|
The Old West-themed North Slope Restaurant and Saloon was a hot spot for food and entertainment prior to its closure in 2007.
STAR PHOTO BY DARRELL L. BREESE
|
A menu for the North Slope Restaurant and Saloon evokes its history. A painting of the original restaurant, a mobile trailer kitchen with an adjacent wood structure for seating, adorns the front. Superimposed in a slender, elegant font are the words “Established 1972 Eagle River Alaska.”
According to local memory, the restaurant was the first to open in Eagle River, and it rose easily to its glory days. A water mattress store just a stone's throw away from the kitchen trailer was vacated by Ted Sadler of Mattress Ranch fame and annexed by the restaurant, expanding its seating area. An Old West faŤade was built over the whole shebang in homage to the pioneer spirit of early Eagle River and to give the restaurant a more cohesive look. It even had its own microbrewery for a few years in the late 1990s.
Locals said the restaurant was often the best, and sometimes the only, place to grab a good breakfast in Eagle River.
Wally Swanson, an Eagle River resident for 16 years, used to hang out with his buddies at the North Slope, even before he moved here from Anchorage.
“You could go in and have breakfast any time,” he said. “We'd go there at 10 o'clock at night just to have an omelet. When we'd go fishing or hunting, we'd always stop there and have something to eat.”
Swanson said the Western omelet was his all-time favorite breakfast at the restaurant.
Colin Walker, a graduate of Chugiak High School who serves in the Navy as a cook on a submarine, remembers the North Slope as the place his parents took him out to eat each week when he was a child.
“I used to get the Denver omelet,” he said. “Green peppers, ham and cheese.”
When he went to the restaurant in his teens and early 20s, Walker said he observed the restaurant's gravitational pull on Eagle River's old-timers and young service workers.
“There used to be these guys who would sit there all day, smoking cigarettes, getting free refills on coffee,” Walker said. “You could talk to them about local politics, work, the weather. And the kitchen was where a lot of people I knew ended up, who didn't run away as fast as they could from Eagle River. It was a well-paying job, as much as you could get in Eagle River.”
George Malekos ran the restaurant from its inception until 2004, when he sold it to Mike Merrill.
A couple of locals recalled him as a colorful character who could, on occasion, be “cranky” and give an employee a dressing-down, but who kept on a friendly staff, served good food and reliably provided good service.
Joellen Kirk, a school bus safety officer, worked as a barista at Sleepy Dog Coffee Company next door to the restaurant in the early 1990s.
“We had a couple of verbals between the shop and the North Slope, just 'cause he was kind of a pill,” Kirk said with a smile. “Whenever he made us mad, I would get a straw and see how many spit wads I could blow out our drive-in window and have stick to his window. I think I averaged about 12 or 13.”
The occasional spat didn't keep her from going there for breakfast, lunch and dinner, though. Kirk said she savors her memory of the nachos the restaurant served “with everything but the kitchen sink on them,” and she said she'll always remember the time Malekos and his staff put together a great Christmas party for the company she worked for on short notice right before he sold the restaurant.
In its later years, after the North Slope was sold to Merrill, the establishment wooed the nightlife crowd with live bands and dancing.
“That's when it was really great,” said Janna Shaw of Chugiak, a handgun retail specialist at Boondock Sporting Goods.
“That was my favorite place to hang out in Eagle River,” she said. “I used to go dancing there with my boss. She's a really good swing dancer, so we'd go and get together with a group of people.”
Shaw said a bunch of local bands played at the establishment for a couple of years, and The Matt Hammer Band played the North Slope almost until the end.
But after a while, Shaw said the restaurant started hosting fewer bands, the dance floor was covered over with extra seating, and a pool table was moved in.
The brief entertainment heyday of the establishment gave her one of her fondest memories, she said, adding that she once took her parents out dancing there with a group of friends, and she taught her dad how to swing dance.
“It was the first time in his life he'd ever danced,” Shaw said. “That's a memory I'm gonna have forever.”
Walker said he'd always relied on the North Slope as a spot to bring friends when he came back to his hometown.
“I can't think of another place I'd go to get breakfast in Eagle River, and that's a bummer,” he said.
Merrill told the Alaska Star he realized partway through a remodel of the kitchen that it would be too costly to complete after he closed the restaurant in December 2007. The North Slope has remained on the market, and Merrill isn't commenting on any offers he might have received on the establishment.
Some locals said they hold out hope someone might come along and revive the restaurant.
Others, recalling the mobile trailer kitchen the restaurant was built around, were of the opinion the building might be succumbing to the inevitable if it never resurrects as a restaurant again.
Whatever the future may bring the North Slope Restaurant by the vagaries of fate and time, its former patrons said it will be fondly remembered.
Swanson said he misses the authentic Alaska feel of the old restaurant under Malekos - replete with stuffed and mounted animal heads - and having a comfortable, friendly place to grab an omelet any time of day.
For Shaw, the real height of the establishment came in a burst before the end, when it was the best place for 20-somethings to dance to local live music.
For many, the North Slope was simply Eagle River's locally owned restaurant for 35 years.
Reach the reporter at news@alaskastar.com.
