MAPS inspires expansion plan for brew-pub
By Jon Denton
Published: January 30, 1994
On nights when the Oklahoma City Blazers play hockey at the Myriad arena downtown, the Bricktown Brewery can figure on $5,000 more business, which is good, the owners say.
If it's on a weekend, the wait for a restaurant table can stretch to 90 minutes. That's bad.
Brew-pub owners Tom McLain and Bryan Jester are about to solve their dilemma.
Encouraged by their own success and emboldened by the recent passage of the five-year, $267 million Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) downtown development plan, the brewery owners hope to cut the restaurant's seating time on such busy nights to about 15 minutes.
It will cost them $1 million to do it. They also will subject themselves to four months of construction noise.
In return, they will lay claim to Oklahoma's biggest upscale billiard room/entertainment center.
They say it was MAPS - that voters have funded with a penny sales tax - that encouraged them to double the size of their expansion plans.
"MAPS gave us the confidence to do this," said McLain, Bricktown Brewery's chief executive officer and an avowed MAPS champion. "We sincerely believe downtown will be revitalized by this thing. " MAPS will dam the North Canadian River and create a scenic, winding canal. It will add a 15,000-seat baseball stadium and a 20,000-seat sports arena, and renovate the Myriad and Civic Center Music Hall.
The improvements will be within walking distance of the brew-pub, located at 1 N Oklahoma, about two blocks east of downtown Oklahoma City.
Ed Bee of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce lauds the brewery's expansion.
"This is the first private sector investment since MAPS passed," Bee said in a prepared statement. Amplifying that is Don Jaeger, also of the chamber: "An expansion of this nature will add something unique to downtown that we can sell to tour groups," Jaeger said.
The brewery started out by capitalizing on the popularity of Spaghetti Warehouse, the first major restaurant to open in Bricktown in recent years, Jester said. Since opening in October 1992, the brewery has made its own success.
Last year, the brewery had sales of $2.7 million, McLain said.
Sales are expected to reach $3.2 million in 1994-95, then $4 million in the first full year after expansion.
"We are sinking more money into this than we have made," McLain said.
The brewery's expansion will increase its 80-employee job base to 110. Restaurant seats will double from 210 to almost 500, including a 75-seat banquet room.
The brewery already has 19,500 square feet of floor space. It will add 7,500 square feet of space from the adjacent Will L. Bradford Building. Built in 1910, the Bradford has, in recent years, served as a Bunte Candy warehouse.
The brewery is renovating the upstairs area of its restaurant and part of the Bradford. Van Hoose Construction Co. has the $650,000 building contract, based on a club design by Richard Bloch of Yui Bloch Designs of New York.
"Bryan and I have been all over the country looking at brew clubs, and we found this guy who has done over 100 restaurants," McLain said of Yui. "He's good. " Another $350,000 will go for equipment and furnishings, all new except a certain rosewood snooker table dating to 1869 and shipped from Denver.
"People in Oklahoma really like snooker. We found out the University of Oklahoma student union had a lot of snooker tables in the 1950s, which is why it's so popular," McLain said.
Existing wood floors will be refurbished; unpainted brick walls will remain intact, and wood columns and the ceiling will continue the restaurant's turn-of-the-century theme.
The expansion will make room for 21 mahogany Brunswick pool tables, outfitted with regulation leather pockets. A pro shop will offer brewery logo merchandise ranging from T-shirts to $800 cue sticks.
Also planned are four regulation English dart game lanes and four soft-tip dart lanes, foosball, shuffleboard and 4,000 square feet devoted to four golf simulators.
A raised bandstand will serve both floors.
In keeping with the expansion, the business is changing names from Bricktown Brewery, Restaurant & Pub to Bricktown Brewery, Restaurant, Billiards and Diversions.
There are no video games in the expansion plan.
"People tend to sit still and not talk with video games," Jester said. "We want to provide something beyond a club - clubs tend to be loud, but we are going to provide a place where a couple or friends can talk and enjoy themselves. We've found with an upscale billiard room, you have a 50-50 mix of men and women. " The MAPS plan gives the restaurateurs reason to plan for the distant future, they said. While the typical restaurant/club concept lasts about 10 years and then needs brushing up, Bricktown's bid as a family attraction may allow the partners to double their restaurant's life span.
They have more in mind. They own a city block of Bricktown landscape, bounded by the Santa Fe railroad tracks on the west, Sheridan on the south, Oklahoma on the east and Main Street on the north.
Their buildings contain 250,000 square feet of floor space.
"We're not using one-tenth of that now," McLain said. "We have another project in mind, a restaurant with another concept, but that's two years ahead. Let's do this first. "
