www.mybaycity.com
March 20, 2004
(Prior Story) Business ArTicle 389 (Next Story)
Sponsored by Bay Area Chamber of Commerce
Kingfish Restaurant Carries On Bay City Historical Theme for Over 140 Years
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New Kingfish sign greets Water Street visitors, Bay City's most popular "destination attraction."
Co-owner Greg Kimbrue shows off redecorated Lantern, now the Kingfish Restaurant and Tiki Lounge.
The newly redecorated and renamed Kingfish Restaurant and Tiki Lounge, formerly the Lantern, was unveiled last week with a private party and a low key public opening.
"We were closed only 52 days," said an excited Greg Kimbrue, stilltouching up final details around the 175 seat restaurant.
Partner Willis Wells was lying on the floor in the kitchen connecting a stove on the new tile floor, marking the restaurant as a class act, according to Kimbrue. "All good restaurants have tile floors," he exclaimed.
The restaurant sits on one of the most historic hostelry sites in the area, having been the Wolverton Hotel back as far as the 1860s. The Wolverton boasted the Bohemian Club Room, the fact of which was revealed in a Bay City Journal article about a fete for Capt. James G. Birney IV in February, 1867, featured in another MyBayCity.com article on this site.
Kimbrue covered the tables in the main room himself, using images of old Bay City shipbuilding including the Davidson yard and Defoe, a Northern game hunt, and Les Staudacher's racing boats like Miss Pepsi and boats built for famed bandleader Guy Lombardo.
The old restaurant was virtually gutted, higher ceiling uncovered, Caribbean style metal roof and fish pictures installed. An old sailfish procured from the Bay City Antiques Center was restored and repainted and is proudly "sailing" on the wall of the Kingfish.
The old salad bar was removed, along with other appurtenances, giving the restaurant a more open look, although the number of seats is the same.
Besides fish offerings like lobster, perch, white fish, walleye, salmon, crab and shrimp, the restuarant features innovative tempters like poking (breaded oysters and shrimp), wasabi tuna salads, Maryland style crabcake, "Looziana" Cajun shrimp, Kingfish crab Alfredo and old Lantern favorites like burgers, 12-ounce New York strip steaks and Caribbean-style jerk chicken.
Dockside, the restaurant on the dock, will be revitalized, too, all in good time, according to Kimbrue. That has a historical basis in that in the lumbering days the nearby European Hotel, now St. Laurent Bros., had bars on the lower level, near the water.
Kimbrue's crowning touch is a lifesize photo of Fabian "Joe" Fournier, the famed lumberjack murdered in 1875 on the steamboat dock next door, mounted on the office door. Tom Kaekel of the Midland firm of Envision Communications produced the lifesize replication of the famed brawler, amazingly in peel and stick format. Fournier will be available for photographs with guests at any time, said Kimbrue.
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