Deep Dive Podcast (with John, Brad, and Tab)
Every week, Brad, John, and Tab take a Deep Dive into a wide range of topics—from dive bars and humorous guest interviews to the reflections of three Gen-X guys trying to navigate a world where you now have ten flavors of Gatorade to choose from… but no Concorde supersonic jet.
The show is a light-hearted, spontaneous conversation between three longtime friends, and it should feel like you’re sitting right at the table with them—talking about 1980s television, flammable pajamas, and how to keep a Christmas carp alive in your bathtub.
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Deep Dive Podcast (with John, Brad, and Tab)
Deep Dive Episode 44 (1 of 2), Jeff Bruning, ( High Life Lounge / El Bait Shop Owner )
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Today's guest is part of a highly successful food, beverage, and hospitality partnership that has been credited in helping transform the Des Moines bar and restaurant scene.
His "destination" restaurants/bars aren't exactly your traditional Iowa Supper Club story. We're talking about a group responsible for places like Fong's Pizza, Mullets, and El Bait Shop.
His two establishments the High Life Lounge and El Bait Shop really caught our attention. Bruning and his partners painstakingly built a patina'd Dive Bar from scratch and created a surreal space that transports you back to the late 1970's. It's a lot harder than you might think.
#HighLifeLounge #ElBaitShop #DiveBar #DesMoines #Iowa
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I love this primary research.
SPEAKER_00And that's where I got my later hose in at a at basically uh uh you know a Yonkers or uh uh a Dillards or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Doss Dillard's over there.
SPEAKER_05All right, here we are, boys. Schlitz, Blats, how's the go going? Going great another week. We're back at it again. We're actually on a little road trip here. Yes, we are. We take a live scene.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_05So we are in uh a home base of a tang bomb. It's got yeah, it's not the Deadwoods Tang Bomb, but these guys actually have this place has more selection of a tang bomb. So should we start off the show with the tang bomb? Yeah, we can start it right away.
SPEAKER_04Just eyeballing it. It's got the right color consistency body that one would expect from what we know locally in Iowa City. I I think this looks like the real thing. And I uh by all accounts it's the same ingredients. It's the Jaeger, right? Plus the plus the tank.
SPEAKER_05So we yeah, the color is supposed to be like what? Uh kind of a coffee that's got a little bit of a coffee, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Are you concerned that the third ingredient's not in it? Is that what you're going to crack?
SPEAKER_04It's not just the powder and the Jaeger. Okay. All right, well, here's to a good show, boys. Cheers. Cheers. Funday, fun day.
SPEAKER_05All right, we're just gonna get right into it here.
SPEAKER_04Might have got a little on me.
SPEAKER_03Not the first time.
SPEAKER_05Today's guest is part of a highly successful food, beverage, and hospitality partnership that has helped transform the Des Moines bar and restaurant scene. And it isn't exactly your traditional Iowa Supper Club story. We're talking about a group responsible for places like Fong's Pizza. For those unfamiliar with it, is what happens when somebody looks at a pizza and says, you know what? This thing needs a crab meat ragoon on top of it. Our guest, Jeff Bruning, he's an Iowa native who's been credited as one of the people helping to revitalize the downtown Des Moines area. His two establishments that really caught our attention. We're visiting today, the High Life and El Bait Shop, because anytime this guy's involved with a place called El Bait Shop, we have to figure out what the backstory is. And we're hoping to hear that story today. So without further ado, Jeff Bruning, welcome to the Deep Dive Podcast.
SPEAKER_04Thanks for having me, guys. Welcome, Bruno.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, uh Schlitz.
SPEAKER_04Brad, what's the backstory here? Bruno has been, in my mind, kind of a target potential visitor on the deep dive because I think everything that Jeff's about, and as we know, being here at High Life and having just had a fantastic lunch, this place is exactly what we were set setting out to do in terms of celebrating dive bar culture. So Jeff's a guy that I've known a long time. We probably met circa 88, 89, went to Central College together. A lot of stories and uh common friends from living in the Vance House on Central's campus. Um stayed in touch with Jeff, with Bruno. He told us don't don't call him Jeff. I don't know what's doing. Known Bruno for a really long time, and I'm super happy that you're willing to give us a little time and tell some stories about your perspectives on dive bars and tell a few lies along the way. All right, yeah, I can do that.
SPEAKER_03Maybe a good old Brad Dunlap story from back in the day.
SPEAKER_05Has Brad always had a magnificent set of hair? Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_00It's a lot darker than that. Oh, I don't know. Yes.
SPEAKER_04And I came out in my proud, loud and proud, vintage Central Dutch Flying Dutch uh retro logo shirt for all the Central College friends of ours who may or may not listen to this.
SPEAKER_03But Central College, they don't go by Flying Dutch anymore, do they?
SPEAKER_04No, it's just they they dropped the Flying Dutchman uh reference. Yeah, what are they doing?
SPEAKER_00The Dutch.
SPEAKER_04That's the Dutch. The Dutch. Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's the Dutch versus the Storm now. Right. When we play Simpson. Yeah. And we weren't those two back then. Yeah. No. That's for another podcast.
SPEAKER_05So maybe before we go any further, I mean, we are sitting in the highlight. John, can you paint just a little bit of picture of what we're looking at here?
SPEAKER_03Well, to me, we're sitting in what you would think of as the advantage 70s dive bar kind of place you might have gotten drugged into with your parents. Wood paneling on the walls, an amazing assortment of old school beer light signage. Um we're in a U-shaped booth, which is fantastic, kind of a vinyl back booth. So it checks all the boxes. Well, we'll get to this in a minute. It checks most of the boxes. But we talked about in episode one as a dive bar, right? Right. Yeah, it's absolutely fantastically done. Um and how it came together, the concept and stuff is stuff we want to dig into with Bruno because it's a pretty special place.
