The morning after, they would call to get something back on their chests.
Tens of thousands of women have drunkenly taken off their bras to add to the collection decorating the famously raunchy East Village gin joint Coyote Ugly Saloon.
Some, however, withdraw their support and phone the next day asking to retrieve the tossed lingerie.
“It was almost like the Call of Shame: ‘I left my $90 Victoria’s Secret bra. It’s, you know, a 34C. Could I get it?’” explained bar owner Liliana ‘Lil’ Lovell, who celebrated the honky-tonk’s 30th anniversary on Jan. 27.
“So they’d come back to pick up their bra, get drunk again, and leave the bra they had on.”
When the original saloon on First Avenue between Ninth and 10th Streets was renovated in 2014, the brassieres were placed in a bag and then misplaced by the bar’s porter.
“He actually went to bring them to the cleaners or something like that,” Lovell, 55, explained. “And all the sudden, we go to reopen, I’m like, ‘Where are all the bras?’ So we had to start from scratch.”
Now, they hang on the back wall of the honky-tonk, which moved to East 14th Street in 2021.
The brunette beauty first opened Coyote Ugly with her then-business partner and now ex-husband, Tony Piccirillo, in 1993.
She decided to staff it with all women — who don cowboy boots and dance on the bar.
“Women just made more money … it’s as simple as that,” she said. “I’d like to pretend it was some feminist agenda, but that’s just not true.”
Back then they needed to serve food in order to have a liquor license.
“We put a microwave behind the bar and … a can of like chili,” she recalled. “We just did it in case [an inspector] came in.”
The place is such a hot spot, there used to be actual fire coming from Lovell’s mouth.
“I was a good fire breather … you drank [151-proof Bacardi Rum] and you spit out into a flame and that would blow fire,” said Lovell.
In 1997, former Coyote Elizabeth Gilbert, who went on to pen the memoir-turned-blockbuster “Eat, Pray, Love,” wrote a GQ essay filled with stories from behind its bar. It inspired the 2000 cult Hollywood classic “Coyote Ugly.”
The film — in which Maria Bello portrayed Lovell — grossed over $113 million and sparked worldwide interest in the bar. The saloon keeper now runs 27 locations around the globe, and the brand has generated over $1 billion in revenue.
“I opened in Kyrgyzstan,” she said. “I didn’t even know where Kyrgyzstan was.”
After more than three decades in the bar business, she has made some interesting observations.
In New York City, bartenders never call in sick “because their rents are $2,000 a month,” she said. But her New Orleans barkeeps can be creative.
“They’d call in sick: ‘Lil, I can’t come in today. I had rough sex with my boyfriend and one of my fake boobs popped,’” she said. “I had one girl … say, ‘My boyfriend locked me out of the apartment and I’m naked and he chopped off my fingers.’”
The Westchester native and NYU grad started pouring drinks in her early 20s, when she worked for a brokerage firm by day and bartended at the Village Idiot by night.
“I made $250 a week on Wall Street,” said Lovell, who now lives in San Diego. “But, you know, as a New York City bartender, I could walk home with $1,000 on a night.”
She says the movie wasn’t exactly accurate.
“There’s one part … where she buys the whole bar a round. I would f–king cut my finger off before I did that.”