| “Father Knows Best” Leads
to Creating Entertainment Empire
By Fred Delkin
If your Dad had taught you how to laugh, have a beer, kick back and look at things in a logical manner, you might be running an entertainment business grossing well over $60 million a year. That’s how Mike McMenamin describes a philosophy instilled by his late sire that continues to guide the ever-expanding McMenamin empire offering a wide variety of beverages, food, lodging, original art, music and dancing at 49 venues spread from Roseburg to the Seattle area. “Dad truly gave us our start,” Mike says. “He put up seed money and kept us on track when challenges came up.” Prominent Portland attorney Robert McMenamin (who handled legal affairs for the inspirations of his offspring until his death some three years ago) aided sons Mike and Brian to bounce back from their first post-college business stumbles in entertaining the public.
“Finally, we started to get it right when we opened the Barley Mill Pub (on lower Hawthorne in SE Portland),” Mike says. This neighborhood fixture was acquired with a $15,000 loan from Mike’s father. The pub had been featuring local blues musicians and gave the McMenamin siblings an opportunity to exercise a musical interest honed by a collegiate devotion to the Grateful Dead (the Barley Mill still hosts an annual Grateful Dead anniversary party). The Microbrew Lobby Next step for the budding barons of beer was converting a former Skippers fast food site into the suburban Portland Hillsdale Pub in 1984. Here the brothers added an on-site brewery and went into politics. Mike and Brian joined several other Portland microbrew pioneers (Widmer brothers, Bridgeport’s Dick Ponzi, Art Larrance and Fred Bowman of Portland Brewing) in successfully lobbying the Oregon legislature into passing a law allowing brewers to sell their beer on site, plus supply that beer to another location. This was the dawn of the now pervasive Portland beer culture that flies in the face of national brewing conglomerates with more small brewpubs than any other city in the country. The Hillsdale brewery gained attention with some madcap concoctions including one recipe with Mars candy bars as an ingredient. The local taste for innovative brews hasn’t slaked since (current estimates number some 150+ Portland commercial brewer recipes being slurped at any given time). By the end of 1985, with the opening of McMenamins’ Tavern & Pool and Blue Moon Tavern a few blocks apart in Northwest Portland, the McMenamins were providing multiple tap outlets for fellow microbrewers in addition to spigots for their own house brews. And the beat goes on, with new brothers -‘M’ pubs opening in the Northwest each year. History comes aboard “We love history,” Mike McMenamin declares, and the first clearly visible demonstration of this devotion was the restoration titled the Cornelius Pass Roadhouse, located just south of U.S. 26 west (the Sunset highway). This opened in 1986. Buildings restored in this rural complex (OMED: Fred means "farm") date to 1855, and today the dot com generation from nearby high tech facilities knocks ‘em back here.
The McMenamin pub format expanded to additional locations in Portland, Clackamas, Gresham and Eugene in the late ‘80’s and 1990 saw the opening of no less than seven more pub-style operations in the Portland area and Salem, plus a venture into wine making. The latter foray was the first activity during another seminal step in the McMenamin entertainment evolution, Edgefield.
Multi-purpose projects are now the focus of McMenamin energy. The Kennedy School morphed in 1997 out of a Portland elementary school dating to 1915. Termed by Mike McMenamin as a “true community center”, this facility offers breakfast, lunch and dinner in the former school cafeteria; 35 lodging rooms, bars, a movie theater, gymnasium and an art gallery. March 2000 marked the opening of another varied McMenamin facility, Forest Grove’s Grand Lodge, an updating of a stately Masonic edifice built in 1922 and now offering 77 guest rooms, restaurant and meeting facilities and three bars amid 13 well-manicured acres. Art amplifies the offerings Art is yet another important missile in the McMenamin quiver of entertainment arrows. Since the first pub openings, artists have been employed to create original works of sculptured wood, prints and multi-media expressions largely based upon a style we would term “’60’s San Francisco,” when hippiedom reigned supreme, The Dead strummed you to heaven and Janis Joplin vocalized the effects of substance stimulation. McMenamin patrons can enjoy the full panoply of this virtual school of art at the Edgefield gallery. Beyond beverages, food, lodging and eye candy, the McMenamin realm is rich in musical offerings. Live music has been featured since the opening of many of the clan’s facilities and in 1998 this interest culminated in the re-opening of downtown Portland’s Crystal Ballroom. Another historical restoration, this enterprise restores a dance venue born in 1914, with a history of featuring nationally prominent musicians. It is embellished by Ringlers, a pub beneath the terpsichorean center. Music is also a key element in two additional Portland entertainment restorations receiving the Big M brand in 1998. The St. Johns Pub offers live tune making in a structure originally built for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition. The latter event also inspired the opening of The White Eagle, a classic saloon offering notable rock and blues live performers since the ‘70’s. This McMenamin restoration includes 11 guest rooms. Two Mc’s Unite Latest example of the McMenamin forays into lodging is Hotel Oregon, the renovation of Yamhill county’s tallest structure, a brick edifice in downtown McMinnville. Another 1905 vintage venue, this wine country outpost offers rooms, a restaurant, cellar wine bar and a rooftop bar with a view of the core of Oregon’s vineyard resources. This 1999 opening was accompanied in the same year by a McMenamin restoration of Roseburg Station in the southern Oregon community tgat once used the site as its rail portal to the world. While Oregon has been the primary geographical focus of McMenamin ambitions, our neighbor to the north has not been ignored. 