SPEAKER_05Jeff, let me tell you about the lore that I have heard about the High Life and El Bait shop. I heard I don't know, ten years or so ago that you were looking at properties and this place this place is really around it, the neighborhood now, a lot of new um building, a lot of you know hip happen and stuff. We're like two blocks away from the Triple A ballpark for the Cubs. But at the time this place was a bit of a brownfield, and you walked in the door, and this was an old bar, and you said, I'll buy it, and you left everything that was the same. That was the story I was told. Since then, I've learned that's the city.
SPEAKER_00That's completely not even close to true, right?
SPEAKER_05Right, right. So tell us the story about the High Life and um L.
SPEAKER_00Well, the story of the High Life High Life is when we took this place over, it was three cinder block walls uh and one shared wall with the building to the south. And um, there's one room, and we're kind of sort of where that room was with a big red panel in front of it, uh plexiglass. And then there was a little tiny room in the back that had a toilet in it. And this is uh place where they put together um, I think dental kits for grade schools. You know, the stuff that makes your see if you brush your teeth right.
SPEAKER_02We talked about that in a previous episode. Yeah, so the cavity flows.
SPEAKER_00Uh pretty much did that built like 1965, uh as in a a building adjacent to you know, shared wall with the one to the south, and then uh Bay Chop has two new walls for itself that were, and then the shared wall was with the high life, and then also with the building to the south. These buildings I think possibly at one time fed grain grain in into uh trains. And I think that's what they did. But I can tell you all this was is a garage door and um and really nothing else. It's a big storage area. It was adjacent to next door to a place called Harry Mary's, uh, which was probably one of the coolest bars that was ever in Iowa. And I say that because it was a music venue that attracted crazy bands that you you know it'd be like a Thursday or Sunday when they were traveling to the next, you know, the where they're actually heading on the way back home or on the way to one of their shows, and and there was uh bands like um Fishbone was uh Fishbone and Primus. Yep, Smashing Pumpkins, yeah. Uh I think Cheryl Crow, uh Dave Matthews. There was uh quite a few that rolled through here through that time, and it was just this really great bar, and it was on a dirt road, Market Street, which is just to the to the north of us, was uh dirt road back then. Uh it didn't have many streetlights. Inside of uh their patio, which wasn't really just a fence in area, they had a car that they had sledgehammers and baseball bats you could just hammer on that car before you went into the show. A lot of the bait shop's layout is very similar to what it was, but there's been tons and tons of changes. Uh, if you ever go to the bait shop, but it was right before we took it over. It was a place they assembled uh what do you call it? The one-armed bandits, uh the slot machines? Slot machines. Yeah. So that's what they did in there. It was really weird. Uh it had been a bar called the Foundry, but that went out of business, and so they it it both sides of this had set sat empty for quite a while. This never, the high life never being a bar. So we had a clean slate and uh started. Um as we were dreaming up this place, we were at the Royal Mile, and I know you guys uh watch you guys enjoy a uh Tangermeister's and they were invented at the Royal Mile. Okay. Uh don't tell, don't let your don't tell your friend in Iowa City that he you know that. But we were trying to do that. You see, I have a jump on on the street. We used to sell we used to sell 12 to 14 cases, or buy twelve, I should say buy twelve to fourteen cases of Jaegermeister a week at the Royal Mile at our peak. And uh we were like, how do we bring the Jaegermeister over here? Because it was hot at the time. We're like, let's try mixing it with stuff. We tried, we tried it, we mix it with orange juice, and it was disgusting. We mix it with a few other things, and then we're like, eh, I don't know. And then it's like tang. We didn't have any tang at the Royal Mile, but we got some tang, we mix it. It it's amazing. We opened up this place uh 22 years ago, uh, this past February, and uh Tang has been on the menu. We have wings that are uh in Tang. Uh we do a Tang, I think we do a Tang Pai and a few other things. We uh we were working on the idea of doing Tang Tuesdays and everything Tang. We actually worked with a local brewery exile and we did uh Tang IPA exile uh just in the last year or so. So anyway, we got work to do. May or may not, you know, may or may not be a good idea. I want to try some of the other varieties. Deadwood might have, and then also the root down, which is actually my favorite way. It was we believe in Des Moines at Court Avenue Brewing was invented, but we soon quit picked that up because we sell a ton of Jaegermeister root beers, root downs. Okay, haven't had Beastie Boy Boy.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, we got some more samples. You may have transformed our tailgating this.
SPEAKER_00I'm telling you, root beer, it's kind of scary because you get all those botanicals get lost. It is, I'm not a big fan of mixing shots. Talk about dive bars. When people come in and say, I want uh all the silly, I'm not even gonna come up and say the silly names, you know, and they're they're way sillier these days. Me and a guy, the guy who's a district manager now, that people are like, I want one of those. They're like, No, uh, how about a root down? Well, no, but I'd probably have I was like, How about a root down? And they finally it's like, okay, I'll have a root down. Yeah, we kind of pushed our agenda on people, but also we're just lazy. We don't want to learn how to make some silly drink, and it's just we thought it was uh just below us to make that. So you know, it's like you got our standards. Yeah, it's sort of like uh it's a wonderful life, you know. We uh we serve hard drinks for people who want to get drunk fast. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_04You know, that's our keep it simple, keep it straight ahead. Respect it.
SPEAKER_00But yeah, that that's uh to tell to make it a short story out of a long one, that that's the history of the High Life. That's where the High Life came from. It was it wasn't anything.
SPEAKER_04It wasn't a bar before.
SPEAKER_05So you have this empty canvas. How do you start going at it? How do you decide what what goes on the canvas?
SPEAKER_00Uh so one of my business partners, uh, this is sort of his brainchild to a point. Uh we all built off of it, but um huge Rat Pack fan, huge uh brewery anna guy. A large number of these signs and things uh are from eBay.
SPEAKER_04Okay, we were gonna we were wondering, yeah, what is the investment? But then there's a lot of signage.
