Becoming an icon was the farthest thing from Al Ruppert's mind when he moved to South Haven in 1980. He had been living in Indiana with a young son who was deaf, fixing broken typewriters and adding machines at an office supply store, when a salesman told him about a great teacher he knew in Michigan who was a whiz working with deaf children.
There had been an outbreak of rubella in and around the village of Berrien Springs. Hearing loss is the major side effect of rubella, and enough children had gone deaf to require a specialized teacher. Ruppert thought that was a better option than sending his son to the Indiana School for the Deaf.
Ruppert found out there was an office supply store for sale in South Haven, north of Berrien Springs, and he bought it and embarked on a journey that led to him becoming an unquestioned icon of the community. He's now the owner of Clementine's, a destination restaurant downtown where two-hour waits in the summer tourist season are common; built HawksHead Links north of town, a golf course along Lake Michigan that was designed by legendary course designer Arthur Hills and looks and plays like a links course on the ocean in Scotland; and is a chainsaw artist known for his large wood creations, including the hawk that greets visitors to the golf course, and for the ice sculptings that star at the city's annual Icebreakers Festival each winter.
His son, Jon, got his education and now runs the kitchen at Clementine's. At 76, Ruppert actively runs the business and is there most days.
In 1982, a local dive and pool hall in downtown South Haven called the E&B Saloon, which had been built in 1894, came on the market. It was definitely not a tourist joint. Its clientele was decidedly down-market. There had been a shooting there recently and reports of a woman raped, and state officials were in the process of revoking its liquor license.
Ruppert was able to buy the bar and liquor license for $40,000, did a complete rehab on the place and reopened it as a family restaurant, the first iteration of Clementine's.
In 1989, Ruppert took on a huge project a few blocks away, at what is now the site of the current Clementine's. In 1896, Citizens State Bank had opened on South Haven's main downtown street of Phoenix Street. It went bankrupt in 1924, and later the building became a sporting goods store and a clothing store.
When Ruppert bought the building, both those businesses had long been shuttered, the roof was mostly caved in and the windows were broken or bowed out. The building seemed destined for demolition. Local folks thought he was nuts to take that project on. Ruppert also bought the adjacent building, which, in South Haven's heyday as a vacation destination for ferries making the trip across Lake Michigan from Chicago, catered to a Jewish clientele, selling religious-themed souvenirs and other goods.
He put in all new windows and installed interior arches that came from an old bank building in Benton Harbor to create a series of rooms. Behind the bar, he installed a massive mirrored backdrop that had been in the E&B Saloon. Decades earlier, it had been painted pink. Ruppert stripped the paint off to reveal gorgeous quarter-sawn oak. He cut it into pieces and reassembled it at the new Clementine's, using wooden pegs to fit the segments together.
In all, it took 18 months to get the place finished and reopened.
The restaurant is filled with antiques and the walls are lined with wonderful old black and white photos of South Haven in its turn-of-the-20th-century glory days. The interior has a lot of exposed brick and repurposed architectural pieces Ruppert found here and there, including mahogany arches that came from a bank building in Benton Harbor. Two of the bank's original vaults are now used for storage. On one wall in the bar, a huge elk head has been mounted, wearing, in this time of COVID, a huge blue mask.
Clementine's was so successful that in 1992, Ruppert opened a sister restaurant, Clementine's Too, in St. Joseph.
In the early 1990s, Ruppert, an avid golfer, unsuccessfully tried to buy a local golf course. "They didn't want to sell, so I went to the county offices to look into land to buy so I could build my own course," he said.
He found 480 acres for sale three miles north of South Haven, on the north branch of the Black River, and bought them for $3 million. "The original plan was to build one 18-hole course on one side of the river and another 18-hole-course on the other, but by the time I was going to build the second course, hard times had hit the golf industry, and there were going to be problems building a bridge over the river, so I decided one course was enough."
Once, the land was heavily forested, but the trees had been cut down, milled and shipped to Chicago after the great fire of 1871. After the hard wood was cleared, apple and peach trees had been planted and later there was an asparagus farm there, too.
After Ruppert bought the land, he called Arthur Hills, one of the most famous golf course designers in the world, to see if he could interest him in the property. Hills told him he was going to be on his way to look at some land in Boyne City, where he would eventually build the course at the Boyne Highlands Resort, and would be able to visit Ruppert on the way.
