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Some would say drinking and nostalgia are inextricably linked. Stephen Hightower and Brad Watts would have to agree. Missing their favorite watering hole—the original Happy Note in the Rebel Shopping Center on Florida—so much, they opened a cover version near Juban’s on Perkins Road. Hightower is betting the college students who frequented the Happy Note in the early ’90s are now grown up and living in South Downs across the street from the new location.

“[Previous owner] Shirley Bryant had a great mixed crowd of regulars,” Hightower says. “It was a place where people would come between 10 and midnight before they went to the college bars, a place you could get a real drink.”

And by “real” Hightower means stiff: easy on the ice, easy on the water, hard on everything else. Like the original, shag carpet lines the vertical surface of the bar, and a mélange of Solo cups and Christmas lights offers modest illumination. A disparate catalog of CDs populates the jukebox. The Animals, U2, Johnny Cash—Hightower is taking requests.

“From young professionals to 75-year-old men, if you could go back in time eight years, you’d see the same people are here at the Happy Note.”