GRILL 1994-2011

This July saw a seismic shift to the downtown landscape; after years upon years of construction and delays, the rollout of the long-foretold Modern Streetcar finally came to pass, officially opening the latest chapter of downtown Tucson’s history.

In decades past, the consensus was that downtown wasn’t so much a nighttime destination as it was a place to avoid after sunset—that is, unless one was really into getting accosted by vagrants and junkies looking to get a few bucks for whatever substance (legal or otherwise) they’d take in as dinner that evening.

But before the bistros, before the gastropubs and before the James Beard winners moved into downtown, there was Grill. For 18 years it was a beacon in the center of Congress Street, catering to celebrities, vagrants and anyone in between; it was a safe haven for those who were willing to taste their particular brand of hate, complete with manifesto; and above all, it was a place to get some damn good food.

The light in the darkness is no longer there; it now lays in ruins, going out in a literal blaze of glory in the early hours of Jan.1, 2013. Now all that remains of Grill and the Red Room, its adjoining bar, are the walls and the memories of the people closest to it: the owners, employees and downtown neighbors.

James Graham, original owner and operator, Grill: I moved to Tucson from New York with my brother for school, and one of the first things I said to him was “Where’s the diner?” This is a college town, and we came from New York, so we’d never seen a chain restaurant before. We met more and more people and asked around, and we found the Congress Grill. Like everybody at the time, we went in once, left in horror and disgust, and thought, “It’d be great if someone bought it and cleaned it up and did something nice with it.” Turned out those were prophetic words.

After I graduated, I was looking for a restaurant space when the Congress Grill came up for sale. I realized if I didn’t buy and renovate it, it was going to get gutted and torn down and turned into something horrible. Our friends threw in money, my wife and I bought it, and we got people to help renovate it and in six weeks we were able to trick it out. We opened in 1994.

We wrote a bad check to the supermarket to buy food, sold that food, covered the check and did it again the next night, and that’s what we just kept doing for years. It was a huge hit from day one.

We knew that there was a demand. We kept hearing that we couldn’t open a business downtown—”you can’t do anything there at night, you can’t make money on Congress Street”—and we wanted to rub their faces in it, and shut them the fuck up. We did, and that’s what matters.

Margo Susco, Hydra owner: They filled this wonderful niche themselves. They opened up not long after us, and you had to be a visionary and have self confidence to open up here in the ’90s. There was an intimacy about coming here in that time.

David Mendez: When did Patrick Forsythe, the closing owner, get involved?

Graham: Patrick was a chef at Hotel Congress at the time. I think he outgrew that, and he wanted to own a place so he came to me. He worked for me so we worked out a deal where he could buy it. This was around 1999. I was really involved with starting MOCA at that point, which was a table at Grill at one point, so I wanted to put my energy toward that.

Patrick Forsythe, closing owner: I’d been with Hotel Congress for six years at that point, and had some money at the time to invest. When Grill came up for sale, I talked to James and Julia, and that’s how that worked out. I worked there for a year with them, to figure out what I was getting into, and that’s just how it worked out.

What was the situation like downtown during Grill’s day?

Graham: It was depressing on Congress Street between I-10 and the Hotel Congress. There was usually one thing open at night, that was it. The city wanted nothing to do with downtown, and didn’t even know we existed. I remember a council meeting, and then-councilwoman Shirley Scott got up and said “I want to see 24-hour restaurants downtown! It’d be great for economic development!” I went up to her after the meeting and said “I own a 24- hour restaurant downtown. It’s called The Grill.” She started to babble and backpedal. So full of shit.

Forsythe: There wasn’t a lot of support for local businesses at the time. All we knew is that we had to own property downtown to make a difference. James and Julia were lined up to own the building, but Mrs. Kim got to it first. We decided to roll the dice and try the restaurant anyway, and it didn’t work out. A lot of that had to do with the fact that she didn’t give a damn about what happened to the property so long as they could sell it down the line. At one point in the early 2000s, if the property owner agreed to match funds or agree to not flip the property, the city would help improve the facade of the business. Mrs. Kim didn’t want to deal with that.

