Ex-Blue Cafe entertainment booker Vince Jordan, Texas nightclub kin Joe Irwin and former  King’s Fish House manager Paul St. Bernard serve their version of an open-faced club sandwich

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

Humans need tangibles, and so it’s tough to write about a subterranean blues club downtown that’s yet to open, as well as its adjoining Southern restaurant above—even if that club is based on the Cellar, the storied 1960s Texas watering hole where future ZZ Top members were the house band and the waitresses might go topless if they felt like it.

It’s even tougher for former Blue Cafe entertainment booker Vince Jordan and his partners—Matt Boone, former King’s Fish House manager Paul St. Bernard, and Joe Irwin, whose uncle co-owned the Cellar back in ’59. They run this Cellar, which happens to be next door to the Blue Café. They write the checks, and it’s been a work in progress for, oh, about two years. That’s a lot of checks, for everything from a new heating/air-conditioning system to new wiring to restoring the original logo to changing all the doorknobs at least once.

“You change one doorknob, you’ve got to change them all,” Jordan says in a conversation at the Broadlind Cafe before he opens House of Hayden—Dave Hayden’s bar around the corner. Jordan should be getting ready to pour drinks at the Cellar. He should have his own day bar by now—and he would have, if reinventing history weren’t so much more time-consuming and expensive than owning either a boat or a Corvette.

“I really want to create a day bar like House of Hayden,” Jordan says, periodically removing his cell phone from the pocket of his Western shirt to see who’s calling him. “I was at the Blue Cafe for 11 years and I can’t tell you how many people talked to me about opening a bar. They think you just open a bar and kick back. It’s not that easy.”

Jordan and his partners are proof of that. The Cellar—part day bar, part blues club—and Quenton’s above are still works in progress two years after the team leased space in the basement and ground floor of the historic Middough Brothers-Insurance Exchange Building at Broadway and The Promenade. That was in 2005.

“There’s definitely a long wait in building out a new restaurant,” admits St. Bernard, a large affable man who also once ran the Foundation room at the Hollywood House of Blues—meeting place of Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson—and is presently spearheading the creation of Quenton’s, the Southern restaurant that will occupy the ground floor space of the Insurance Exchange Building directly above the Cellar. Things just get a little more anticipatory when you’re reviving a nightclub so notorious that it sparked three of the, er, most interesting franchises in the Lone Star State.

Texas Governor Sam Houston is supposed to have proclaimed that his state could get along fine without the U.S., but not the other way around—words that are almost believable when you consider the abundance of fine guitar blues created in the Lone Star State. Return Texas to whomever and we’d be losing the real and spiritual home of men like Lightning Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan—three of whom are dead, but still.

“Texas has always been key. I think it just happened, the way the McKinley Morganfields and the Little Walters went to Chicago,” says Jordan, a good friend of Jimmie Vaughan who made sure the state was represented during his decade at Blue Cafe. “I think it’s the same way with Texas. I don’t think Lightning Hopkins and T-Bone Walker and the architects of the Texas sound planned it. It just happened they all played guitar.”

And some of them wound up playing at the original Cellar, which wasn’t entirely planned either but which helped bring a light touch of mythos to the hard-headed business enterprise of raconteurs Cary West and reputed ex-CIA man Pat Kirkwood.

The first of their eventual four Cellars debuted, appropriately, in a Ft. Worth basement at Tenth and Main. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had been released two years earlier and so the Cellar began as a beatnik coffeehouse. As Texas Monthly writer Joe Nick Patoski explained exhaustively in April 2000, it was “a trendy concept when it opened in 1959. By the time I was old enough to sneak out of the house, it had moved to a second-story walk-up three blocks from the Tarrant County Courthouse, and no matter what the menu said, it was no longer serving just coffee, if you know what I mean.

“Walk in and there was no turning back. You’d give your dollar to the ex-con working the register, slip into the smoky haze, and move instinctively toward the booming beats.”

Patoski loves the Cellar, and however lurid, his story checks out.

But how does that inform a modern club—even a club with the good karma to be located in the former home of a 1940s Long Beach jazz bar called Ahab’s Cellar? A club today is all about sprinkler systems, handrails in the restrooms, and a 2 a.m. closing time. Will that play on Texas time?

“We’ve updated it a bit—it was a pretty trashy club,” says Kirkwood’s nephew Joe Irwin, a refugee from the petroleum transportation business who was born in ’55 and started sneaking into the Cellar about 16 years later.

“It’s inspired by the Ft. Worth and Dallas Cellars,” Jordan says in a separate interview—accent somewhat on the “inspired.” The new Cellar will have real furniture—a jazzy curved row of antique-leather booths with cocktail tables, and a professional-grade sound system. Fixtures in the original Ft. Worth Cellar consisted of pillows on the floor and black-painted walls, emblazoned with slogans of the day: “You must be weird to be here”; “Swingeth with us and ye shall learn to dig”; “Evil Spelled Backwards is Live.” At the time, this was pretty outré stuff.

“It had a pretty faithful following in its day. Everybody who was kind of anybody in the Texas music industry stopped in there and played at one point,” Irwin says. And back then, the doors stayed open all night.

“It opened at six in the evening and closed at six in the morning. In the wee hours of the morning, it wouldn’t be unusual for a cocktail waitress to take her top off and dance,” Irwin says. “From there, it just developed into a blues hangout. Stevie [Ray Vaughan] got his start at the Cellar when he was 16. Frank Beard and Dusty Hill [of ZZ Top] actually played in a house band called the Cellar Dwellers, and they were a Beatles cover band. Johnny Cash was known to stop in there a lot. Hendrix stopped in when he was in town.”

