Wichita bar closes for the second time in 9 years. This time, it won’t be back.
Downtown bar Peerless at 919 E. Douglas closed once before — back in 2019 when the founder got into a rent dispute with the landlord.
It reopened about seven months later when Marcello Venegas bought it and had continued operating until a little more than a month ago.
Now, Peerless is gone for good. Venegas said that his lease was up and that he decided not to renew it. He’s spent most of this week moving out the equipment he wasn’t able to sell.
That means that Venegas, who also owned nearby restaurant Forge ICT until it closed last June when he got behind in rent, is out of the food-and-drink business. He left a job in engineering at a local aircraft plant and is trying to get back into that field, he said.
And although it’s too soon to say for sure, he may get back in the business someday. He learned so much over the past several years running his downtown businesses, and thinks he’d know better what to do — and what not to do — if he tried again.
“I’d hate for all this knowledge to just go to waste,” he said.
Peerless was founded in 2016 by Travis Hatfield, who now owns the bar Douglas Social at 2518 E. Douglas. It quickly became a place where fans of ping pong would gather and play at a table set up at the back of the bar.
Peerless was closed from late March to early November in 2019. New owners put up signs promising the arrival of a different bar, but it never materialized, and Venegas was able to persuade Hatfield to let him use the Peerless name.
This story was originally published October 1, 2025 at 12:13 PM.
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