The relationship with the Kims was horrible. It was one of those things where if you paid rent on time, it was fine. If you asked to have anything fixed or modified, you were screwed. James did his renovations, we did ours, but it hadn’t been completely renovated since 1959, so the city was ready to shut it down just for fire code. I talked to Mrs. Kim about it, and said that if the restaurant’s going to continue, we’re going to need help on improvements and new lease terms. She told me she didn’t care if there was a restaurant there or not.

You can only bang your head against the wall for so long before you just give up.

How did you end up working at Grill? How was it working there?

Gabriel Sullivan, booker at the Red Room: I was attached to the whole business just from playing music there. It was just this big inner circle of friends and musicians that hung out at the Red Room, played music and worked there. When Chris Black decided he needed to give up the booking gig he had, the first person he suggested to Patrick was me, and I had become so connected with the music community that it was a really easy transition to take over.

When I started, I was trying to think of who I could get in there that never comes, and I was trying to step it up to prove who I could get in there. I never did get to book Howe Gelb there though.

Luke Anable, bartender at the Red Room: I graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago, moved here and applied for a job with Tucson Weekly. I didn’t get that, and was disparaged. I applied for a job at the library, didn’t get it and was super disparaged. I walked by Grill and saw a sign that said “help wanted immediately,” which was frequently there—like “are you ready to work in five minutes?” I came in and started washing dishes. I did that for a month, then worked the floor for a few months, bartended, then started managing the bar with Will Elliott.

It really was an experiment in chaos. Maybe it’s overly romantic in my head, but it was just freaks, goths, punk rockers and homeless downtowners. It was our little place; no one came down there, no one left, and we all lived within half a mile of downtown. If we weren’t working there, we’d be there eating. It was a place where Patrick would pay Boar’s Head for meat before he would pay the exterminator. The priorities were a bit backwards maybe, but there was a commitment to quality. No one talks about how great the food was there, but it really was, at least ingredients-wise. People were super committed to it.

Graham: The idea that we could be attacked by a crazy homeless person with Tourette’s who could bite you and send you to the hospital, knowing the cops wouldn’t come and help you, creates a pretty intense bond. The people that worked for us were generally very young, too; for many of them, it was their first restaurant job, and we were teaching them their first skills. Most places didn’t give their employees as much protection as we gave them; it was good for them to hear that, if the customer touches them, that we’d beat the shit out of them, that their boss was really protecting them.

Forsythe: Once you’ve worked with a crew from 10 p.m. to 6 p.m., fed 300 people, had your life threatened, had a conversation with Reverend Horton Heat, then gotten through a few shifts like that with the same crew … yeah you’re going to bond.

As for the food, everything was homemade. The “cheese on tots” rule was just part of the quality line; if you cross that, you might as well be a Chuck E. Cheese, or Maloney’s or anything else. But it was also to push our cooks and waiters to get involved in real food. We were trying to teach people how to use every bit of our ingredients.

Patrick Foley, cook: It was funny; a lot of cooks ended up going from Grill to different, high-quality places. You had to come up with specials, using the Culinary Institute of America cookbook, you had to come up with different soups … everything was made from scratch, and if you worked there you actually learned something about cooking. It wasn’t just opening cans.

Bilal Mir, kitchen manager: At the point when I joined, or enrolled, or enlisted at Grill, it was clear it was a cool kids club, but it also took a certain fortitude to work there. If you were some dipshit who took the job just to try and bang one of the cute girls from Brooklyn Pizza, you wouldn’t have lasted. You needed to have a good foundation or work ethic. There were a lot of guys who worked in there who were dipshits and just wanted to hang out. But if you stuck to it and were worth something, you were OK.

I remember one day, the kitchen manager at the time was telling me about some scam with this kid who was a waiter, stealing from the place, and for some reason he was telling me. Maybe he thought I’d team up with him and rip the place off bigger? I don’t know. But one night I drinking with Matt Davidson and told him what was going on. They fired the guy the next day. Not long after that, they started grooming me to run the kitchen. I was the best cook there, and I guess Pat saw something in me that made him think I could run the kitchen.

But while I was there, there was really a particular core group of guys who worked for me that I try to keep up with when I can. Foley, Ryan Chevira, Jesse Vasquez, but there’s one guy who fell off the grid, Graham Weisse, who I always ask about when I’m out there … those were the dudes who helped hold it together, honestly.

What was the history of the Red Room?