1995 marked the opening of the first Washington state McMenamin outpost, McMenamins on the Columbia, first structure built from scratch by the entertainment impresarios, on the Vancouver side of the river. This was followed the same year by two Seattle operations. Now these Washington outposts have been joined by an additional Vancouver venue, two more Seattle area pubs and Centralia’s Olympic Club. The latter is a restoration of a men’s saloon opened in 1908, complete with a wealth of original fixtures and soon to be amplified by a McMenamin remake of the next door Oxford Hotel. Lest our readers think there’s any slowing of the McMenamin entertainment flood, Mike points proudly to the family’s latest project, St. Francis School in Bend. This undertaking in the heart of the central Oregon community is transforming a former Catholic school enclave into a lodging, dining, bar, theater, live music and convention site. The fun will continue And there’s more to come, according to Mike. He’s found the family’s formula works well in Washington and sees the Seattle area as offering “lots of room to grow.” At the ripe young age of 50, the McMenamin leader declares “we’re still having fun…that’s what it’s all about, having a ball as we go along… we brew, we ferment, we distill, we feed and we lodge…we encourage great music.” He notes that “folks tend to not like change, but we do, we create or re-create all types of entertainment and services…we like to operate diversely so our employees can find fun niches that best fit their talents.” Mike stresses that “our people are the key to our success. We try to provide a culture that’s meaningful for them and that’s enabled us to keep key people long term.” He admits that constant growth has exponentionally complicated management of the McMenamin brand of fun. “We crunch numbers constantly now and we conduct training programs that have gone way beyond the early days.” He notes that there are now multiple layers of management to implement the widening spread of geographical locations (49 in two states) and activities. This writer's son and daughter both worked at various McMenamin sites in the '80's. Myr offspring credit the founding brothers with very personal, yet low key, supervision of their properties..."they really personified the friendly, family-oriented atmosphere we all tried to project," says my daughter. The currrent happy McMenamin employee family now numbers over 1,200...a majority ex-collegians earning their first full-time paycheck. "We've given a start to an army of ex-college types," Mike says, "and an awful lot of them have found our operations so much fun they've stayed with us over the years." Mike worked his way through a degree at Oregon State after two years on a football scholarship. The bar and restaurant business, as an entrepeneurial category, has long been a risky profesion. Centuries before the dot coms, four out of five went broke before the end of their second year of operation. Yet since their first faltering efforts at public entertainment, the brothers McMenamin have produced an 18-year run of successful operations and if Mike speaks no blarney, these descendants of Irish immigrants are still enjoying bringing the joys of their youth to an ever vaster audience. Causes you to amend that popular business adage to: “find a need and have fun filling it!” McMenamin operations OREGON Portland -- Bagdad Café & Theater, McMenamins
Pub205, Barley Mill Pub, Blue Moon Tavern & Grill, Crystal Ballroom
& Ringlers Pub, McMenamins Tavern , Mission Theater & Pub,
Fulton Pub & Brewery, Oak Hills Brewpub, Greater Trumps,
Raleigh Hills Pub, The Rams Head, Ringlers Annex, Hillsdale Brewery &
Pub, St. Johns Pub, Kennedy School, Market Street Pub and McMenamins
on Broadway Beaverton -- McMenamins on Murray, McMenamins
Cedar Hills, The Riverwood Pub Clackamas -- McMenamins on Sunnyside
Corvallis
-- McMenamins Eugene -- High Street Brewery & Café,
East 19th St. Café Forest Grove -- The Grand Lodge
Gresham -- Highland Pub & Brewery
Hillsboto -- Cornelius
Pass Roadhouse & Brewery, Rock Creek Tavern Lincoln
City -- Lighthouse Brewpub
McMinnville --Hotel Oregon
Oregon City -- McMenamins
Roseburg -- McMenamins Roseburg
Station Salem -- Boons Treasury, Thompson Brewery & Pub
Sherwood -- McMenamins
Tigard -- McMenamins Greenway Pub,
John Barleycorn’s Pub & Brewery
Troutdale -- Edgefield
West Linn -- McMenamins West Linn
WASHINGTON Seattle -- Dad Watson’s, McMenamins Queen Anne Hill, Six
Arms Centralia -- The Olympic Club Mill Creek --
McMenamins
Vancouver -- McMenamins on the Columbia, McMenamins
East
|
The
brothers began their beery ventures into capitalism by acquiring inner
southeast Portland’s Produce Row Café (sold in 1978). Next
came Bogart’s Joint, Stockyard Café, West Hills Market and
Vintage Wine & Cheese, all sold by 1980 when a distribution business,
McMenamins’ Wine & Ale, began a short life as a pioneer purveyor of
out-of-state microbrews.