SPEAKER_00There's a lot of there's a lot of guys, a lot of people that were all in there, but mostly men say, Oh, I my wife won't let me hang this anymore. Do you want to buy this or do you want this? Okay. So there's been some of that. The Schlitz signs out front, uh the huge ones, they guy came in and's like, I'll take a C note for each one. I'm like, I don't know what a C note means. So I was like, what do you mean by that? He's like, well, I'll take $300. Like, okay, but I I know that's a lot of money. Can I go talk to my partner? And as I turned the corner, I'm like, oh my god, because these are like they have to be worth like a thousand apiece, especially at this point. John's been looking at the ham stuff. What'd you say? Some of the biggest hands are. Yeah, those balls, they're even more than that. I had a box of motors for it so we could keep them going. And and by the way, all those hams.
SPEAKER_03So are you saying $2,600 is a good deal for one of those? Because I'll share that with my wife like as soon as we leave. Probably so. Okay.
SPEAKER_00I would say it depends on the bigger.
SPEAKER_04And he's got spare motors. So Becky can fix it.
SPEAKER_00Just remember though, just remember though, most of those are at least 60 years old. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. And and they're not plugged in. And they, you know, a lot of ours we've had to go in and like retrofit it with LED and just the very genesis.
SPEAKER_03You said it was your kind of your business partner started the brainchild. So did he say, hey, what about like something our dad's hung out in? Or how did what was his origin story?
SPEAKER_00I think if you walk in the front door on the steps, it says 1960, established 1965, because that's his birthday. Okay. Um or birth year, 64, 65. And then but he he said he he had this idea what he wanted to do. So they have a place in lacrosse uh called Buzzer Billy's, and there's a ton of really cool bars and a lot of these this feel, and so he had this idea we wanted to do, and it is sort of like your grandpa's basement kind of flavor. Yeah, it really is. Um so all of our trips, so we have a place called the Royal Mile, and we uh we went to uh Britain for that. We went to the UK. Um, one of my favorite places in all of UK or in the world is Edinburgh, uh Scotland. I think it's one of the coolest towns in the world, and I've been there nearly, I don't know, about ten times in my life now at this point. We flew into London and we went up to Chester and York and and then uh to Edinburgh, and then we all got together and we like okay, pick the top ten names so you want to name our British pub. And so we put them in, and the the top winner was the Royal Mile. Okay, and so it became the Royal Mile, which is a it's a road, it's the high street of uh of Edinburgh that runs from Castle to Castle, hence the Royal Mile. And um so we did that, and then uh Hessen House we went to Munich and we partied.
SPEAKER_04I love this primary research, yeah. So we can get behind that.
SPEAKER_00And that's where I got my later hose in uh at a at basically uh uh you know a Yonkers or uh whatever Dillard's of uh for everyone who doesn't know what Yonkers is, a Dillard's or whatever.
SPEAKER_02It's called Das Dillards over there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and so I got that, I got my hat, the whole nine yards. Uh we we toured that so we got our flavor for that. Well, for the high life, we went to Milwaukee and we took a road trip, and I'm telling you, we had to have gone to a dozen bars on the way there because Wisconsin has very easy laws if you want to become a bar. So we went to a ton and we saw all these places, we got supper clubs and different things, and uh and so we got a ton of ideas. We went to the Schlitz uh tap room, the we saw the PBR in its early stages of being turned into it what it is today. It's a whole retire it's a whole apartment complex and a whole bunch of things. Uh and then we of course toured the Miller Brewing Company, um, went on and did all like the the deepest dive into it. And they took us to a place uh that had I think it was a place called the High Life Lounge up there, and then they they took us through and they said anything you want from the archives, pictures and stuff, you pick it, and so we went through and we picked. And so if you're on the front well some of these pictures, but then all of them around our pictures, we just they let us print. They used to own the uh Pro Bowlers tour. Okay. Uh so there's a ton of high life bowling stuff. So we're kinda we have this kind of feel like there's a bowling alley on the other side of this wall that's kind of yeah for the longest time we had Brunswick tables that were from a bowling alley in Ames. Um they kind of faded, they kind of wore out. But um this guy behind us is Barry Asher. I I just loved his style, and so I kept picking his picture to print. Well, then when we got them all together and we started sorting, I realized I have like every decade of his career or like every five years I have a new picture of him. He had a buddy through on the Pro Bowlers tour, he runs a bowling alley in California. His buddy told him, Um, hey, there's a place, there's a place that plays tribute to your to your to you. And it's like so he sent us a like a big signed picture, it's behind the bar on the other side. Uh and that we've actually made a t-shirt of the like the fourth one in where he's like kind of doing the point. And then he has like a rainbow, he's like has a rainbow coming behind him. It's I love that's one of my favorite shirts. So that's what we did. We did this whole big trip and and it started to come together. You kind of, you know, you want stuff that's you know, the four mica tables. We we purchased four mica and built the bar and put the four mica down. The thing about how we do stuff is we try to we try to fool everybody into believing that or been in the space for a really long time. Yeah at this point now we kind of have been. 22 years is quite long for any place to be open. Great run. Uh the real miles turning 25 this year, and that's our oldest uh that I'm involved with. Um Buzzer Billy's is, but they had to close because of the floods, but still it's that started during Branch Dividian, and that means nothing to some people, and it means stuff I mean Sorge Reno and that kind of stuff. That that was right then that place opened, so I I can't ever remember exactly when that is, but that's somewhere in the So Buzzer Billy's was first, then Royal Mile, then Bait Shop, then this. Then Hessen House, then here. Okay. Uh and then um and then on and on and on. We've opened 25 places over the years. Uh yeah. We have a few other places like this, but I wouldn't call them dive bars. We bought a bar uh that opened in 1992 called the Library Cafe. Oh, yeah. University Library Cafe, which is kind of a neighborhood kind of joint.
