Business Spotlight: Fireside Lounge

Webster Street's  is up and running again, now under new ownership. Sandy Russell, Bitsy Eddy and Keely Rogers-Free, long-time friends and now business partners, hope to create a warm vibe and provide their customers with an assortment of excellent drinks, from classic cocktails to locals beers.

In the future, they may even bring those garlic noodles that made the Fireside Lounge locally famous. They celebrate today, July 1, with a grand opening starting at 5 p.m. We chat with Susan Russell.

How did you come to own this place? I was living in the neighborhood for years—I was a customer here. Unfortunately the place kind of shut down. It just wasn't open consistently and we saw the "for sale" signs go up. A friend of mine called and said, "Hey, the Fireside is for sale. I think you should buy it."

Keely and I had been working on some other projects for about four years, trying to put different business plans together. When this came up—Bitsy’s my best friend and Keely is a dear, dear friend—I said, "What do you think? Let’s do this." We started pursuing it in December and opened three weeks ago. We just soft opened, kind of kicked the doors open to see what would happen.

And what happened? We were well received. People have been waiting for this place to re-open. We’ve been so pleasantly surprised. We expected it to take a while, but we’ve had some busy nights. After we get through our grand opening party this weekend, I'll start working on different promotions.

What are your plans for tonight’s grand opening? All of our family and friends from everywhere are coming. We’re going to have a taco bar from 5 to 7 p.m. hosted by Calafia Taqueria. At 9 p.m. we have a DJ who’s going to host a '70s and '80s dance party. And then on Monday we’ll open at 10 a.m. because the Fourth of July parade ends pretty much right in front of the bar. We’ll have live music at 1 p.m. after the parade.

What service do you offer now? We have focused on small craft breweries, local breweries, from Oakland, Davis, Concord, Anderson Valley. All the breweries are really local, like Cherry Voodoo out of San Francisco.They’re new and they’re awesome. Whenever possible we focus on small craft American distilleries. This month we’re featuring all of the St. George distilleries, an Alameda local, it’s a fabulous product.

What are your plans for the future? Down the road we would like to open a kitchen if our license allows us to do that. It’s going to be a while. Everything we’re doing, we want to be compliant and do it right. We want to be a bar with great light food, not a restaurant with a bar. There are a number of other places in the city doing that and doing it well. I’ve got a vision for that kitchen and I’m excited to make it happen when we can. I would do paninis, really nice salads, soups, that sort of thing.

What’s the history of the name and why did you choose to keep it? It’s been the Fireside since 1942 and that sign out front is a historical landmark at this point. And why would we change it? People know the Fireside. It opened in ‘42. We don’t know for sure, but we’d like to think that the association was with FDR [Franklin d. Roosevelt], as he was president and the Fireside Chats were happening at that time.

This being an old military town, there was a lot of history with this place. At one point when the kitchen was open, they were doing these apparently good garlic noodles. When servicemen would come in, they might be here for five hours, fly in and fly out to the next place—and they would make sure to cut over here, get a whole bunch of noodles and take them back to the guys, wherever they were. And that’s probably the biggest request we’ve had from people: Are you going to do the garlic noodles?

Would you consider it? We’d like to eventually, if Esther, who still lives on the island—it’s her recipe—if she’d see fit for us to do that. I think there’s right now that’s making her recipe and doing those, but we do hope to bring it back here.

What vibe are you going for with the new Fireside? We want it to be welcoming and warm and cheerful. We definitely don’t want it to be a fight bar. We’re definitely not a night club. But we hope that people will come and that they’ll have a good time, have a great cocktail and want to come back.