Kahiki Supper Club by David Meyers

Author:David Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

12

PASSING THE TIKI TORCH

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.

—Peter Drucker

Of the two partners, Lee was more interested in building restaurants than running them. In 1978, he persuaded Bill to accept an offer from Michael “Mitch” Boich to buy the Kahiki. Boich was the founder of the Boich Companies, a privately held coal mining and marketing company headquartered in Columbus. “He was a good customer of ours,” Lee said. Bill agreed, “Mitch was a great guy.” One of Boich’s favorite pastimes was playing backgammon. During 1977–78, a backgammon club met in the basement of the Kahiki.25 In the 1970s, Oswald Jacoby, author of The Backgammon Book, hired Marcy, Bill’s wife, to travel around to shopping malls, teaching people how to play the game.

A native of Steubenville, Ohio, Mitch Boich had attended Ohio State before entering into construction, coal mining and related industries in the late 1940s. When he passed away on August 25, 2000, Representative Robert W. Ney of Ohio eulogized him on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as “a man of tremendous vision who never lost his sense of tradition” and “a man known for his pizzazz and his strength.” What Ney left unsaid was Boich’s role as a kingmaker. Boich and his family were contributors to the campaigns of many politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Governor (later senator) George Voinovich and Governor Richard Celeste. In exchange, he expected them to support legislation that would benefit his financial interests.

Margaret Newkirk of the Akron Beacon Journal wrote about an incident that occurred in 1988 when state representative Jerry Krupinski of Steubenville ran into Boich at the Galleria restaurant in Columbus. At the time, Celeste and New York governor Mario Cuomo had recently proposed a national tax to assist Ohio with the cost of cleaning up its coal-fueled power plants. However, Boich and other coal mine owners didn’t support it. So he told Krupinski he was about to head “across the street to the Statehouse to ‘kick [Governor] Dick Celeste’s ass.’ Krupinski said, ‘I was pretty impressed.’”

“Mitch got around to every place,” Lee said. “He saw [Michael] Tsao at Trader Vic’s.” They hit it off so well that Boich thought that if he bought the Kahiki, he could bring Tsao in to run it. He would then lease the restaurant to him with a buy option. However, the sale nearly didn’t happen. The partners had agreed to sell the Kahiki’s inventory to Tsao for $100,000. On the day of the closing, Tsao told them he didn’t have the money. Bill wanted to walk away from the deal, but Lee didn’t. So they let him have the inventory for free. “We were sorry within two weeks that we sold it,” Bill said. “We had this great big gong, like four to five feet across, that went bong, and right after we sold it, they replaced it with this little thing that went ting.”

Michael Tsao was a product of the American Dream.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.