04/20/2019
I woke up really sad at 5am this morning to my first “how did I get here?” moment.
People ask me all the time, “Do you ever just stand here and say, 'I did this!'?" No. When starting something, I haven’t yet gotten anywhere and while I’m doing it, I’m worried about the future. Logically, I guess, the first time I’ve ever wondered how I got here is on the day I’ve deemed it to be “The End.”
Uptown Billiards started when my Little League Baseball coach called a female umpire the C word after missing a call at 2nd base. I was 11 years old, and that fired-on-the-spot assistant coach was the brother of Keith McCready who played “Grainy Seasons” in the Tom Cruise and Paul Newman movie “The Color of Money.” Keith was the best nine-ball player in the world – probably ever – and Mark, his brother, was what gamblers called a “card mechanic.” As Coach McCready sulked off that baseball diamond, my dad stepped in and volunteered to be the new assistant coach.
My head Little League coach (Bobby) offered my dad a partnership in helping him open a new place he wanted to build called “Hard Times,” and my dad jumped at the chance to be his own boss. Hard Times would become one of the four biggest gambling billiards joints in the United States and the only place with real “action” on the west coast. There is a Hard Times operating currently in a different location by disciples of my father, Burt.
I spent the ages of 13-15 hanging out at Hard Times on the weekends watching the greatest hustlers in the world hustle at pool and cards, all of which happened between 1am and 7am. I saw McCready win and lose thousands every couple hours, I saw fights, I met hookers, my dad was forced to explain what “nymphomania” was, Steve Mizerak (the Lite Beer trick shot “Even when you’re just showing off” guy) taught me how to break at 9-ball, I watched Charlie the Ape win a 3-day Gin game using marked cards my dad had purchased “factory-wrapped” because Charlie’s opponent owed my dad $500 and refused to pay it back.
Then, when I was 15, my dad made me sell my pool cue to buy a moped and kicked me out of the pool hall.
I was a mediocre student in high school.
I was moderately ADHD.
I was a good tennis player, but never destined for the big leagues.
I took a tennis scholarship to U of Portland and decided to study accounting because I knew I would be eternally self-employed because of my ADHD and my lack of respect for authority.
I graduated, bought a suit, walked into a guy’s fancy office and talked him into giving me a commercial construction finance job I was nowhere near qualified for. I went into training, hated everyone I worked around, followed in my dad’s footsteps and cleaned out my desk at midnight one night.
I moved onto my cousin’s couch.
My life, my future, and my definition of success would all change because of a phone call that came six days later when my phone rang. “Kent, come be our Tennis Pro here in Antigua.” I said “no” the first four times he called. On the fifth, Rob Sherman said, “Kent, you’re being a fu***ng idiot. You are going to come here, we’re going to loan you $72,000 to buy the last tennis pro’s inventory, you’re going to live in one of the nicest hotels in the world, eat some of the best food you’ll ever eat, learn about wine, have cocktails and go to dinner and make friends of the richest and most powerful people in the world some of whom will change your life, you’re going to learn about imports and exports, learn about entrepreneurship because you will run the retail store and manage the assistant pros and you’re going to leave here with a Swiss bank account because you have no expenses or taxes and no matter how bad you f**k up on the retail side of things, we’re going to buy your ending inventory from you and give it to the next pro."
I worked two 8-month seasons between the ages of 25 and 27 and left with almost $100K in the Swiss American National Bank. Two of the resort’s guests were original investors in Uptown Billiards Club. One guest, a shipping baron, invited my girlfriend at the time and I to stay at his 1000-acre Kent estate in England between my two seasons, where we played billiards and I first had the thought of opening an upscale, English-looking billiards club.
I returned home to spend time with my parents.
I spent six months in Orange County. I went on five “first dates” and no “second dates.” The OC I remembered with its orange groves and humble kids had been replaced by glass, silicone, and status symbols that rubbed me the wrong way. I had just spent two years of my life recognizing that the poor black villagers that took care of the rich white hotel guests were infinitely happier than the hotel guests. Being rich and white was no longer a goal and dealing with people who thought it should be became disheartening.
I heard about an upscale pool room near my parents’ house in Costa Mesa, CA. I walked in. It was modern and sexy and there was a giant fish tank with sharks swimming around the “Shark Club.” That was it. That was the moment that I realized I was going to go back to Portland where it rains all the time and people have to play indoor activities and I was going to open a pool room that looked like shipping baron Robert Montegue’s snooker room.
