ROGERS, Minn. — Stop by the Rogers Muni Tap Room, order a double, and you might also see one.
“We've never been here before,” Melissa Frenzel says from a Muni barstool.
Not long after taking her seat at the bar, the Apple Valley woman sees her two bartenders and does a double take.
“They look alike,” she says. “They're basically twins.”
Twins would make sense.
Reality makes what Melissa sees even more uncanny.
Behind the bar, Jake Karls is talking to another curious first-time customer. “That's my dad right there,” Jake tells him.
“It is?” the surprised patron says.
Jake and his father, Joe Karls, bear a striking resemblance.
“I think when he was a senior in high school, playing football, he kind of turned into a person, not a kid,” Joe says. “That's when it started, I guess.”
What started was questions. Lots of questions, especially since the father-son pair started bartending together.
“Never stopped,” Joe says. “We just laugh every night.”
Susie Milless, who sells pull tabs at the Muni, gets the questions, too.
“So many people come up here,” Susie says, “and they’re just like, ‘What's the deal with the bartenders? Are they brothers?'”
Hardly.
“I'm 29,” Jake says.
“I'm 57,” Joe adds.
Deb Karls, wife to Joe and mom to Jake, says the similarities go beyond cosmetic.
“They walk the same way, they have the same mannerisms,” she says. “I brought the right baby home from the hospital. There's no question about that.”
While the similarities between Joe and Jake are clear, they do not extend to Joe’s dad.
“I'm 5'6,” Jerry Karls says as his son and grandson work nearby, both 6 feet tall.
“I never thought Joey looked like myself,” Jerry concedes.
Proof, perhaps, that nature is a bit of a crap shoot.
From his barstool, Jerry surveys the bar. “I hear people have gone home early because they thought they were seeing double,” he says with a laugh.
Call that the Muni’s version of one too many.