Forsythe: It was just a side room under James, actually. We started primarily with sake cocktails, expanded the beer and wine list, and started record playing nights before we got the full liquor license. I originally wanted it to be a jazz bar, and that’s what the baby grand was about, actually.

We told bands that we couldn’t pay them, but we’d give them food and drinks. That got the local bands and the local kids coming in. We took a room that had 20 people a day and started trying to pack 100 people into it. They never shut us down though, thank God.

Howe Gelb and I still talk about it the day he left. He was up on the stage, just porking around on the piano when one of our waitresses told him he wasn’t allowed to play on it. It pissed him off, and he never came back. Later on, one of our cooks wanted stencil on the Bob Dylan mural; he showed me a proof and I said “hell yeah.” My only comment after that was that maybe it might get Howe to come back around.

Anable: We’d have 200 people in there, with people shouting and dancing and throwing confetti, and we somehow expected people to come in and eat pasta still; it was crazy, but we did it. Patrick wanted that, where you did whatever you wanted and you didn’t care if they trashed the piano. And honestly, we didn’t really know how to price anything. We were making up business plans as we went, really, selling great wines for $4 a glass, where other places they’d sell them for $8, $10, $12 a glass. We were also kind of figuring out how you book music and how you record it as we went along.

We started recording when a band would play, and we said “this seems too good to let it go in one night; we need a record of this.” There was just this moment when Will Elliott was so good, and Lenguas Largas and Otherly Love and Lifers were incredible…and it wasn’t just that those bands were incredible, it was that they were playing together. It called for something to capture it; it was more than great musicianship, but a moment.

Sullivan: The Red Room was super loose and super communal, and something that I don’t think any other place has done before or since then, at least in Tucson. It had that vibe of a listening room where you could hang out, have a nice drink and just pay attention. But on the weekends there was no controlling it; it was going to get wild and loud. It was pretty insane, and I don’t know how that continued to happen without hiccups. You could stand outside of Hotel Congress and know who was playing at Red Room.

Really, I think that place would’ve gone down a lot faster were it not for Luke. Red Room was his baby, and he kind of gave it a nudge in a very classy direction. He steered that ship for sure, and had gotten a few people to put a recording setup next door into the back of Vaudeville, with wires running over the stage, through the wall and into the Arcade Automat speakeasy … but that’s a whole other thing.

What was the closure of Grill like for you?

Sullivan: During that final month, I was in Europe; when it closed, I was watching from Facebook. I had shows at Red Room booked out for two months that I had to move, and it was messy. That first week after it closed was aggravating; all of a sudden I was out of a job when I got home, but it wouldn’t be Red Room if it went any other way. It was sad and shocking to get back and realize that there was nowhere to go get a nice drink and feel like you’re at home.

Graham: It was tough; Patrick called me in the middle of the night, and he asked, “What would you think if I closed Grill?” My first words to him were “a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and Grill burned very, very bright.” That blew my mind, of course; I didn’t see that coming. but I told him, “Hey, it’s your place. you paid for it, you gotta do what you have to do.” My personal philosophy is that restaurants shouldn’t run longer than five years. They have lifespans, and you have to respect that.

We went back to see the ruins last month. That was heavy; I saw pieces of tile I glued to the wall, and bits of wall that Julia had painted. That was hard to reconcile. It was the Drachman Mercantile, the oldest restaurant in Arizona. Sure, El Charro has been running continuously longer, but there hadn’t been one space operating as restaurant as long as 100 E. Congress was. I really wish someone kept something going in that address, but sadly they did not, so … womp womp.

Foley: It’s sealed as a memory; it can’t be refurbished into something I can’t be disappointed in. It’s also sad that it can’t be refurbished into something that maybe I’d think is cool. I’m sad it burned down, but only psychologically; it’s cool in a way that it closed and then physically disappeared, as opposed to if a Chuck E. Cheese got put in.

Anable: Well, it just fell apart infrastructurally. We were just drilling steel plates over holes that would drop you into the basement; we were fixing things with duct tape. If we’ve all agreed that we can’t really fix anything, we have to realize that it’s going to end. If you can’t have a floor, you can’t have a bar, you know? I miss Grill a bit, but it almost seemed organically to end. When I was ready to be more professional and business oriented and separate my personal life a bit, the Grill was in flames. I felt like a lot of us were growing out of it at the time. In a way, that makes it hard for me to mourn it too much.

