This couple met at Costa Mesa’s Wayfarer and got engaged there. Now they own it

Justin and Courtney Suitor were ready when the Wayfarer was offered for sale last year.

And why wouldn’t they be? The Costa Mesa music venue had long meant so much to the couple, both personally and professionally. They’d often fantasized about buying it. But that wasn’t going to happen … right?

“Courtney and I had talked about it actually years before the opportunity presented itself,” says Justin Suitor, an Orange County musician who’d been playing at the venue with various bands since 2009 when it still went by its former name as Detroit Bar. “It was more of a dreamy situation that we talked about.

But the dream started to take shape.

“Courtney has wanted to return to operations and hospitality and venue life for a long time, since she departed the Observatory,” he says, referring to the Santa Ana venue that she’d worked at until 2019. “And I like playing music and I love the venue, and I like, you know, that nightlife, too.

“It was kind of a funny joke, but then, when it became a real opportunity, we just had to jump on it.”

The Suitors took over the Wayfarer in August, and since then have been working to revitalize and rebrand the intimate 300-person capacity club. They’d met at the club where Courtney Suitor started as a bartender not long after she turned 21 around 2006 or 2007. She left in 2011 to help open the Observatory in Santa Ana as a managing partner and general manager, but when Justin Suitor proposed marriage in 2015, it was at the Wayfarer.

So even before they owned it, the place was special to them, and now they hold the keys to it, too.

“I really look back on those five years nostalgically,” Courtney Suitor says of the place where she poured drinks, made friends, and listened to great music for much of her 20s. “It was really like my youthful glory days, I guess.

“I worked Sunday karaoke every week, and at the time most of the regulars were local musicians,” she says. “And Justin was one of those regular karaoke customers.”

Justin Suitor says he first came to the bar in 2008, a little bit intimidated by how cool it seemed, and how strong the musicianship was of the bands that played there.

“I always thought it was a little too cool for me,” he says. “I never really thought to go there, but a friend brought me to karaoke and it was a good scene.

“From that point on, it became a goal for me to have a band cool enough to play there,” Suitor says. “Because at the time, I was really ready for that. I just needed to work a little bit harder to be able to play on that stage.”

In 2009, a band he was in got a residency at the club, and since then, he’s played that stage often, perhaps most with his longest-running band, Painted Wives, which was formerly known as Railroad to Alaska.

The Suitors say that they haven’t changed much of the core mission of the Wayfarer and Detroit Bar legacy.

“I feel like it’s really a good model, and that’s why it’s been around for so long, and why it’s such a special place to so many people,” Courtney Suitor says. “So it really doesn’t need all that much, because it’s kind of like an icon in my opinion already.”

Still, any icon of a certain age can use a bit of freshening up, and the Suitors have done that with the Wayfarer – giving everything a new coat of paint, updating the sound system, bringing in new furniture and pool tables, and at the moment, working to update the food menu, too.

“It was important to Courtney and I to preserve a lot of what makes the Wayfarer the Wayfarer, being it’s part of the fabric of the Orange County music scene,” Justin Suitor says.

Its place in that scene has long been twofold – to book buzz-building artists on their rise to bigger stages, and give local acts a chance to build their careers and fanbases, too.

In its past, the venue has booked everyone from Stereolab and Modest Mouse to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the late Elliott Smith to play the cozy room. It also gave now-well-established Southern California acts such as Cold War Kids, Local Natives, Young The Giant and Airborne Toxic Event some of their first regular gigs.

“Part of the Wayfarer charm, that Detroit Bar had too, was that there are a lot of bands coming through these tour circuits of 300-capacity rooms that in the very near future you will hear on the radio, if you’re not hearing them already,” Justin Suitor said. “And in the very near future, you’ll see them opening up for bigger acts in 1,000-capacity rooms.

“The Wayfarer provides an opportunity for people to see bands that very soon will be too big to play in a 300-person room,” he says. “Too big to be that close to them on stage. Too big to meet them after the show in the parking lot and talk to them.

“That right there is kind of the essence of the Wayfarer that is carried on from Detroit Bar. These bands are on their way, and this is one of the first steps off the starting line.”

Courtney Suitor and her partners in the Observatory sold that club to event promoters Live Nation in 2019. She was expecting her third child with Justin Suitor and the time seemed right to step away from the hustle and bustle of running a nightlife business. When the pandemic hit the following year, she was even more relieved not to be in the live music business.

But now, the time is right, she says, both for reasons professional – she and her husband are lifelong live music people, after all – and personal.

“I would have never imagined having this as my career path if I hadn’t had that job at Detroit Bar,” she says. “I really feel like both of our experiences there shaped the rest of our lives. Who we would become, and what career paths we would take, and the kind of values we would have.”