I met the woman I would marry my first night back in town. I told her, “I’m here to build a bar that will send me $3,000+/month to live wherever I am in the world. I’m going to build this pool room and then travel.” We fell in love, I moved into her house 4 months later because the crack heads doing drug deals outside my apartment in the Everette Station Lofts were scarier at noon in 1989 than they are at midnight in 2019. I knew at the four-month mark that I “was done” in my search for a lifelong companion. I had met my favorite person I had ever met in my life – and she put out. What’s weird is that I could tell that her Lincoln City roughness (the small-town attitudes, the troubled educational system, etc.) would polish up over time and that she would grow into a human being even more astonishing than she knew possible. I was right, of course, and that’s no small part of how I got here.
I made offers on several commercial sites in which to build my pool room and every one of those deals fell through as I cashed in CD after CD from my Swiss bank account. Eventually I was as broke as the day I was sleeping on my cousin’s couch. Coincidence or not, in the words of Oliver Collins to Joelle (my wife), “He’s never going to get this thing built until he’s hungry.” Within a month of getting hungry, I met Al Kailes, who 40 years prior helped his friend Walt design sets for an amusement park in Anaheim; but Walt didn’t have a lot of money at the time so he paid Al with 220,000 shares of stock worth just $0.17/each. Al was the guy who looked at me and said, “Someone’s gotta give you a chance… I guess it is going to be me.” Al brought me to the Mallory Hotel and said, “Kid, this is where every big deal in the history of Portland has been signed. I brought you here to do the biggest deal of your life so far.” And Al and I signed a lease.
One of the great accomplishments of my life came when the Portland’s Fire Chief and the head of Building Appeals said, “You win. We will approve your building plan but you need to know that no project this size in the history of Portland has ever been given this much attention and you will never do enough business to repay the city in taxes what it has spent fighting you on this.” I later received a personal note from the “occupancy specialist” at the City who confirmed that I had done the impossible.
I raised the money from 8 or 9 people, all of whom threw in less than $15K each, put $41K on credit cards no bank should have given me, and my soon-to-be wife put in more than she was comfortable with when the over-rans came.
On October 2nd 1994, friends and I sat on a concrete floor in what is now Uptown’s entry with a birthday cake to celebrate my 30th birthday. We opened October 6th for “trial and error night,” the 7th for “media night” and the 8th to the public.
We opened with beer and wine in the front of the house, with a toaster oven and a microwave in the back. We had a doorman downstairs and valet parking on weekends. The doorman, who I will see tonight, eventually became my relief bartender.
One day, the OLCC came in and said, “this place needs a full liquor license.” In 1996, I built a kitchen, a dining room, and stocked the bar with booze. I hired a chef to run the kitchen as a concession rather than as an employee because I didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. I watched and learned a little bit. He went off to open “Clay’s Smokehouse” and I hired my first of many chefs.
I fell in love with food. My chefs got better and better. We started “Steak & Lobster Happy Hour” for $10 in the early 2000s. We moved to “5-course Happy Hour With Wine Pairings” when the Vancouver, BC “Chef of the Year” came to work for me. He came, went, came back with Adam, who left my humble pool room kitchen to go off and run Genoa in between. Eventually, Nate, took over and our dining program exploded. That’s the good part about dining.
The bad part is that I learned the hard way that the journalistic “food critics of Portland” thing is a crock of s**t, more corruptly “pay-to-play” than any industry I’ve ever heard of. Nate and I were voted by Portlanders to be the “best food” restaurant by a survey of over a quarter million diners on OpenTable, month after month, year after year, ahead of Beast, Castagna, LePigeon and more and (whether we were better or not), no local media picked up the story of incredible food in a pool room. Our second, third and Fourth years together, we won “top 100 most creative restaurants in the USA” by 5 million+ votes among 13,000+ restaurants – but we couldn’t make Willamette Week’s “top 100 in Portland” list or Portland Monthly’s “top 25.” My manager called WW and asked, “how can we not be on your ‘top 100’ list if we are in the top 100 in America year after year?” They told her point blank: because you don’t advertise with us.
