Most restaurants don't make it to year six. Poor Phil's, the seafood-and-beer bar at 139 S. Marion St., marks its 41st year.

"The average life of a restaurant ain't great," founder Dennis Murphy told the Forest Park Review on Thursday, June 26. "The average with luck, 5 years! Forty years is like ancient."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the average restaurant lifespan at roughly six years, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis published in June. By either measure, the Murphy family operation on Oak Park's South Marion Street corridor has beaten the odds several times over.

Murphy opened his first spot in the village in 1975, the same year Oak Park began granting liquor licenses after roughly 70 years as a dry town. He and his wife Bunny launched Philander's in 1979 as the village's first stand-up bar since Prohibition, then opened Poor Phil's next door in 1985 as a deliberately casual counterpart. Both took their names from Philander Barclay, the eccentric early-1900s Oak Parker who photographed everyday village life.

The bar has survived recessions, a six-figure expansion in 2012 that added about 100 seats, and the pandemic. Manager Mary Murphy, Dennis and Bunny's daughter, credited regulars for keeping the doors open during COVID-19 shutdowns. She started working at Poor Phil's in 1993 at age 19 and is the only one of the couple's eight children still in the business.

The South Marion Street block has changed around them. The village invested $5.4 million in brick streets and bluestone sidewalks on the corridor, prompting the Murphys' 2012 kitchen overhaul. A Barnes & Noble is slated to open at 1144 Lake St. in summer 2026, according to village officials, filling a storefront vacant since 2011.

Poor Phil's offers about 100 beers, 36 on tap, plus oysters, lobster, and soft-shell crabs. Tap handles from retired brews hang from the ceiling. Every table has a centerpiece anchored with an American flag.

Happy hour runs Monday through Friday, 4 to 6 p.m., with half-priced appetizers and $2 shrimp or oysters. Hours are Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Friday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to midnight. Sidewalk seating is available on Marion Street.