Paulie G's Pool Hall and Deli

As mentioned in another review the owner is a blatent racist!!!!  The man was disgusting and unwelcoming and an embarassment to any business owner.  No one like that is welcomed or appreciated here in Olympia.  We will NEVER give this man anymore business and if you do not support hatred and racism you will not either.  People like this do not deserve to be part of our local business community.

I'll spare you (save this mention) a long treatise about my desire for good places for table games without smoke and booze or crappy equipment in Olympia.  I like a nice, friendly pool hall that isn't all drunks, gamblers or people who think it would be fun to threaten me physically.

This neat little place tucked halfway between Aztec Lanes and the Eastside Co-Op seemed promising enough, and really like just what I was looking for.  The owner announced the opening online with a defiant "no dumbasses."  Hey, I don't want to have to deal with dumbasses, either!

Approaching the front door, one sees an array of brightly-colored notes going floor to ceiling full of disclaimers about who is and isn't welcome.  Emphasis on families and friendliness and being "good people"!  Hey, this sounds like it will be low-pressure.  A place where people might be able to play games side-by-side without bothering each other, accepting that everyone else has as much a right to be there as you.  Again, the owner mentioned online that there's platforms set up so that kids can play more easily, which seems pretty cool and inviting.  That's good hospitality.

The rest of the notes are not.  Fully half of them seem to go on about people with saggy pants, referring to them as "thugs."  One particularly-heinous sign says that "boyz in tha hood" should "stay in the hood," and another notes that the place is called "Paulie G's" not "Homie G's."  Hostility with a thick varnish of racial innuendo.  Not very welcoming.  Not good hospitality.

It's perhaps not the rough crowd one might (reasonably, in some locales) worry about at a pool hall normally.  But in Olympia, on the outskirts of the Eastside, that level of hostility playing off of the fear (prevalent in some parts of Olympia) of black youths coming down from Tacoma to engage in some unspecified criminal activity that will impact the "good people" the aforementioned sign referred to is despicable.  It's not hard to get the sense that "good" is approximately synonymous with "white" here.  It has all the right markers of being a place for white families and other serious, fine, upstanding people.  I guess that's one way to try to address the fears about becoming one of Those pool halls.  It's a disgusting one, though, and it seems particularly out-of-place in Olympia.

I continue to long for a casual, friendly place for playing table games with other Olympians, with no further caveats.  I am not a little disturbed at what apparently lurks on Devoe St.