SPEAKER_04By Drake, yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, uh I you can't really call it a dive bar. We have well at one time we had 41 beers on tap, and it's uh as big as this side room right here. It seats uh 35 people. We had more taps than people in the place. We had uh during COVID, we had 120 whiskies and everyone really got mad at me. So now it's like yeah, 25 now and back to reality, and we actually got rid of some taps. But um the Royal Miles I got that neighborhood feel. So there's a lot of the things, a lot of the things we do though in our company is very much dive bar-esque is we have the same people behind the bar all the time. Yeah, we try we've strived. We have a lot of people that have been working in our company for decades. We have staff that's been on for years and years, and so people come to see the staff. Uh there's a guy named Joe next door that I mean he I paid him extra because people come to see him, it's sort of like having an advertisement to have him. So you want to see that person, you know, not so much the the person who owns the place. I mean, we are here, but we're kind of slowly kind of backing out. Like I said, 25 years, 30 years into business with my partners. We've kind of receded back. We still have this kind of personal touch and we do these kinds of things, we stay involved with the community, and uh, you know, we we do all the dive bar stuff, we've sponsored softball teams, and you got it. I hope you got a bowling team. Bowling, we did bowling team for uh a few times. We've done we've done we've done all the things that you know it just kind of ebbs and flows. But um we sponsor bike rides out front. We have a space when the bay chop open, we have 52 spots to uh lock up your bike. So we are a hybrid and we aren't, you know, we don't have decades and decades, you know. We're not we do have a kitchen, we do believe in uh serving food at every one of our places. It's a pain in the butt, but it yeah, it's nice to keep people uh fed so that they don't have too much to drink. And you know, pretzels and chips do it a little bit, but we just you know, and I guess if you had a bar, you couldn't. You only eat so many pickled eggs. Yeah, you can and and pig's feet and gizzards, but uh uh exactly. But and well when we opened up, we had sardines, we had uh we had uh Vienna sausages.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we did a show, we had a shot, was uh God, what was it called? But it I don't remember what it was. It was like a shot of something and it and it was uh sardine in it.
SPEAKER_04Okay, excellent. I'm into that.
SPEAKER_00Uh we did Polishes, which are uh famous in Wisconsin, which is just basically a sh it's a beer and a shot of uh brandy, I think is what a Polish is. We had all these things, we tried them out, but that wasn't organic. And that's what I think a dive bar, the DNA of a dive bar is organically, you know, a person decided they're gonna open up a bar and they actually stuck with it and it stayed around, and some of them are been around for decades, you know.
SPEAKER_03You touched on something earlier there that I just wanted to follow up because it was one of our questions. So you're called the High Life Lounge and you went to Miller Brewing. Did you have to jump to any hoops to use the name High Life? Did they have any questions about that? Sounds like they embraced it and let you know.
SPEAKER_00I I get asked that a lot, but if you just think about it, if you reverse that and say uh the brewery would like to call your bar the High Life, uh-huh, that's illegal. All the laws on the books from the 30s when they when prohibition was lifted was to get rid of the idea of a tidehouse uh that is controlled by the brewery, which is still in force in in Great Britain to this day. But for America, they decided, you know, you could go to a Schlitz brewery uh bar and they would have everything down to the furniture and silverware would be printed with Schlitz on it. The building you can still see them, it's all branded, completely controlled, and you could only sell their products and you you know, and that's how that was done. Well, when prohibition hit, when they repealed the Volstead Act, they had to pull that out and they had to uh that that was no longer a thing you could do. Now, the flip of that, if somebody says we want to call our place the High Life Lounge, they were like, Can we get a piece of paper? So I do have in a file somewhere it says from the lawyers says go ahead and do it, but they were like ecstatic. I will tell you the other reason they wanted uh to do it is like in the first months we were selling 450 kegs of high life a month. Yeah, yeah. And uh that's insane. I'm just gonna say that's not bad for it. Four and a half barrels, you know, like so a a ton. We we got our first delivery on pallets. And uh when the bait shop wasn't open, we didn't open the bait shop in for 18 months. It was just a storeroom sort of we would have three kegs high and about 20 foot long and about two two or three rows deep of of kegs and empties in that next room waiting to be picked up. I mean, we were slam packed full all the time. They loved they never outright said we love this, but they showed it by having people in. Yeah, we just had uh we we had the biggest of the wigs uh when Miller was bought out by South American Breweries, it was SAB Mirror Miller for a while. We had the guy from South America, he was South Africa, excuse me, he was in uh here. He came here, and we came here on a Wednesday and we had a baseball game. The place was totally full. Did you know he was coming in, or was it just told us he was coming in, but he's like he's like it's a Wednesday, you know, how busy this place is so you couldn't even walk in here, it's so busy. And he just it's just because there was a baseball game, it wasn't because of him, but he thought it was because of him. Fair enough. He thought it was the greatest thing ever, especially when a lady asked if he would sign her chest. He thought it was the greatest thing ever. Remember that one. Uh and then just recently, like uh within the last month, month and a half, I was here with David Coors at David, I think, is Coors uh the great grandson of the original uh the founder of Coors Brewing and also uh one of the higher ups in uh Molson Coors, and so and Pete's been here too, his dad. We've had that kind of poll because we've done so well. We actually Uh we have Groundhog's Day every year. We celebrate our grand opening on Groundhog's Day. We open on February 2nd, and this year was going to be on a Monday. And normally that would be slow, but it was extremely busy because we convinced Ying Ling to roll out on February 2nd. So they rolled out on February 2nd. We had Cheryl, one of the Ying Ling daughters. She was here. We had both sides packed. As we kind of move forward on a weekday, it only really got this side of the building, but that day we had both sides. But every year we grand open on February 2nd. It doesn't matter what the weather is, it doesn't matter what the day of the week is. We have a line out the door, usually about 50 people deep, waiting to get at 5:30 in the morning. You can't legally sell alcohol till 6. We don't even sell it, we give it away, but you can't give it away until 6 a.m. 8 o'clock on Sundays. We got a little nervous about that two years ago. Uh because I think we opened up a little early, but it's gonna be a while till Sunday again. But the thing is, is like they they're all hot for it. And we we packed this place on the weekends on those days. We packed it, but we were worried this year we wouldn't. Yangling came in. We were packed. It took I videoed with my phone over five minutes of people just walking in the front door. That's how that's how many people walked in this this year. They filled in here, they tried to get in. It's like, okay, we gotta go that way, and that side filled, and it's just crazy. Every year.