Hills has designed more than 200 new golf courses, including such famous courses as Bonita Bay in Naples, Fla.; The Golf Club of Georgia in Alpharetta, Ga.; the Bighorn Golf Club in Palm Desert, Calif.; The Champions course at Keene Trace Golf Club in Lexington, Ky., Wolfdancer Golf Club in Lost Pines, Texas; and Palmetto Dunes in Hilton Head, S.C.
Other Michigan courses Hills has built include Red Hawk Golf Club in East Tawas; the 27-hole Bay Harbor Golf Club in Bay Harbor; Stonebridge Golf Club in Ann Arbor; Fox Hills in Plymouth; and the Pine Trace Golf Club in Rochester Hills.
Ruppert said they took a tour of the land and at the end, "Hills asked me, 'Who else are you going to call?' I told him I didn't know. He said, 'Don't call anyone else. I'll do it.'"
It turned out the land had once been the bed of an ancient lake, which lent itself to naturally sculpted sand dunes on the course. In 1996, Golf Digest named HawksHead as the best new golf course in the U.S.
The Inn at HawksHead offers fine dining, and reservations can be made at one of nine guest rooms in a restored English Tudor-style mansion that had been on the property.
"He's amazing. When you meet Al, you get the tip of the iceberg. The more you get to know him? His stories, oh my god. He's definitely loved by the community," said Kathy Wagaman, executive director of the South Haven Area Chamber of Commerce. Ruppert sponsors area sports teams and recently volunteered to learn some dance moves for a Dancing with the Stars fundraiser put on by the Al-Van Humane Society ("Al" standing for Allegan and "van" for Van Buren County). He or his son Greg, the manager of HawksHead, win the annual chili cookoff most years at the Icebreakers Festival, and Al eagerly helps folks wildly decorate their small boats for the yacht club's annual Blingy Dinghy Parade.
"There's always a risk when you tell someone about a restaurant and they go there, it might not be that good. Not Clementine's. The service and the quality of the food is always good. It's got great burgers, great soups, great steaks, and it's not overpriced," said Wagaman. "His ability to retain employees says a lot about him and his leadership. Typically, in the restaurant world, there is a lot of turnover. But you see a lot of his waitstaff year after year."
Off-season, Ruppert employs 110 at the original Clementine's and 75 in St. Joseph, and more in the summer. He employs 120 at the golf course during the season.
The South Haven restaurant sells 14 tons of yellow lake perch a year in non-COVID years and during the tourist season will sell 600 pounds of onion rings a day. They are served on wooden pegs, either six or 12 inches high, and Ruppert claims they sell eight miles of them a year.
Fare ranges from typical burger and sandwich fare to pastas, fine dining (charbroiled salmon topped with sun-dried tomato basil butter or potato crusted Canadian walleye), dinner salads and burritos.
The restaurants were closed from March until June because of COVID, then opened at 50 percent capacity, with tables removed for social distancing. It shut down for indoor seating in November in response to Gov. Whitmer putting restrictions in place as COVID cases climbed rapidly in the state.
Ruppert said the restaurant averages about 1,200 meals a day in the summer, and before the shutdown in November, was selling 500 meals a day during the slow season.
Ruppert is a folk artist of some renown. Much of the top floor of Clementine's is taken up by his large workshop, with various works of art in progress. Bored in the winter of 2005, he built a detailed six-foot replica of Clementine's out of cherry wood and it sits prominently in the restaurant.
Carla Ruppert, one of his daughters-in-law, owns a kids' clothing and toy store next to Clementine's called Oh My Darling; and another daughter-in-law, Theressa Ruppert, owns a souvenir store around the corner called Divine by Design that specializes in local works of art.
"course" - Google News
December 06, 2020 at 12:08PM
https://ift.tt/2JEkv6h
Meet Al Ruppert, restaurant proprietor, golf course builder and celebrated South Havenite - Crain's Detroit Business
"course" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35q9ps5
https://ift.tt/35rCFi1
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Meet Al Ruppert, restaurant proprietor, golf course builder and celebrated South Havenite - Crain's Detroit Business"
Post a Comment