Facelift for an Evergreen mainstay

The Daily Inter Lake

It was barely 8 a.m. on a Monday morning at Nickel Charlies.

Waitress Di Eslick's bottomless pot of coffee was making yet another round at the table.

Scott Hedstrom let his buddies Shane Reavis, Joe Van Bremmel and Gene Hamann know that they'd better watch the price of gas. Eggs were 17 cents this week, the longtime Flathead Valley egg producer told them, and they're going to 18 cents next week.

Gas is to follow, he predicted.

His was just one more thread in the string of news and views the guys swapped as they started off their day with a good dose of jocular friendship.

"Everybody here wants to find out where to get junk," Reavis said. Always involved in some fix-up project on their street rods or home improvement, it seems, they stay on the lookout for cheap parts.

"I'll probably head on over to Pacific Steel when I leave here," he said, hoping to find brake fittings for his classic car.

From the next table over, Mel Colby called out his own caution.

"Those old guys over there," Colby grinned, motioning to Van Bremmel and Hamann, "they'll tell you the truth nine different ways before they tell you a lie."

That's the way it goes in the family at Nickel Charlies, one of Evergreen's two oldest pubs and eateries. Heavy on the "family."

These men aren't just Monday-morning guys. They plop down their $1.25 for coffee and a tip just about every weekday. A lot of times, they'll spring for breakfast.

"It's just a fun place to come to," Hamann said, "to catch up on the news … They've got good waitresses in here."

They come for the atmosphere, they all agreed, for the camaraderie, for the good cooking and the affordable prices.

"It's almost like family," Reavis said, drawing a chuckle with his finishing punch: "The coldest weather and the hottest beer."

As owners Bob Powell and Nick Alonzo remodel and expand the place, they have every intention of preserving that atmosphere.

By this point in the winter, most people driving the U.S. 2 strip from Kalispell to Evergreen have noticed the facelift that's been going on behind the restaurant and casino's bright yellow awning.

When the roof was stripped away, folks got a glimpse of the old metal Quonset dome that first covered Charlie's Beer Depot.

Nearly all of the parking was diverted to the back of the building and concrete started pouring from cement trucks at the east end. Lumber started going up. Before long the expansion was dried-in.

Last week, the yellow awning came down to make way for an updated front that capitalizes on the Indian-head nickel theme.

When all is finished in April or May, there will be another 50 seats - adding to the current 101 seats - and something like 3,700 new square feet in the restaurant. A new state-of-the-art kitchen will take the clang and hustle of out of the way of diners and give cooks and wait staff a lot more elbow room and efficiency. New public restrooms and more seating will go in the current kitchen and wait station.

It will be quite a change from March 1961, when Charlie and Dave Williams opened Charlie's Beer Depot - the next incarnation after it had been used to sell motorcycles, cut hair, repair trucks and market real estate over the years.

Williams' mother had bought the Quonset building and help set up the boys in business when Charlie was 21, Bill Spurzem said. A couple years before that, Charlie had been tending bar downtown for Moose Miller.

"He wasn't 21 when he worked for Moose," Spurzem said, "but Moose thought he was."

Spurzem started tending bar for Williams the day the Beer Depot opened, he said. It was a modest joint, with just a bar, a few wooden benches and tables, a jukebox and pinball table. In 1964, Spurzem recollected, an expansion to the east gave enough room for a pizza parlor there and a pool table to the west.

"He got it all fixed up, painted the floor, and then on June 9 the flood came" and wiped out the floor's fresh look, Spurzem said. "It's never been painted since."

Spurzem worked there off and on between moves to Seattle and back until he started his 28-year career with Montana Power in 1971. Williams employed a couple of bartenders over the years, roped a few customers into the task when he needed to go somewhere, and eventually sold it to Art Lindlief.

"It was a fun place to be," Spurzem said. "It was rowdyness, but there was never any fighting or anything. Oh, it was the typical bar, every so often there was a fight.

"It was a good place to go. A lot of the customers now were probably kids in there while their folks were customers. They had a Coke while their folks had a beer. In those days, we had real family bars."

Spurzem, when he's back in his hometown after spending winters in Arizona, still stops in for coffee at Nickel Charlies. And he still likes the place.

"It's got excellent food. Kelly's done a wonderful job of managing it," he said of general manager Kelly Thumm. "She's probably their best [asset] down there."

Thumm herself started waitressing 15 years ago, after Terry Weland and Ty Campbell bought it and turned it into a full-fledged restaurant and bar.

But she had been one of those kids who got familiar with the place when her folks stopped in to socialize.

"Charlie was a unique fellow," Thumm said. "He always seemed stern to me, but I was a little girl. He sat at the end of the bar reading the paper and he wouldn't pay you any attention.'

But, she was to learn through the years, Williams was one of the good folks.

So was Marie Galloway,

the pizza parlor cook who "came with the place" and cooked for seven or eight years after Weland and Campbell bought it.

"We called her mom," Thumm recalls her waitressing days. "She's been around the horn. She had a lot of grandkids and kids. She was ornery. There was a job to be done. She was ornery, but she had a heart of gold."

Generations continue at Charlie's - children of customers, of cooks and bartenders don't just eat and drink there, they work there. They may leave for a time, but it seems they always return.

"It's a family," Thumm said. "We make a lot of friendships with people. People have made a lot of friends having a beer here. I've seen a lot of people die, get divorced and remarry here. We've had a lot of babies."

A jam-packed photo gallery at the rear entrance pays homage to that family - decked out in Halloween costumes, arms draped around each others' shoulders with beers in hand, caught deep in conversation at the old wooden bar.

Powell and Alonzo bear that family in mind as they add to the 101 seats in the bar and restaurant - updated and expanded over the years to accommodate more people and the state's restrictions that separate smokers in the casino from diners in the restaurant.

The Missoula businessmen with ties to the Flathead bought the business in May 2006 and realized the business has outgrown the crowded kitchen.

They plan for this major remodeling to handle the business and its growth for the next 20 years.

"We love Kalispell," Powell said. "Our goal is to not change it from Nickel Charlies. The new area will be decorated like the old area. It'll have a state-of-the-art kitchen. This all is really to improve the service. We don't want to lose the integrity of the place."

Nickel Charlies cooks are being trained at the business partners' two Montana Club restaurants in Missoula now, getting the feel for the updated equipment and redesigned line. Powell and Alonzo also own three Hoagievilles, Arriva, and three casinos.

Packing that experience to Evergreen, they're keeping customer service at the top of their list, right beside making life more efficient for the cooks and wait staff. He admitted they outgrew their kitchen long ago.

Although the place will be bigger and will have a bit of a different look, he said, this is all about the customers.

Thumm insists on it.

"We're still family here, we're still friends and we're always going to be that way," Thumm said.

"They'll just have to sit through a few times here to see that."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com