The owners of Penn Social are nixing the coffeehouse business model it reopened with last year, getting rid of Little Penn Coffeehouse brand on the first floor and returning it to the sports bar and downtown party space beloved by many of its pre-pandemic customers.

The daytime café and nighttime concert venue and private events space the owners launched a year ago was not profitable with such little foot traffic downtown due to the prevalence of pandemic-era remote work and a struggling business district, says owner Geoff Dawson, co-founder of Tin Shop, the company behind a number of area bars and restaurants.

“We’re like a cat with nine lives,” Dawson says. “And hopefully, we’re not on the ninth.”

Penn Social closed in the fall of 2020 before announcing its return last May, thanks to a $2.8 million federal grant that allowed the owners to purchase heavy-duty audio equipment to create a subterranean live music venue and event space in the former sports bar, and to reinvent the ground level as Little Penn — a coffeehouse and work space with outdoor seating. The grant mostly helped Dawson keep the Tin Shop team employed, he says.

They’d hoped to create a sustainable business model through happy hours for local businesses and regular music performances.

“The hole in that plan is that nobody came back to work,” Dawson says, adding anecdotally that Wednesdays are the new Fridays, when he sees the most action downtown. The same shift in business has taken place at Tin Shop’s Astro Doughnuts & Fried Chicken and Astro Beer Hall — just a 10-minute walk from Penn Social — which has also been struggling, he says. (Meanwhile, Astro’s new location in Arlington, which will include both a beer hall and the doughnut and fried chicken joint, is on track to open by the end of June, Dawson says.)

A number of low-star ratings online are indicative of Little Penn’s shortcomings as a coffeeshop. Recent reviews include customers who seem confused about the menu offerings and website; others want it to return to the days when football games played on flatscreens upstairs while arcade games and dance parties raged on in the basement late into the evening: “This place may have been a great vibe at one point but it’s truly lacking character now,” reads one review from two months ago.

Many things about the rebrand will be noticeably different from last year’s plan — but will remind patrons of the original layout. Already, managers have wheeled in a few arcade games and a pool table into the main space upstairs. The planned podcast studio upstairs never materialized and is no longer in the works.

Private events will still take place downstairs but perhaps less frequently and with a different vibe — less K Street law firm gatherings and more university alumni events and college sports watch parties, Dawson says. He’s OK with losing business from some of the “more serious” groups.

Little Penn’s regular programming currently consists of Profs and Pints talks and Volo Sports post-game happy hours. Hosting live music has been a challenge, but Dawson says Tin Shop may partner with another company to book acts going forward. “We’re not particularly built for that,” he says. “There are other people who do it a lot better in D.C.”

The transition to the new-but-old model should be complete in six to eight weeks, per the Tin Shop team. The business hours are listed as 4-10 p.m. every day except Sunday, when it opens at 1 p.m. — though, Dawson didn’t immediately answer whether those hours will change. (Some online reviews from the past year have mentioned last-call times as early as 8 p.m., and generally limited hours on weekends.)

The team hopes to recapture some of its original feeling by the fall and re-establish Penn Social as a go-to spot for game watches. Amid the changes, the owners have learned a hard lesson: “You’ve got to pick your poison,” says Dawson. “You can’t be everything to all customers.”