This month we welcome David Meinert and his partner Mandy Park to the front pages of the Belltown Messenger. They are now the proud owners of a Belltown institution, the 5 Point Café, and are expecting their first child any day now.

While they sip cups of steaming tea I chat with them about their plans for the future of the venerable bar. If you haven’t dropped by there lately I would advise you to put it on your list of must do’s. Great music, drinks, and home-style cooking in an atmosphere of authenticity are especially comforting during these upcoming dark days of winter.

EB: So you guys were just laying in bed one night and said, “Oh my, the 5 Point is going up for sale and...”
David: No. Actually, Mandy worked off-and-on at the 5 Point for years. We’ve always loved the 5 Point and the Mecca.
Mandy: Between jobs, I either worked at the 5 Point or the Mecca.
David: And we’re both big diner fans and big Seattle historical fans. I grew up here. We were always interested in both places and didn’t want them to change. In fact we were worried when Dick sold the 5 Point originally, that it would get to be something way different, and then we heard that it might become available.
It’s a real long, complicated story; but the guy, John Chigaras, was a big part of the story. He owned Apollo Amusement, which since the late ’50s did the jukeboxes all over Seattle. He did the jukeboxes for the Mecca and the 5 Point; and when Dick died he bought this building. When he found that Mandy and I were interested in doing something with either place, he approached us.
Mandy: I’d known him since I started working here. He would come in and want things done a specific way; and sometimes he was a little hard to deal with, but I developed a relationship with him. I just ran to him one day, and that’s how the whole thing started.

EB: I think one of the biggest concerns with all of us Belltownies is that nobody wants the 5 Point to change at all.
David: We want to change it a little bit from what it is now; we want to change it back to what it was when Dick owned it. There are a few things like the menu, which had been shrunk down.
A few things had been taken off, like the liver and onions and the oatmeal.
Mandy: Back to the way it was when I started 13 years ago.

David: But nothing else. It is a dive but a good dive. That’s the beauty of the place. A place where we offer huge value—by that I mean meals and really stiff drinks for not very much money. And there is a certain kind of culture that comes in here. The whole thing is to make the food really good, to make it all homemade. We’ve already gone back to buying whole turkeys, and roasting the turkeys ourselves. All the fries are homemade; the point of it is good homemade food served 24 hours a day.

When Dick had it, he catered to a lot of the senior citizens crowd in Belltown as well, which has gone away. We really want to get that back. We are going to do a two-for-one senior citizen discount for lunch starting in December, and there is always a 10 percent senior citizen discount. We like that crowd.

EB: The Frontier Room and the Rendezvous always had old timers.
David: Yeah. There are fewer places that seem to attract the older crowd, and yet there are a bunch of retirement homes right here.
Mandy: It was out of respect for that generation, the ones who came up through the days of unions and harder times, bars and restaurants that catered to working people.

EB: People look at the Frontier Room and the Rendezvous and think, “Yeah, they have done a beautiful job with fixing the old places up, but have excluded a bunch of the people who went there.”
David: Since 1997, Seattle has had a fascination with the hipster and urban yuppie culture.

EB: Like the ultra-fancy lunch carts we see now around town, replacing the old school taco trucks.
David: When I grew up in Seattle, Seattle was a very blue-collar town. Seemed that a bunch of people moved here in the nineties, tech people, and stuff got really fancy. That’s fine I just hate to se it lose it’s grittier side of life.

EB: Like First Avenue and the Market used to be.
David: So as much as we can encourage that, embrace that culture, we want to. And that’s part of our interest in the 5 Point, keeping it the same.
Mandy: Blue–collar culture is who built, who keeps the 5 Point open, the maintenance workers, union workers, nurses who come in the morning.
David: Software programmers are still welcome if they really want to.

EB: You also have tourists who come in.
Mandy: I grew up in the Midwest; and these are the kind of bars you find in the Midwest—not fancy.
David: No faux-Moroccan tile tables in Midwest coffee shops.
Mandy: That’s a good way to put it. This is much more comforting. I find that a lot of the cruise-ship passengers coming to and from Alaska are from the Midwest, leaving from here. The 5 Point is like home. The prices are within reason of what they are used to paying, and the portions are what they are used to.

EB: There are not too many places like that left here in downtown Seattle. There is the Hurricane Cafe. Few 24-hour places; Minnie’s is gone. I mean, where do you go if you want a drink at 10 in the morning, or 6 in the morning?
David: Six in the morning we have happy hour!
Mandy: It used to be fun watching people get here at 3:30 or 4, trying to stay awake the last hour until the bar opens at 6.

EB: One of the things you are noted for is your great jukebox. The music is superb. So that is going to stay?
David:  Yeah that will stay, the jukebox with one hundred CDs. We’ll rotate them a little bit.
Mandy: We’re going to put some of the old stuff back on from the past 20 years. I can’t forget a lot of the music from working here so many years.
David: It will still have Alice In Chains, Mudhoney, Klutch, and Suction. We’ll have Mark Lanegan’s Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, some great drinking music.

EB: You will still keep the holy wall of bras?
David: That moose actually belongs to John Chigaras.

EB: Do people still do that, throw their bras on the moose?
David and Mandy: Oh yeah—It just depends on the night—we’re all for it, we encourage it—who’s having how much fun—the more bras that come off in a night, the better night it is. (We all laugh).
Mandy: There used to be the photos of the boobies, but we don’t really do that any more.
David: Don’t lie; there’s booby photos all over.
Mandy: There are booby photos, but there’s not a camera where we’re trying to...
David: There’s two cameras back there. I’m just getting new Polaroid film for them. (They good-naturedly banter back and forth about the merits and demerits of the acclaimed booby photos).

EB: Are you keeping the periscope in the men’s room?
David: The periscope is still there and that works. One thing that made the bar rowdy at night was the strip club down the street, Razzmatazz. That’s gone now; so to encourage strippers to still come here, their first drink is
75 cents.

EB: So do you have any trouble with the Liquor Control Board?
David: No. No, not at all.
Mandy: No, the bar’s been cleaned up enough; more so, because the people going here have matured a bit. I feel like I grew up here, as well as a lot of other people.

EB: What about music. Would you ever put music in here?
David: No, no live music. It’s not the right place for it. This is a 24-hour diner/bar—free to get in, and cheap to eat and drink.

EB: Do you feel that the 5 Point is a part of Belltown, or do you see it as a part of the Seattle Center neighborhood?
David: It is right on the edge of both; technically, it is Belltown. I feel that we are part of the Belltown community. This is my third business in Belltown. I’m partners in the Crocodile and Via Tribunali.

EB: How do you see Belltown and the 5 Point in 2020?
David: The goal of the 5 Point is to keep it the same. I think there
is a gritty working-class culture that will always exist in every city, and this is the place for that scene to hang out. It is a neighborhood bar.