The Copenhagen Bar: The Quilici Family Tavern on Old Fourth Street

Follow East Fourth Street out of downtown Reno and it runs east past the freight yards, over the county line, and changes its name to Prater Way. On that stretch, at 2140 Prater Way in Sparks, stands the Copenhagen Bar: a low neighborhood tavern with a painted sign, a cowboy cutout by the door, and the same family behind the bar since 1949. The family is the Quilicis, and the Copenhagen has outlasted the freeway that took its first building.

It is a Sparks bar, not a Reno one, though it belongs to the same road. Fourth Street carried the Lincoln Highway and then U.S. 40 across the valley floor, and the working taverns strung along it served the railroad, the trades, and the ranches on either side. The Copenhagen is one of the few still pouring.

East Fourth Street, Prater Way, and the Old Road

The road tells you most of what you need. The Lincoln Highway was Fourth Street through Reno, and at the Reno–Sparks line it became Prater Way, running on toward the Southern Pacific town of Sparks. We tell the full story of that road in how Fourth Street became Nevada's main street. Along it sat the corner bars and Italian tables of a neighborhood that lived by the rails: Casale's Halfway Club partway along, and at the Sparks line the Coney Island Bar, the Copenhagen's neighbor and old rival.

The Copenhagen began beside the Coney Island, on what was then Highway 40, near a Chevron station. It was already a bar in the 1930s, with a pool table in the front room. A car once drove through its front wall. In 1966 the bulldozers came for Interstate 80, and the old building went down.

The Quilici Family's Copenhagen

Gino “Bear” Quilici was born in Sparks to Italian immigrant parents and worked the Italian ranches as a young man. After the war he tended bar at the Stag Inn, and in 1949 he and Hugo Ceccarelli took over the Copenhagen. Bear worked twelve to sixteen hours a day, rarely drank, and was in bed by nine. He was known for treating every customer the same, a millionaire or a man living paycheck to paycheck.

When the freeway took the building, the lot Bear wanted on B Street fell through, and a partner found a parcel on Prater Way with a house on it, then open fields and orchards. The family built the present bar in 1966, with a barber shop on the corner that is still cutting hair. A painting of Bear hangs over the register. He died in 1997, and his son Doug, already his partner, has run the place since. The sign out front still reads “Gino Bear Quilici's Copenhagen Bar,” with red, white, and green wine bottles painted beside it.

Nobody in the family can say how a Danish name landed on an Italian bar. As Doug Quilici puts it, “a Danish name for an Italian family, I don't know.” Bear didn't like change, and the name stayed.

Doug has said what he intends for it: “I'm just going to keep it a neighborhood bar and keep with that tradition, no matter what.”

A Working Man's Bar

The first customers were the trades: cement finishers, roofers, masons, carpenters, and union painters, many of whom helped raise the Prater Way building. On Fridays paychecks were cashed at the bar, with a free pack of Lucky Strikes and drink tokens on the house. Ranchers and cowboys drank here, as did casino dealers off shift from the old Harolds Club and the Primadonna, and the old Italian families of the Sparks neighborhood. In the early days the room was nearly all men. It is closer to seventy percent now.

The drinks are the old repertoire: Picon punch, old fashioneds, Manhattans. The decor is Western and unhurried, with saddles, old signs, bicycles hung from the ceiling, and raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles in dim light. On Fridays the bar serves its shrimp scampi, and each Columbus Day the regulars cook bagna cauda at their own skillets. Doug remembers the neighborhood bars of his youth as “a genuine meeting place that maybe you'd see in Europe now.”

The Copenhagen Today

The streets around it have changed. Urban renewal in the 1960s cleared much of Sparks' Italian quarter, and neighbors like the Frostop, the Wagon Wheel, the Chuck Wagon, and the Elbow Room are gone. The Pony Express Lodge and its neon still stand nearby. The Copenhagen is open and still family-run. Hours shift, so call ahead before you go.

At a Glance: The Copenhagen Bar

• 2140 Prater Way, Sparks, where East Fourth Street continues east as Prater Way.
• The original bar stood beside the Coney Island on old Highway 40 and dated to the 1930s.
• Gino “Bear” Quilici took it over in 1949; his son Doug owns it today.
• Interstate 80 demolished the first building in 1966, and the family built the present one on Prater Way the same year.
• Picon punch, old fashioneds, Friday shrimp scampi, and a Columbus Day bagna cauda.
• A neighborhood bar of the trades, the ranches, and the rails.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Copenhagen Bar on East Fourth Street in Reno?

No. It is in Sparks at 2140 Prater Way, which is East Fourth Street under its Sparks name. Any bar on Fourth Street in Reno proper is a separate business.

Who owns the Copenhagen Bar?

The Quilici family. Gino “Bear” Quilici took it over in 1949, and his son Doug has run it since Bear's death in 1997.

Why is an Italian family's bar called the Copenhagen?

The name came with the bar, and the family kept it. Why it was chosen is not recorded.

Is the Copenhagen the same bar as the one before 1966?

It is the same bar in a new building. Interstate 80 took the first one, and the Quilicis rebuilt on Prater Way.

Conclusion

The Copenhagen is what a corner bar looks like when nobody has tried to improve it: a pool table, a family name over the register, and a road outside that used to be the way across America. Bear Quilici kept it small on purpose, and his son has kept it that way.

We return to this stretch of old road often, from Casale's ravioli to the Coney Island's tamale-factory corner. To bring a piece of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points:

• Online Nevada Encyclopedia: Fourth Street & Prater Way — oral histories of the corridor, including the Copenhagen Bar.
• Nevada Historical Society — the state museum and research library for Nevada history.
• Reno Historical — a community history project on Reno's streets, buildings, and businesses.

Hero image: a 1950s Olympia beer can from The Eclection's own collection, shown as a period tavern object. It is not a photograph of the Copenhagen Bar.