J.J. FOLEY'S BAR & GRILLE

The first memory Jeremiah “Jerry” Foley has of the establishment that’s been his life work comes from when the place was his father’s and grandfather’s life work.

“We came here on Sunday after Mass at the Cathedral,” Foley recalled, “I was about 8 years old.”

“Here” is J.J. Foley’s Café on East Berkeley Street in the South End. The time would have been the 1950s, and Foley’s was already very old for a neighborhood bar in, what was then, a less than a vibrant neighborhood.

“It was founded in 1909,” Foley said, “My grandfather started it after he came over from County Kerry in Ireland.”

“It was a lot of hard work,” Foley said. “Back then, this was an oasis in the desert. This was Dover Street back then, and it had its rough side.”

Early on a Friday night in December 2014, Foley’s is an oasis for young adults starting their weekends. The Café dining room is full. The tables in the bar area, the older part of Foley’s, are full of groups of men and women for whom middle age is far away, generating a pleasant buzz of chatter.

“I’m the third generation,” Foley said. Three members of the fourth generation of Foleys — his sons Brendan, Michael and Jeremiah ­­– are working the bar in the white shirt and tie that is the Foley working uniform. Judging from the occupancy rate, their family business seems to be more than a going concern. Foley’s is thriving as both a bar and as a restaurant, two businesses with failure rates so high they have their own reality television programs based on the difficulty of success.

“We’re old fashioned guys trying to keep it an old fashioned place,” Foley said when asked about his business methods. “Just a lot of hard work and prayers."