SPEAKER_03All that star power. Now here we are on a Sunday and Brad Dunlap. The baritone show ponies here. The crowds are overwhelming.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you can you can see them all all backed up. I was gonna ask you, Bruno, because I think I heard when you first opened, was it true that you didn't serve because you've got your your tap here is a little bit broader than I was almost expecting, because in the early days, was it true that you didn't serve anything on tap that became available after like 1970 something or was that?
SPEAKER_00No, it was 1982 because uh 82, 83, I can't remember exact year.
SPEAKER_04That was how you started. You said we're gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00We didn't serve nothing that that came out after that date.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00That excluded Bud Light. Oh, we didn't sell Bud Light, we didn't sell Bud Light. That was an issue. Oh yeah, we uh the Roe Mile for a while, we didn't sell any Anheuser-Busch products. Okay. We were like the one out of 7,000 liquor licenses in Iowa that didn't sell Budweiser products uh at the Roe Mile for a while. And people I mean, I'm sure there was probably one or two.
SPEAKER_04I think well, I was just I'm looking at John because we heard this when we were at the Fox Ed. They do not serve Budweiser. Isn't that is that true? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, and not I mean it's in our area. Yeah, yeah. In our area, uh one of the few. Yeah, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_04It's it's interesting because you would think that like that's one of the things we said on our opening show. Like, what do you expect to tap at a traditional dye bar? But the Foxhead was.
SPEAKER_00But was a that was a place named after the beer, though, right?
SPEAKER_04They were we don't know. I is that is that the case? I don't know. There was a Foxhead beer, but we didn't know if it we're not really sure.
SPEAKER_05It was out of Wisconsin and we did see um ads that were framed up in the the Foxhead hung up there, but you know that the Foxhead was given its um permit, its license like six days after Prohibition opened, or so I don't know how old Foxhead beer is.
SPEAKER_00Well they probably still have like a chip on their shoulder if you want to call it that, or they still were remembering when Budweiser ran off like breweries like Potosi and stuff like that. That could be that could be like they just stuck with that. Like a philosophical yeah. Uh we did it because of very similar things, uh, but it it it actually hurt people's brains when we told them we don't sell anionizer which products. And then we came over here and we're like, we're gonna the High Life Lounge, why would we sell like like we were sort of kind of it was okay to say we weren't doing that. We did sell Budweiser from the get-go, but it was just a I mean, in all honesty, it was just a hook. It got people in here, it got people, you know, it's sort of like you know, it's you're just playing into the beer wars, you know. Yeah, and it worked out for us, and so that was just that was great. And then on the flip of that, when we told the uh Bud distributor that we wanted to start carrying Bud Light right now, they filled this place full and drank like through like three kegs, and they're so happy and they like we got tons of business on the other side of that. And by the way, a place called the Beachwood Lounge opened up in Des Moines after they saw how successful we were. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Oh, really? Yeah. I want to go back to double-click on decoring and tricking the place out. You talked about it a little bit eBay, some stuff from the brewery. Uh, how long did it take to assemble all the signage? And for those listening, we're gonna, if you haven't been to the high life, we're gonna post a series of pictures of all this, but it is an incredible collection of stuff. How long did it take to assemble it all? Was it already open and gate? Probably never twenty.
SPEAKER_00Twenty-two years. Uh if you go next door to the bait shop, it wasn't as I mean, it didn't even come close to as much stuff as it is, but that was kind of some of our places have a ton of stuff, other places have hardly anything on the walls, and that's by design to a point. Uh, but it's all by organic uh design. My business partner, he wanted to have just those pictures on the wall. He didn't want to have any signs, he wanted it really to be clean and you know. Yep. And if you go to the bar now, like really recently we had a lot of stickers and a lot of stuff. He's like, that's his that's his give in. He's like, as long as the bar is clear of all the nonsense and keep it nice and clean, um we put all this other stuff up. He at first we didn't have much, but then it just kind of kept adding, and there was really cool signs and stuff. I will say one comment about this this wallpaper was like in stock, like new. It was like old new, you know, the old stock. Yeah, yeah. It was from the 60s, and then we we hung it. Yeah. Uh and if another really kind of fun thing about it is on this side, if you look, you gotta stand in the middle. And I don't know, at one we put that wing wall in, maybe you can't see it anymore. But at one time we realized we hung on this side there the browns pointing up, and on the other side the browns pointing down. Uh-huh. We didn't even hang it the right way on both sides.
SPEAKER_03That's perfect though. That's the motif. Of all this stuff, I'll let you go in a second, Brad, but I have to ask, yeah, all this amazing, it's almost like a museum of bar signage and stuff like that. All your eBay reads you just weren't able to find an Elvira sign? Princess of the Night.
SPEAKER_00We didn't get Elvira, but you've got to remember Elvira is more of a hot thing for the 80s, right? I don't think she was 70s or something. This is an inside project. I walked around.
SPEAKER_04In our first episode, we talked about what to expect at a dive bar, and I've I'm good at putting my foot in my mouth, right? So the two things I mentioned is you you might see a cardboard cutout of Elvira. Because I think I've seen that in more than one dive bar.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's true, except for you saw that in your lifetime, not like it's not old school. Thanks. Bruno's on my side here, guys.
