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The likes of the Cohn Restaurant Group, Consortium Holdings and Brigantine Group get a great deal of attention for their ever-expanding arrays of high-profile hospitality venues, but there’s a low-key trio of local entrepreneurs quietly growing their empire. Their businesses are built on affordable luxuries—food, beer and hugs—and though they are without a name for their entity, it’s a formidable, energetic group made up of real people you are bound to encounter when you visit one of their bars or restaurants.
The longest-tenured member of the trio is Tom Nickel, the founder of Julian’s Nickel Beer Co. and proprietor of O’Brien’s Pub in Kearny Mesa and West Coast Smoke & Taphouse in La Mesa. In 2018, he offered an ownership stake to O’Brien’s General Manager Tyson Blake. Since then, he and his wife, Kristina (who was named a partner in 2019), have gone on to oversee O’Brien’s and West Coast, while starting their own online keg sales business, Kegseeker. Even with three people running four businesses, they jumped at the chance to add a fifth link to their chain when Nickel was approached about taking over the Lake Cuyamaca Restaurant and Store on the bank of its namesake body of water, and now they’re hard at work readying for the debut of The Pub at Lake Cuyamaca.
“Tom was approached by a member of the board that manages Lake Cuyamaca, a customer of Nickel Beer who is familiar with Tom’s history as a restaurant owner and operator,” says Tyson. “He asked if we’d be interested in making a presentation about what we’d do with the restaurant and store if we were to take it over. We went in, told them our ideas and we ended up talking for an hour-and-a-half. It was fantastic.”
The Board not only took to the idea of Nickel and the Blakes converting the space into a lakeside pub with taps and a casual menu, with a built-in bottle shop for on-site purchase and consumption of both beer and wine. Much of their enthusiasm had to do with next-level ideas having to do with the team’s idea to form community partnerships and add to the park and recreation area’s offerings for visitors and tourists. Those initiatives include provision of catering services to a neighboring firehouse-turned-event-space as well as a dozen or so rentable cabins, to-go food items and pairing packages for fishing parties, tent and RV campers, beer-pairings for fish fetched from the lake, special events for apple-picking season and snow days, farmers markets, locals’ nights and various fundraisers.
Excited about the aforementioned possibilities, the Board is rebuilding the restaurant’s deck patio and extending it to wrap around the south side of the building. That improvement will add 500 square feet of public space, upping the site’s total square-footage to 5,000. Once the patio expansion is complete, Nickel and the Blakes will renovate the interior, adding a fresh coat of paint, knocking down a pony wall to open up the restaurant’s dining room, adding a bar with a fallen-wood, live-edge top, equipping an existing cold-box with a dozen taps and knocking down part of a wall to provide better access and visibility for the bottle-shop component. Enough new furniture—chairs and standard tables in the dining room with barstools and high tables in the bar area—will be added to accommodate up to 125 guests at a time.
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Coffee and an array of grab-and-go breakfast items (breakfast sandwiches, bowls and burritos) will be available in the morning at a pair of walk-up service windows on the exterior of the pub. During lunch and dinner hours, a menu of sandwiches, soups, salads and similarly homey fare will be available, with composed dishes such as a short-rib cottage pie being rolled out on a rotational basis on weekends.
On the beer front, roughly half of the taps will dispense Nickel Beer Co. offerings, including a recently debuted Cuyamaca Lake Lager and The Pub Ale. The other half of the draft equation will be solved by breweries the trio has longstanding relationships with, such as Mcilhenney Brewing and Russian River Brewing, who will contribute their largely hoppy offerings and other coveted ales.
With so many other businesses to tend to, division of work will be key with this project. Nickel’s main contributions will be seen in the bottle shop, which he will stock with a variety of styles as well as food-friendly ales, lagers and wines that can be purchased and enjoyed in the restaurant or on the patio. Tyson is getting the kitchen organized and establishing a structure that will work for a future chef. (Prospective applicants for this open position can access a job description and apply online.) And Kristina is teaming with newly appointed GM of The Pub, Alison Usry, to handle front-of-house operations. Usry comes over from Nickel Beer, where she signed on after years working for Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Red Lobster).
“Our vision for the most part is to do what we do already—provide a nice community pub that feels like a home away from home with similar offerings to what we do at O’Brien’s and West Coast,” says Tyson. “Although we’re still very much involved, in preparing for this, Kristina and I have had to take a step back from the day-to-day at both spots. That presented an opportunity to promote Allison Cohen to GM at O’Brien’s. She’s been with us for many years and has proven she cares as much about the pub as we do, which creates a great level of comfort in that she understands what the pub is and what it stands for.”
Meanwhile, at West Coast, where Kristina has focused a great deal of energy for several years, staffers Chelsea Chase and Taylor Pletcher have been promoted to split management duties, including oversight of staff and beer ordering.
If all goes as planned, The Pub at Lake Cuyamaca will open to the public in November. That will be followed by several months of operation before a planned late-winter or early-spring closure to complete renovations and reopen with a completely finished concept. Those interested in keeping up with this project are invited to follow along via Instagram (@thepubatlakecuyamaca).
The Pub at Lake Cuyamaca will be located at 15027 CA-79 in Julian