Pub Crawl Reporter
To buy into a business, especially a restaurant, one must know what they're leaping into. When Ulysses Demby and Dan Koehn purchased Set 'Em Up Jack's, 1800 East 23rd Street, they knew exactly what they were doing.
With nearly 30 years of combined bar and restaurant experience, including Koehn's run as general manager for Teller's and Demby working as the general manager for Jack's, the transition to bar and grill owner was surprisingly a smooth one.
"You're just a little more in tune to it because it's your money," Koehn said.
Demby knows that you have to stay in tune to the business or the financial end, from taxes to labor, will swallow the less experienced whole.
"With the experience between me and Dan, we know how to control food costs, how to control labor costs, make a budget and we stick to that budget," Demby said. "That's the only way in the restaurant business that you can make a profit."
Set 'Em Up Jack's location in the east side of Lawrence has afforded the partners a good opportunity for business.
"I like the location because there's not a bunch of competition. It's like everything is growing westward and we're the only sports bar on this side of town," Koehn said.
"People said that you should never put a restaurant over here on the east side," Demby said. "The stigma about being on this side of town - the residential doesn't support it, a lot of bad people on this side of town. Well, I beg to differ."
Koehn also disagrees with the east side stereotype.
"We're a neighborhood bar so our base clientele is basically within a couple miles from (Set 'Em Up Jack's) to begin with," Koehn said. "There's a lot of young families out here and that's the type of clientele we want to have for our food business. This side of town deserves a place to go like that. You shouldn't have to drive all the way downtown or to the west side of town to be able to get some good food," he said.
While Demby and Koehn oversee the day to day activities as the establishment's owners, you'll also be able to see them from time to time getting their hands wet by cooking food, cleaning, or tending bar. Although this is a rare sight in the suit and tie ownership world, Demby and Koehn see the hands-on ownership approach as a necessity.
"To me it's like a respect thing," Demby said. "It's always easy to stand up in a suit and point and have people do it, but if you're willing to clean out a fryer or clean out the dumpster, (the employees) respect that."
Also, doing such work shows that they know all the aspects of running a restaurant, and the employees appreciate that more.
"They know I'm never going to ask them to do something that I haven't already done a hundred times already," Koehn said.
One thing that they definitely have done more than a hundred times is putting together a menu change. Jack's has a new menu that, according to Demby, took two months to work out.
"It's not a huge change," Koehn said. "We're not getting away from the bar food or anything, but we're adding a few items that are aesthetically pleasing."
Some of these include pasta dishes, salmon, and new sandwiches, including one made especially for vegetarians.
So is Jack's going high-scale? Koehn has managed fine dining restaurants, but the only thing he really wants to bring to Jack's from that experience is the quality of service.
"Your expectation when you go to a fine dining restaurant is that you're going to have impeccable service, and your expectations when you go into a sports bar probably won't be as high," Koehn said. "But if you get that service at a sports bar, you're always so much more impressed when you leave. That's what we're hoping for here is that every single person that comes in receives a good service experience," he said.
Along with good service, Demby and Koehn also want people to come in and watch their favorite games on the 16 TVs (including five big screens) Jack's have scattered throughout the restaurant. Are there three different games on at the same time that you want to see? No problem!
"It's the best place to watch games," Koehn said. So go check 'em out at Set 'Em Up Jacks!
------------------