SPEAKER_05And it was another one I said. I don't think he's on your side. I think he's just compensating.
SPEAKER_04I thought you're just a big fan of the Statler brothers. But anyways. You know I am. There we go. By the way, I will say two things about John's giving me a hard time because I've s I've um I've laid down a few ditties on on air, which I'm not proud of, but two of them you're you're associated with. And I think I texted you about one of them.
SPEAKER_00Was it Roadrunner? No. No.
SPEAKER_04So Whiskey You're the Devil.
SPEAKER_00Oh, Whiskey.
SPEAKER_04And that was something from back in the Vance House, right? We were doing a whiskey show and and I wound up singing a little Irish tune called Whiskey You're the Devil, which I remember.
SPEAKER_00Or maybe that was Whiskey in the Jar.
SPEAKER_04Oh no, that's Whiskey in a Jar. That was Metallica and Jethro Jethro Toll. No, Thin Lizzie.
SPEAKER_00Thin Lizzie, thank you. Sorry. Finn Lizzie. Metallica. Which is so weird.
SPEAKER_04Whiskey You're the Devil's different. It's more of a traditional one. I don't think it's been covered by but that was a tune that that um Bruno and I would do. Oh, yeah. The other one was, and we're sitting underneath the signage for it. Do you remember doing I just I have a distinct memory of the Vance House Lounge at Central College and you doing the Ethel Merman version of the Low and Brow commercial? Yeah, it's just to start right there.
SPEAKER_00Right there here.
SPEAKER_04Tonight is kind of special.
SPEAKER_01The beers will pour. Must be something more. Somehow. Tonight.
SPEAKER_04Let it be low and brow. So we were going to wear three-piece suits. You'll have to listen to episode, what is it, three, where we where we did beer advertising. And all the low and brow commercials, these guys are wearing like woolen sweater vests and then a then a then a three-piece, but then like a sport coat on top of it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, they wanted to make it out to be real fancy, hard to get, and it was made in Canada. I mean the real low and brow is amazing. Yes, it is. That was made in Canada. The real low and brow is like of the of the seven original Munich breweries, that's one of them. And it's the only one where they have like the at least when we were there, the people serving the ladies uh spoke Bavarian. Okay. The menu was in Bavarian and German. Okay. It's wild. Like it's legitimate, legitimate. But this is like St. Pauli Girl, or at least essentially. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. So Elvira didn't see one. Work on that. And then I do see the NASCAR um pennant here. My other comment was it, which was a slip of the tongue, was that you usually would see a cardboard cut out of a F1 driver. Don't have that. Is that are you not on board with that as a as a dive bar expectation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00We're a little bit we're a little bit more old school than those two things. We're aspiring to be a foxhead, you know. We're aspiring to be. I doubt if those two things are at the end of the year. You wouldn't see that at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_05Just so we're clear, the cutout of the F1 driver in Elvira isn't old school. It is no school.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna tell you the other things you see in the two bars you s you just talked about. Probably jello shots, lots and lots of vodka, bush slide. Yeah, bushlight. And pricing that's very, very low. And I and that and I I don't disagree with low pricing because we're we're pretty competitive with our pricing, but uh you're talking about really low price. You're talking about like country bar. Right. You're describing to me a dive bar in rural Iowa.
SPEAKER_04Where you can only get peanuts, you can spit on the floor.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and all the woodwork is chipboard. Yeah. You know. There you go.
SPEAKER_03And all right, let's transition to your food program because we've talked about decor and stuff in here. We sampled a good portion of the menu earlier, absolutely amazing stuff. Liver and onions were incredible. Chicken was awesome, spam and eggs is great. Yeah. Did you start with like a TV frozen dinner and like build the menu off of that? Or what was the what was the motivation behind the creative genius of your menu?
SPEAKER_00I keep referring to my partner, my my business partner, Andy Massett.
SPEAKER_04Does Andy ever get out? Like, is he why?
SPEAKER_00He's out there, but he just wants to be done. He he has an acreage down in south of Des Moines. I guess he's moved like six times since I known him. It's crazy. I don't know if he's built two, two or three of the houses. Shout out to Andy. I mean, when we first and that the kind of staff kind of balked or did like revolted on it, we used to have uh Angels on Horseback, which I think is God, there was one thing that just smelled the high heaven. Maybe it was chicken livers. It was something we used to we had a few like out there dishes, but it was basically everything is from like the 1950s or 60s cookbooks. Yeah uh cocktail party kind of menu. That's where a lot of the stuff comes from. Okay. And then it's uh it's like I like to tell people when they come to work here. It's like this isn't like if you worked at the Royal Mile or the Hesson House, we don't have to explain what this stuff is. Here, you have to explain what those are. Here, it's all in English, and it's stuff you've seen a million times over in your life. You've had it. You know, tuna casserole, stroganoff. Broasted chicken was a huge one that's from my hometown. Uh my grandmother is crazy. She she worked at um Tony's. There's a place in Carroll called Tony's, and broasted chicken was like the height of like fancy. Yeah. And so we'd always on Sundays we'd go there. Grandma didn't wait on us or she's like just did it for part-time just because she had the skills from back when she was she's my they were farmers really. But she waited there, and so that's where we started going there, like for breakfast and stuff to see my grandma. But then we'd go all as a family with my grandparents to eat broasted chicken on Sundays, and that was huge. There's another place called Denny's in Carroll that basically we lifted the entire menu. Okay. Uh, which is is original. I mean, it's just like a local bar for locals, which could be considered a dive bar. But they had like the pizza burger we sell here, it's very similar. Yeah. Uh but all like the menu is sort of a in our original menu, all of our food came from Farner Bakken.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh, and so Farner Bakken is really not geared towards like high-end food or anything.