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

That’s what they want this Cellar to become: a stop-over club, a hang-out for whomever’s in town—the way Blue Cafe was the night Jordan booked Royal Crown Revue, and ex-Stray Cat Brian Setzer stopped by to sit in.

That kind of impromptu jam session could happen again, says Jordan, who spent a decade bringing American music into the Blue Cafe—acts like Top Jimmy, Jimmie Vaughan, Dale Watson, Pete Anderson, “Steady Rollin’” Bob Margolin and Texas blues-bird Lou Ann Barton. The Cellar will run off of Vince Jordan’s SIM-card, and his easy manner honed by years of working the bar.

“Besides the gift of gab, he’s got relentless energy and perseverance,” says Legends sports bar owner Gene Rotondo, who has known Jordan 20 years. “He’s someone who knows how to get things done and is willing to do them.”

There’s also the added draw of Quenton’s, the restaurant above. Quenton’s and the Cellar are joined at the hip, their builders say. Eat at Quenton’s and your receipt will get you 50 percent off the cover at the Cellar—one flight of sturdy, brick-lined stairs away. Or you just come to Quenton’s, where Irwin says the menu will be a wish list of Southern United States cuisine—one-pot jambalaya, New Orleans barbecued shrimp, St. Louis dry-rub ribs, and steaks that don’t stop cooking at 9 p.m.

“About 9 p.m. just about everybody stops serving food, they push the chairs out of the way for the DJ or whatever,” Jordan says. “What we’ll be able to do is create a restaurant that will be able to do late-night seating and have full segregation from the club. You’ll be able to come here late and eat a meal and then go and see a show. While it’s all one, it really gives the vibe of two different things going on.”

Added bonus? They’ll serve breakfast and, according to Irwin, you’ll be able to eat at the Cellar bar—leaving open the delicious possibility of breakfast . . . at the bar.

“I think the musicians will recognize [the Cellar], and if we can get them in here I think the people will come,” Irwin says. “And then what we’ll do is, we took the menu here and we kind of centered it around Southern comfort food. It’s not like a cholesterol-free dinner, but you’ll certainly feel good when you’re done.”

The man who leased them the space says he likes the operation’s chances.

“I think it is going to be a good fit, and I think that Joe and Vince are going to be good operators there,” says Insurance Building owner Dale Peterson. “We’ve got a Cohiba and a Wasabi and we’ve got a few other things that are geared primarily to a much younger crowd—the 18- to 24-year-old crowd. And I think their club is going to be a little more upscale. And I think that’s fine as far as I can see. It’s going to be geared more toward the people from the old Blue Cafe period.”

Which raises the question: What about Blue Cafe—whose Streamline Moderne facade is next door?

“Very seldom do they have real blues any more,” Peterson says. “I think it’ll be good.”

So perhaps the only thing left to do—besides the million things you do to open a blues club and a Southern restaurant in the heart of the state’s fifth largest city—is to pay Gene Rotondo? Well, maybe not pay him.

“When [Jordan] was going to take on his project, I really thought they would be way way ahead of us, so that became a horse race,” Rotondo says in a conversation shortly before Legends—which burned two and a half years ago—passed the Cellar to reopen before Christmas. Jordan says it was sort of a bet, but both business owners are now focused on their particular enterprises.

“Ultimately, it still relies on having a good venue, good service, and making it a service people want to return to,” Rotondo adds. “And that’s the challenge whether you’re Vince at the Cellar or Gene at Legends.” That and getting the doors open.

“It’s about getting to the point where people are like, ‘Don’t ask Vince Jordan and Paul St. Bernard when they’re going to open,’” Jordan says, making a 2008 forecast: “I think this will be a strong year.”
It could even be a legendary year, as legendary as 1963 was for the original Cellar—that being the year Lee Harvey Oswald and the Secret Service both, er, sat in. (Better make that notorious.)
Here’s the story—er, stories: Cellar co-owner Pat Kirkwood’s policy was free drinks for friends; and with all that gratis bellywash as fuel, Cellar franchises sprang up on Commerce Street in downtown Dallas, in downtown Houston and, briefly, in San Antonio.

The San Antonio franchise lasted long enough, according to the late Kirkwood, for Lee Harvey Oswald to be employed there as a dishwasher, “upon his return from Mexico during the middle two weeks of November 1963,” according to Patoski.

Lee Harvey Friggin’ Oswald.

The other three Cellars closed in 1972, 1972 and 1973 respectively, having lasted long enough to burn themselves into the collective Texas memory—and to be immortalized in the Warren Commission’s report on President Kennedy’s assassination.

“The night before Kennedy was killed, he stayed in Ft. Worth,” Irwin says. “And the local reporters took the Secret Service over to the Cellar. There’s some controversy that the president was left unguarded for several hours while the Secret Service was at the Cellar.” Several hours? “The Secret Service detail that was assigned to Kennedy was in the Cellar drinking until 5 in the morning the day he was shot,” Jordan says. “That all came out in the Warren Commission report and you can look it up online.”

He’s right; it’s in there, though not quite so compellingly. Just visit www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-8.html#evaluation and scroll down to page 450. And that’s it. Helluva yarn. Maybe you don’t need that kind of publicity, your first year in business?

“This is a Texas thing. We’re not recreating it,” Jordan says. “It’s inspired by what it was, what it stood for.”

What it stood for was good music. That should work.

Tags: blue cafe, downtown, house of hayden, joe irwin, paul st. bernard, the cellar, vince jordan