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It’s 7:30 on a Thursday night, and the bar at Celebration Restaurant is packed.

Customers line the perimeter of the large square, and in the middle is bartender Jon Radke, pouring wine, refilling bowls of okra and greeting most everyone by name.

Radke, 51, has bartended at Celebration for 27 years, but he bounds around with the energy of a teenager.

“When you come here, you’re on ‘John time,’ ” says Tommy Kohler.

“He’s blowin’ and goin’ the entire time,” says C.J. Freeman, Kohler’s stepson.

“But he takes care of everybody like you’re the only person in the restaurant,” Kohler says.

The two have been meeting on Thursday nights for the last 15 years to watch a ballgame, share a bottle of wine and enjoy a good meal, they say. Kohler knows Celebration owner Ed Lowe because they attended Jesuit together, with Lowe a couple of years ahead of Kohler.

When Celebration opened in 1971, Kohler patronized the adjoining leather shop “to buy hippie wear, mainly belts,” he says. Later on, the restaurant took off and the hand-tooled leather half of Celebration closed. The meatloaf and pot roast that were part of Celebration’s original menu are still two of Kohler’s favorites, he says.

Joe Adams is another customer who came to Celebration for the leather in the early ’70s and stayed for the food.

“Kind of like any institution that lasts, it changes, too, but it still remembers what it’s here for,” Adams says.

Adams and his partner, Jimmy Lancaster, are “fixtures” at the restaurant, they say.

“There was a time it was three nights a week,” Lancaster says.

“It’s seldom that we go a week without at least one trip,” Adams says.

They sat in the dining room tonight, but stopped by the bar to say hello to Radke. Before Adams met Lancaster, he was a regular at the bar.

“It’s a hackneyed phrase, but it’s a ‘Cheers’ of sorts,” Adams says.

The bar is where the Shepherds met the Persons. Teresa and Ken Person live nearby on Pomona and have “come here for years, even before we moved to the neighborhood,” she says.

restaurant,” she says. Her father, a farmer, owns the Kiepersol Estates winery. She gestures toward a bottle of the winery’s Texas syrah, which Celebration has on its menu.

Her husband, Andrew, is from New Zealand and unaccustomed to Texas delicacies. “I couldn’t find a place I could get him to eat chickenfried steak and fried catfish” when they were dating, she says.

Andrew Shepherd swore he would never eat catfish, but Holliday convinced him to give her one more chance and took him to Celebration.

“I was like, ‘This is gonna suck,’ ” he says.

He was wrong.

“We’ve been here once a week ever since, and we order chicken-fried steak and fried catfish every week,” Holliday-Shepherd says.

They usually come on Tuesday or Thursday nights, when Radke and Marco Chavez man the bar, and that’s how they met the Persons, who often come the same nights.

“People keep coming back because they establish these relationships that turn into friendships, and that’s what it’s all about,” Holliday-Shepherd says.

Not to mention, says Ken Person, “Jon pours a full glass of wine.” Celebration isn’t just a place to meet friends — “It’s the hottest pick-up joint in the Metroplex,” says George Fryman.

He’s been coming since the second or third week the restaurant was open, and used to buy the leather products. (At the 25th anniversary

Order like a regular party, Fryman showed off a coin purse he bought from the Celebration leather shop.) He dined at Celebration six nights a week before he met his girlfriend, Mandy McGill.

The chicken St. Caroline is a personal favorite of Tommy Kohler’s. It can be ordered grilled or fried, and “if you’re going to get it the real way, get it fried,” Kohler instructs. Freeman likes spicy dishes, and “the Jamaican jerk chicken is hotter than hell,” he says. He also enjoys the tomatillo redfish that’s sometimes served as a special. Both men enjoy Radke’s spicy margaritas, made with a jar of his own jalapeño-infused tequila that he keeps behind the bar. “They’re not as spicy as the jerk chicken,” Freeman notes.

Person orders the meatloaf in the winter and the salmon salad in the summer. Joe Adams and Jimmy Lancaster also are fans of the salmon salad.

The night he met her, he was sitting in the dining room, but Radke, whom Fryman considers “one of my very dear friends,” made trips from the bar to personally deliver Fryman’s martinis. McGill was dining with a man at a nearby table, and told Fryman she was impressed with the great service he was receiving.

“My brother and I are here once a month,” she told him.

After hearing that, Fryman swooped in, and soon they were dating.

“You just can’t beat the atmosphere,” he says.

Celebration Restaurant

4503 W. Lovers

214.351.5681 celebrationrestaurant.com