We had a lot of private last-day parties, and Al Perry and Al Foul came in and played guitar for 20 people. It was emotional, but you can tell it wasn’t necessarily bad emotional. We got our closure.

Forsythe: That was one of the things: People thought it was such an institution that when I tried to talk realistically about it closing, they didn’t believe me. “Grill just exists,” they’d say. No, it doesn’t.

At the time, just before we had to close up, there was a buyer that was interested, so we were holding on ’til the 11th hour. When that deal fell through, I looked at what we had in the back, I knew that payroll was the next week, and I knew that Saturday night we were done. I slept on it, and that Sunday I went in, locked the doors for half an hour and talked to the staff.

“We’re done. We’re bankrupt. We have food and booze. You guys are still here, but I can’t pay you. It’s up to you. I think we can last ’til Wednesday. Do you want to go out in a blaze of glory, or just lock the doors?” Ninety nine percent of them said “Let’s do it.”

Really, the craziness didn’t happen until we actually ran out of food. We got a lot of complaints about that. I have written diatribes of people saying, “We realize that you ran out of food and that you’re closing, but do you have to be so rude?”

Now, personally, I don’t go downtown. I’ve had enough, and there’s a lot of ghosts there now. I’ll go to Hotel Congress—I’ve got a few friends there still and it’s interesting to catch up—but there’s literally nothing else left down there for me.

What, to you, is Grill’s legacy?

Foley: It was kind of the center of underground culture. I enjoy a lot of the restaurants that are opened downtown now, but there’s nothing like that cheap diner with a dive bar attached to it. If someone opened something that would be slightly comparable, I think people would flock to it.

As far as a legacy, I’ll admit, sometimes I’d hate being there, but I’d end up there anyway. It was all about the community, and it was definitely a family thing. It was a second home.

Anable: In a way, I can’t imagine it existing now, and in another way I wish Patrick could’ve had a shot with downtown the way it is now. One hopes there’s a call for some soul downtown now. The question for me is if you can have that much soul, be a family for your employees and still be a viable business. People are finally making a money downtown, but whether or not those places can also give the creative infrastructure that Tucson keeps drawing for whatever reason. Whatever this Tucson mystique is has to be real; it might be exaggerated and romanticized, but I can’t deny that there’s a caliber of person here, and they still need a place or a spot to meet.

Graham: It was an open source thing defined by the people who worked there. As Patrick said to me once, this place has been employee owned since day one. It was a unique and very successful capitalist experiment; we were financially successful, it made a profit its first year, and we were able to show people that money could stay downtown. I think we proved that independent restaurants are a success for the community and the city. Whether or not the city leaders learned that, I don’t know. They were slow to learn on a lot of topics.

Susco: The day I no longer have Hydra, I hope people speak as kindly about it as they do Grill. People talk about it with the time, with its feel and the music and the dress and I can only hope they say Hydra is a downtown icon. That, to me, is the highest compliment you can get.

Sullivan: Now that I think of it, it was that last real job that I had. “Well, now it’s time; do I want to go back to serving tables, or make a living playing music?” That was a strange way for Red Room to support me one more time. Just pulling the rug out from under you and saying, “Hey, stand back up and do it yourself.” It was a perfect attitude that Grill and Red Room always had, where something weird was going to happen and you just had to deal with it.

Mir: It was my version of college and grad school, since I dropped out before I worked there, I was a total dipshit. It’s where I learned how to develop a work ethic and thrive in chaos. How do you problem solve when a junkie cook of yours tries to break in through the ceiling, or another disappears for a few weeks because he locked himself in his motel after doing speed? Any time anything happens out here that’s even remotely disruptive, it’s the most mild-fucking-thing compared to whatever we did at Grill. I met the girl I thought I was going to marry there. Turns out she was just Satan in another form, but … that place was just the backdrop for a lot of people’s lives.

Forsythe: James flipped that whole business crowd, family thing that the Congress Grill was into a scene for bohemian artists, a new vibe for a new generation; we were getting up at noon and staying up ’til 5 a.m., and that worked for a lot of people. That’s where we got the diversity and the loyalty we did. We were able to stay true to our nature as much as we could, and what that meant to the community. At least we were consistent.

To those who didn’t get it, we were bastards. To those that did, they loved us. I don’t think there was a midline with Grill. You either loved it or you hated it.

This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2014.