Photo by Madoline Markham.
PT's
PT’s founder Tim Vakakes and Mitch Hurt, CM Foodservice director of operations, stand against one of the wooden walls in the interior of the new PT’s.
An old friend has returned to town.
PT’s Sports Grill made its home on Hollywood Boulevard from 1982-2004, and now a new incarnation of it has come to SoHo in the former Lovoy’s Restaurant space.
Tim Vakakes, who started the original PT’s with his brother Pete (the P of PT’s), sees it as a “2014 version of a really neat neighborhood bar and grill,” and he’s worked with Charles Matsos of CM Foodservice to bring the restaurant back to life.
Just like old times, you can order half and half onion rings and French fries with your order of classic, naked or dry-rubbed wings.
“We brought Buffalo wings to Birmingham in 1982 before restaurants like Baumhower’s existed,” Vakakes said.
Chefs Clayton Selfe and Adam Alfano will serve Classic PT’s Burgers on the classic onion roll or their new options, pretzel bread or Kaiser rolls. In addition to recipes from the original restaurant, the Cedar Plank Salmon is rubbed with a zesty ancho-chipotle chile topping, fired and served on a cedar plank with a citrus herb compound butter. There will also be a prime rib sandwich as well as variations on onion rings and fried green tomatoes, Vakakes said.
Vakakes also said the menu will feature a selection of desserts he believes will blow customers away, such as a Homemade Peanut Butter Pie encased in a graham cracker crust and topped with dark chocolate ganache.
Twenty-four beers will be served on tap, including a variety of local brews, in addition to special bourbon varieties and drink creations by a house mixologist. True to its sports bar calling, there will be two dozen flat-screen TVs for game watching.
The bar and grill will occupy the former Lovoy’s space along with an adjacent retail space, which will increase the restaurant size by 1,500 square feet to a total of 5,000 square feet. It will seat 140 people inside and an additional 80 on its patio.
In the pool room to the right of the entrance, you’ll find a room with pool tables, where classic PT’s pool tournaments will take place. The space will also offer cornhole tournaments and space to host private events.
The idea for the original PT’s came from Vakakes’ wife of 32 years, Diane, who grew up in a Chicago neighborhood filled with the kind of bars and grill restaurants she hadn’t seen in Birmingham.
Vakakes had been in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, but he credits Diane with helping him figure out what people like to eat.
“We wanted to be a friendly place where people could hang their hat,” Vakakes said. “There were not a lot of bars and grills then. We were the first, and it took 10 years before people said, ‘We could do that.’”
Vakakes recalls the early days of PT’s, when many sports games weren’t on cable and when ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman had hair. A graduate of Mountain Brook High School and Auburn University, he said he had a college and high school reunion every day.
“Everyone came by because they knew I was there,” he said.
After a 24-year tenure, PT’s closed in 2004 to make way for a condo development that would later fall through.
Matsos and his company had been wanting to bring PT’s back, so recently, they asked Vakakes if he would be interested in the venture. The rest is history.
“It’s in your blood,” Vakakes said of getting back into the restaurant business. “Like Al Pacino, it pulls you back in,”
Vakakes first worked with Matsos when he ran a Golden Rule franchise in the early 1990s, and their fathers had worked together on an investment in the past. Now the two are teaming up for this new project.
The partners are hoping to open more locations for PT’s if this one does well.