a year-to-year lease, and was informed he’d need to move in 2022 as the building owners had plans for the space.
Photos from the 22nd Anniversary Evening: Photos by Oscar Almeida.
And so for 22 years Bar Frida has been a part of the Puerto Vallarta gay landscape. Tom has been a part of the community even longer. He’s been coming to PV since the late 1970s. He retired and moved from Vancouver Canada in this mid-50s – but still owned a flower shop in Vancouver and helped run the business remotely. But after a few years of “retirement” he grew restless and decided to open his own bar.
“Now mind you,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never run a restaurant or bar before, but I love people and it was just something I wanted to do.”
“We were the first bar in Vallarta that was invited to take part in Guadalajara Pride around 2002,” he said. “Everything we did was bilingual, and I was after the Mexican crowd. They recognized that and appreciated that we were reaching out to the Mexicans.”
His bar was one of the first few gay bars in town. Los Balcones was possibly the first, and the Piano Bar had existed before but it was never promoted as a gay bar. Paco Paco and Bar Frida’s opened up within the same year, and Los Amigos had opened up about six months before.