The biggest mistake of my Uptown career was born of my culinary successes. As Michelin-trained, Roseburg-born Nate was taking over the kitchen in the recession of 2009, I miscalculated. What I got right was that while the world was suffering financially and it was super uncool to hang out, play pool and drink somewhere fancy, that “Amazing Food In a Pool Hall” would be campy enough to gain traction. It exploded. My staff got paid in tips off revenue so they were surviving, but my prices were so low that we lost money despite our full dining room until the corporate entertainment budgets came back in 2011.
Where I miscalculated was this: I thought that once people started coming in to play and drink again, this explosive dining room thing would add a new profit center to the two-hour waitlist pool crowd we had enjoyed before the recession. I was dead wrong. The twenty-and-thirty-somethings that want to drink and play pool don’t want to do it where fifty-somethings are dining and sipping their wine. The pool side never picked back up to where it left off. My mistake, my shortsightedness, my failure.
Our place had always been 50%-60% corporate events so it remained profitable, but it was the people, the regulars, the wait lists, that made Uptown fun. Uptown was never again as fun as it was before 2009.
I signed a lease in 2013 for a new restaurant where I wanted to apply everything I learned in 20 years at Uptown. If you ask my staff, that’s when things changed. Uptown had always been about the staff and the regulars, but now, Uptown had it’s first “General Manager,” and as good as he was with people, it became about numbers to (the newly overwhelmed) me because I couldn’t be there anymore. The staff wasn’t “my staff,” they were his staff. The regulars weren’t “my regulars,” they were his regulars. All I saw were the numbers, which were just as good as mine… but not as fun.
I tried in 2017, once my new restaurant had found it’s way, to fall back in love with Uptown again. I invested about $50K in the place and was going to make it mine again. I hired some amazing people who I consider among the best hires of my career. Then, in that year, I went through a series of setbacks in the kitchen until I just quit the dining program. You can only say, “I have a new chef” so many times in a year and not lose your credibility. I had lost mine. That hurt. I spent 2018 working to rebuild the 20-35 year old crowd in the pool room and things were growing. We were 30% up for the first couple months of 2019 over 2018.
But I was on a month-to-month rent while trying to get an affordable lease done with my landlord, Al’s daughter, who had been given the building by her father decades earlier. At first she wanted a 20% rent increase. As I tried to reason with her, she raised her number to 24%. After losing our right to park cars and keep our trash in dumpsters downstairs in the parking lot (because some other rich guy’s kid inherited that property) she didn’t budge. I explained to her that because there is no provision for waste on her property my staff has to roll trash down 27 stairs every night, my costs have gone up and my risks had gone up, she didn’t budge. As I explained the ever-present homeless camps out front and the human waste we get to shovel, she raised her proposed rate to about 28%. Eventually, the homeless had set our building on fire and guests were (literally) stepping over homeless people to get to my door. I asked for a concession. I pointed out the barbed wire wrapped around the 3-year vacancy two doors down from Uptown and the vacant 18,000 square feet across the street and it got worse. Her last proposal (just last week) as I tried not to save Uptown from closing, was at a 38% rent increase, something Uptown could never afford.
And so I’m out. And as hard as I worked with her to do a deal that would afford her a tenant and keep me in business, she inexplicably chased me out of a building that I would bet sits vacant for years unless the downstairs tenant decides to expand. It is my understanding that she has to put in an elevator and bring the place up to seismic code if I move out – which will cost her three times my annual rent. She's her own boss, too.
Please know that I am not feeling like a victim, however. I am excited for the free time and the lack of responsibility this freedom will bring. Uptown did what I needed it to do for as long as I could do it. I made some great decisions along the way, made at least one really bad one - but even that brought me incredible personal joy despite being bad for business. I’ve worked with hundreds of young adults in pivotal times in their life and relished in the joy of watching them leave me happier than they arrived.
Rob Sherman, Roger Lockwood and others helped me during my time of transition and taught me to believe in what I didn’t know was possible. I’ve tried to do the same thing for everybody who worked for me. I did a good job most of the time and I hurt people once in a while. My wife, who ended up doing very well financially, allowed me to worry about people first and money second. So I did. As long as I could. And tonight, I have 65 former staff coming back to say “thanks” and “goodbye.” Which, now that I've taken the time to think about it and write it all down, makes me happy and proud.
And that’s how I got here.
