Restaurant consultants make a lot of money telling eateries to change the color of their curtains and to put tiramisu on their dessert menus if they want to attract more customers. But the truth is, featuring all the recommended fads du jour doesn't guarantee prosperity in the food business--just ask the owners of the more than 300 Denver area restaurants (according to my best calculations from labor and revenue statistics) that went out of business in 1995.
If there were a surefire formula, restaurateurs would make it their business to follow it. In most cases, though, success simply comes down to the right combination at the right time. A mediocre menu executed by an inexperienced kitchen can survive next door to a college dormitory, and $30-an-entree establishments have been known to thrive in neighborhoods that require armed guards as valets.
In 1974, when Angelo and Jim Karagas chose an old plumbing supply house at 15th and Wazee streets for their Wazee Lounge and Supper Club, LoDo was a filthy heap of rubble, without a microbrew or art gallery in sight. The brothers Karagas already had an unlikely hit on their hands with My Brother's Bar (classical music and flat burgers are not your average recipe for success), which they'd opened even farther down 15th at Platte Street in the late Sixties after moving here from their native Detroit. They decided to model their new place after the supper club that shook under Chicago's "El" in The Sting. (The old storefront that houses the Wazee was then in the shadow of the now-defunct 15th Street viaduct.)
Jim Karagas still owns My Brother's Bar, but the Wazee is now the property of Jane Karagas, Angelo's wife. Angelo went on to that great pizza parlor in the sky two years ago--but not before he made the Wazee an urban mecca. The restaurant is filled with antiques collected over the years: Depression-era wainscoting (that's wood paneling on the lower part of the wall to all you non-interior decorators), gaslights from early-1900s Milwaukee and a mahogany bar from the deco Thirties. There's even the unique dumbwaiter--or, as politically correct general manager Russ Barrett, who's been there sixteen years and hopes never to return to the "real world," says, "the dumbwaitperson"--made from an industrial-size garage-door opener. The black-and-white checked floors, vinyl seats the color of Dago Red and a few stained-glass windows complete the classy, yet cozy, effect.
Build it and they will come, and come they have: The Wazee plays host to well-known authors and unknown street cleaners alike. The eclectic clientele is part of the restaurant's appeal. Spend an afternoon hunched over your great American novel, sipping a local micro, and it will quickly become clear that half the customers who walk through the door have been in three or four times already that week. The waitstaff is schmoozing all over, remembering names and faces, and even Barrett, who tells me over the phone, "I'm the bald guy," spends lunch and dinner making the rounds to chat and pick up the stray glass here and there.
The waitress, ahem, waitperson, I drew for lunch one day had the kind of tolerance that can only come from being happy in your job. (Barrett says much of the staff has been at the Wazee for ten years or more, with five to six being the average--almost unheard-of longevity in the restaurant business.) When I asked what the soup was that day, she replied patiently, "Tomato. Friday is always tomato-soup day." The waitperson had to repeat this information no fewer than eight times over the next half hour; I must have been sitting in the non-regular section. It was also the art-critic section, because everyone around me was discussing--and in not particularly complimentary terms--a local artist's metal sculptures for sale on the wall behind us. But the soup, which arrived steamy-hot in recycled-paper bowls (the crockery-impaired Wazee used to use Styrofoam but got complaints from environmentally correct types), seemed to satisfy everyone. Once I'd shaken in some salt and thrown in a few oyster crackers, the Friday-is-tomato soup made Campbell's look like, well, canned. (A small bowl of soup is always $1.95; the rest of the week's selection is minestrone on Monday; Tuesday, chicken with wild rice; Wednesday, bean; and Thursday, chicken noodle.)
Satisfying as it was, the soup was an unnecessary starter; the Wazee's pizzas and sandwiches are so sizeable they usually require an empty stomach. My individual Pacific Rim pizza ($6.50) contained so much deli ham, pineapple, green peppers and onions--as well as cheese and sauce--that it looked like someone in the kitchen (maybe chef Michael Jimenez?) had taken leave of his senses and thrown on every topping in the place. Miraculously, they never spilled over--but that's because the Wazee's trademark cornmeal-enhanced wheat crust is cooked in the kitchen's stone oven like a pie crust, until it's sturdy enough to support a delicious load but soft enough to sink your teeth into. Purely in the interest of science, I also tried an individual pie with onions and excellent sliced-to-order (read: not dried-out) pepperoni ($5.70) and, on a later visit with a few friends, a large with fresh-sliced tomatoes and spicy sausage ($14.45), which conveniently arrived on a cake stand that gave us more table space.
