STOWE – The name is a curious one and the business plan an ambitious one for a new food/drink/entertainment enterprise on the Mountain Road.
There’s a little bit of everything at Alfie’s Wild Ride. Owners Chris and Beth Oleks see the business primarily as a bar, helped in large part by 24 taps featuring beers from Vermont and elsewhere. It’s a food spot, too, with former Prohibition Pig chef Michael Werneke crafting what Beth Oleks calls “authentic Mexican street tacos” as well as ceviche, foods reflecting the time Werneke and the Oleks have spent in southern California.
Alfie’s Wild Ride, with capacity for 668 patrons, is also an entertainment spot. The former auto-body garage now has video games, a shuffleboard table and a 150-inch projection screen on which Chris Oleks will show major sporting events as well as films with visual appeal that can play in the background while customers talk, from kung-fu movies to artier work by Kurosawa or Kubrick.
The stage at Alfie’s Wild Ride is modeled on one from “Twin Peaks” and will host local and touring acts. Chris Oleks envisions Alfie’s as 1990s throwback bar, a “hyper-casual” place without multiple TV screens to stare at, one that predates the idle scrolling of mobile phones, a bar where people actually talk with each other.
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What’s the story behind it?
New England natives, the Oleks had minimal experience in the hospitality business before moving to Vermont in 2017. Chris Oleks served as principal at Stowe High School from 2017-19. Beth Oleks bought the Stowe Public House on Main Street, a bottle shop offering more than 650 varieties of beer as well as a small bar and outside space.
The inspiration for what would become Alfie’s goes back to a variety of sprawling industrial spaces the Oleks visited in California that had been turned into bars, breweries and restaurants. Chris Oleks said they were also struck by an old aircraft hangar in Atlanta that had been turned into a full brewery with open garage-bay doors that was about twice as large as the 8,200-square-foot Stowe space. That brewery, Oleks said, was large enough to create “micro-zones” for customers to inhabit with their friends.
Chris Oleks said Beth wondered if they could do something similar with the former auto-body shop down the road from Stowe Mountain Resort. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we could totally do this,’” he said.
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Alfie’s Wild Ride is open from noon-midnight daily, and the Oleks want to serve not just tourists but locals and the service-industry crowd looking for a hangout after work. “The town is so busy. It never stops,” Chris Oleks said.
The Oleks had to remove the car lifts and paint booth from the garage. They spent six weeks cleaning the space (“A lot of time with the power washers,” Chris Oleks said) and sandblasted the floors. They built up the interior from March until just before Alfie’s opened Sept. 25.
So what’s with the unusual name, Alfie’s Wild Ride? As Beth Oleks explains it, she was working from home one day as a “nerdy academic” consultant for the energy business in the Bohemian enclave of Topanga, California, where the Oleks lived for 18 years. An older man came to the door and said he just crashed his car on the Oleks’ property.
Beth Oleks thought that was odd, as there was no road near their yard. The man, Alfie, told her he had been visiting a woman named Skip up the hill from their house, parked the car at the edge of her property but failed to set the parking brake. As the car started rolling Alfie jumped in to try to stop it but instead went over a cliff and “bounced all the way down” 300 feet of hillside, according to Beth Oleks. Alfie was largely unscathed and, Beth Oleks said, a “cool guy” they would become friends with.
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Alfie was also a hoarder whose car was filled with tools, according to Beth Oleks. Years later, she said, she would find a random wrench or tape measure on the property left over from the incident the Oleks took to calling “Alfie’s wild ride.”
Beth Oleks said the story of a wayward car seems appropriate for a business in an old auto-body shop. It might also evoke some patrons’ adventurous days on the slopes up the road at Stowe Mountain Resort.
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Alfie’s Wild Ride hours and location
Alfie’s Wild Ride, 942 Mountain Road, Stowe. Noon-midnight daily. (802) 760-8499, www.facebook.com/ALFIESWILDRIDE/ or www.instagram.com/alfieswildride/
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
