Tough Luck Club now open in Reilly Pizza basement

What’s stranger than eating pizza in a former funeral home?

Sipping a cocktail in the morgue.

That’s where you’ll find the newest addition to Reilly Craft Pizza & Drink — the 61-seat Tough Luck Club, a cocktail lounge carved out of the basement of the old Reilly Funeral Home at 101 E. Pennington St.

Tough Luck Club opened on New Year’s Eve in the basement, which runs the length of the three-story building, and was used as the funeral home’s morgue.

Reilly beverage manager Niklas Morris said the name is inspired by Manhattan’s famed Turf Club, where in the heyday of metropolitan cocktailing — the 1860s to 1910 — neighborhood celebrities would back the Turf, and when the talk turned to politics mixed with booze, fights would break out.

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“No bar is so fancy that it doesn’t have a bit of an edge,” Morris explained. “And we’re also in a former morgue, so (there is) a good chance that if you are here now or previously you are probably having some tough luck.”

The club’s general manager, Courtney Fenton, said Tough Luck serves craft cocktails just as the pizzeria upstairs. It will offer just one beer — Coors in a can.

The club is open from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, with plans to extend the hours in the next couple weeks, Fenton said.

Patrons enter the club through Reilly’s beer garden in the back of the restaurant.