SPEAKER_05So shout out to Jeff Farner. He was a listener.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so yeah, we did a lot of we did a lot of business with Farner, but then it just kind of we kind of it just they're not from around here, you know, they are in town. They did deliver, but they're more convenience store and small town. And we we needed a little bit more than that because we started to branch out and had more needs in all our places. What I just said too, Tony's is no longer open. I was gonna ask you if those places is no longer open, right? And Farner Bakken is no longer uh Farner Bakken, they got purchased.
SPEAKER_04So keeping some things alone.
SPEAKER_00But that's where we got it. It was it was no, you know, the cheeseburger basket we opened up was $2.75. Tater tots, I think we kind of put tater tots back on the map. Because you didn't see a lot of tater tots in Des Moines, and now everywhere has it. Seems like everywhere has tater tots. Seems like everywhere has crab rangoon pizzas, everywhere, you know, like apparently they have Tangermeisters and things, you know. They do a lot of people have broasted chicken. Um not to say that we were the only ones that ever had it. I'm just saying it went well.
SPEAKER_04It's not roasted, but have have you ever had the chicken at Mount Hameltop? Do you know do you know of Mount Hamill down by Mount Pleasant? No. All right, something to something to check out. No, I mean I'm it's a chicken joint. It's all about chicken.
SPEAKER_00I'm all about fried chicken. And uh, you know, we have a place called the chicken.
SPEAKER_04So I mean Oh yeah, I actually was there on my way out to Ragrai.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the chicken uh I didn't know that was yours.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's he's got so many places you don't know. You're if you're in a place, the Des Moines metro areas. I don't know now.
SPEAKER_00We talked about mullets before. I don't own mullets and the chicken, I've sold both of those off, but um a lot of my partners still are in it. I actually own the property at the chicken. Okay. That's it.
SPEAKER_05So, Jeff, listen, there are groups like yours in other places in Iowa, and it seems like those groups have an equation for their kitchen, and they're okay food fast, and they have put this equation together. How fast can we get it from the order to the kitchen, back out on that, and then turn the table over. Maybe this is a good time where like Brad, what did yeah, what did we eat? I mean, before we before Jeff came here, let's we're gonna talk about your menu because you are not a conventional place. I mean, you're like a sit down and eat and enjoy each other. Brad, what did we eat? We wanted to go kind of light.
SPEAKER_04Um we got the Velvet Elvis, which is a Velveeta and uh sausage kind of like super bowl dip kind of a vibe. Right. Then we got it's like rotel, but yeah, with breakfast sausage, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, really nice. So good. We had your we tried your tots and your fries, because that's gonna be a make or break. If you're serving burgers and you got bad fries or tots, you're not we did deviled eggs. Deviled eggs, yeah.
SPEAKER_04As this as a starter, because we wanted to keep it light, we did the liver and onions. Right. That was our appetizer. And the three of us enjoyed all that. Yeah. And then it was the Stroganoff. Yep. It was the spam egg sandwich, and it was the roasted chicken. So I I I was asking Bruno as as he came in and we were saying hi, how I did on, you know, how we did on the menu. We did decent, but we missed a couple.
SPEAKER_05So you also have meatloaf that you can get up until 9 30 at night. You have uh sometimes was it uh chicken and noodles, mashed potatoes. Your mashed potatoes is a real mashed potatoes, they got skins in them.
SPEAKER_06Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_05I mean, you have an outstanding menu that is not fast. You are built for people to sit and spend some time. It's not it's not an alternative. It's very unconventional.
SPEAKER_00Well, we do like a lot of the things you just mentioned, so the brosa chicken comes in core, you know, we don't quarter our own chicken, it comes in quartered. But then we have to uh brine it and bread it uh to order, which is fine. I mean, but that but it's not like we don't just take it out of a bag or you know and just reheat it or whatever. Um and then you know, meatloaf is all the components come in separate. We have to form it in loafs and make it that way. Uh the stroganoff is made from scratch. Uh, you know, the fries aren't, we don't make fries and tots. Uh we do one of the one of the few, if not the only places we have crinkle cut because you can't we do seasoned fries at all our other places, but crinkle cut works here. Yeah. Tanner tots work.
SPEAKER_04The onion rings are specials. Those are really good ones.
SPEAKER_00Onion rings are from scratch. We make them here. Uh they aren't we're not out of a bag.
SPEAKER_05Uh listen, I'm an onion ring guy. The difference between your onion rings and everybody else's is you have seasoned battered onion rings. Like it's in the batter, and it is it's not sprinkled on top.
SPEAKER_00We have to do pickle chips. Uh uh, you know, where I'm starting to get a little angry. I don't know about you guys.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you didn't get a pizza burger, Brad. Come on.
SPEAKER_00Those, you know, when we first did that, it was a it caused an issue because they couldn't figure out the kitchen, couldn't figure out. There's a process to to batter those uh and get them going and uh and make it work so that it doesn't screw up your uh fryer and all that. Right. But we got it worked out, and once they worked it out, they they uh they love it and it's it's good money maker. Pickles aren't like expensive. But all this stuff, you know, if you don't hand make it, then you're I I read a story or maybe watch a podcast where somebody went, we're traveling or whatever, and it was a food show of sorts, and they they said, Okay, we tried chicken strips or we tried uh jalapeno poppers. And they went and they realized that they were having an identical thing everywhere they went because they're just from Cisco, yeah. Pre-made and they throw them in a fryer. Now, don't get me wrong, we do that because it's a labor saver and it helps on some stuff. Like our pizza burger, I believe a pizza burger that we sell is the best one you can get, and I will also tell you that it is pre-made in the freezer and we drop it in the fryer. But I think it's the best one. Okay, so I've seen something like that cafeteria, like when you're in grade school, they make a pizza burger, which it's a hamburger with sauce and then mozzarella cheese. I don't like that. That's not what I think of as because that's not what I had when I had a pizza burger. But um we couldn't we're not gonna try to figure out how to make our own. We're not that chefy, yeah. But we're also not uh we're not gonna just cut cut a bag open uh and throw it in the microwave or or in the fryer all the time. So one of our best sellers is bacon bacon wrapped tater tots. There's a person hand rolling them in the kitchen almost 24-7.
SPEAKER_03You referenced growing up with roasted chicken on Sundays. My grandma made liver and onions, and you just don't simply do not see it anymore. You have to sell more liver and onions in any restaurant in Iowa. You has it been on the menu since day one.
SPEAKER_00We sell a de we sell a good amount, and I would tell you the kitchen doesn't mind cooking it because it comes there's another one. We we don't have raw liver sitting in the back of the kitchen, so it's as fresh as it possibly can be. It's pre-sliced frozen, so then we get it and you get just the right size and it cooks. You can cook it just right. It was great. We put the oven, we know, cut, we cut the onions, we put them on, and that that all that stuff comes. But uh as we assemble it, it's there's just some things that make no sense uh to try to do from scratch on a on a uh business perspective. Yep uh and we're not like I say, we're not when people say, Well, I would really like to talk like a I would we would like to talk to your chef, and I'm like, Well, we don't have one of those. Yeah, and by the way, most places don't have those, and they can call themselves a chef all they want, but they probably didn't go to school for it. Um it's like somebody calling themselves a brewmaster when they work at a brewery. There's like so few of those that there's probably not one brewmaster in the state of Iowa uh that wants school because you have to actually go to school in Munich to be able to call yourself it's like saying you're a PhD.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, or Brad calls himself a bike mechanic, right? Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_04Here we are exactly. I'll show you pictures of my newly built bike after this, Jack. We don't want to get too much.
SPEAKER_05No, you're good. So I so I guess going back to my my concept, I know that with some of these other groups, they sit down and they think what is the experience they want, how fast do they want to turn the table over? You know, that depends on the menu. Are you guys like that? Or are you just like we want to bring the food that we want to bring? And if they stay here 45 minutes, that's fine, and if they stay here an hour and a half, that's fine. Do you does your group think about that?
SPEAKER_00Or we don't do formulas to figure out how much money we can make. We don't reverse engineer and figure out these things. Uh it seems kind of force and made up. You know, I I I'm also not move we're not gonna be opening up. We try to, we're trying to stay within like a you know, real tight radius of where we're at. Uh at one time we did open up in Cedar Rapids, uh Fongs. We did open a place in Angony. There was a Buzzerbillies in uh there still is a Buzzerbillies in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, Lincoln, Nebraska, and the original one was in Waco, Texas, is no longer uh part of the group. So we have two buzzerbillies, but they're not really part of our crew. Uh that's a separate part of the ownership group. We're really tight. I mean, we're not opening a place in Chicago, we're not opening a place in Kansas City, Omaha, you know, you know, outside of where we're at. We're not going to Iowa City. It's just we're not that interested in money, I guess. So we don't think in terms of how fast can we do this. We just want you to come in and have a good time. And it's more neighborhoody than than anything. It's like you just want to feel really comfortable when you go there. You don't want to feel like you're getting run off or that we have some sort of agenda. Uh I've never even thought that way. So when you say that, I mean it sure does sound like my buddies out now.
SPEAKER_05All you want to do is sell as many hamburgers as you can and get the next people in that are gonna order more hamburgers, and you're doing the absolute opposite of it and you're thriving.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't make any sense to do that to me, but then it might make sense to the next guy. The only time we ever really kind of run into that, and this is something, is uh like at uh Lucky Horse in the Drake area or or the Royal Mile uh down here, is uh if they're going to the show, if they're gonna go to the wicked show coming up or whatever, we gotta kind of run on a timeline. It's like we gotta go, hey, you going to the show tonight? Because if you're going to the show, we're gonna let you know we probably won't get you in in time. And then at the uh Lucky Horse or the library, hell, you're going to are you going to the Drake basketball game or something? We kind of have to let them know that we're on a channel. But other than that, no. Um I think the times my staff really are the most worried is do we really have to stay open that late? Can we, you know, post-COVID, the whole calculus has changed. We used to be, you know, here till three in the morning. And I will tell you that the old adage of um nothing good happens after midnight is really true, especially I guess when you're 56.
SPEAKER_04That was a Doug Dunlap isn't.
SPEAKER_00You know, it's just really true. There's not like we're not we used to make pretty dang good money from midnight to two because it was just like, you know, people are trying to furiously drink as much, and then Fonks, we did, you know, late night pizza till 3 a.m. But that was such a battle, and we had to have security and we had to have all the silly things. Things can get weird. And we're like, you know, then COVID kind of took the legs out from under that, and we actually have kind of geared towards more breakfast. We just opened our first coffee shop, and we have a lot of our places have turned to breakfast uh that didn't start off as breakfast, and so we've adjusted that way. Um, but we've kind of just rolled with what the customers want and you know when we I just think what you just said, I think it's sort of forced too. When you're trying to formula, you know, turn everyone into an equation, then really you're not really that into your customers. I think you're more into you're more into how much money can you make. And quite honestly, I don't really care how much money we make. I'm not interested in that. I never really have been. I know that you know it's silly to say that, but it turns out like you make really good money if you just do things that you love and do it right. So and that's I think is kind of that's why people meet their girlfriend, meet their uh future husband, future wife. That's why they get engaged at our places. This is why they come to our bar, you know, as the day they get married, this is why they have their uh their you know, rehearsal dinners, this is why they have their uh remembrance, you know, uh uh get together. Yeah, yeah. And uh retirement parties and all that stuff. They make our places a part of their lives. We've tried to do that on scale, so that's not the easiest thing to make happen. Right. Uh, because when you're doing more than one place, you get kind of a little detached from the owners. But we tried like we re encourage our culture to be that kind of that that feel, which is exactly what a dive bar is. It's a neighborhood place where you be you plug in and you make it your own place.