740 Front blends history, contemporary vibe

LOUISVILLE — Like any typical 70-year-old, Fred Burns has an inexhaustible storehouse of stories to tell. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his restaurant, located in a 116-year-old building that has been designated a historical landmark, has its tales to tell as well. As noted on 740 Front’s website, “the partition walls, ceilings, floors and fixtures all have a story.”

But Burns, whose 45-year career in the restaurant business is chock full of new concepts that prospered, doesn’t just bask in the past. He knows that to stay relevant, 740 Front can’t just embrace its history as the last of the 13 original saloons that lined the old coal-mining town’s once boisterous and bawdy Front Street. It has to cater to a wide range of evolving tastes.

“That’s the tough part of the business now, trying to figure out what the millennials are going to do, their changing attitudes about things,” Burns said. “I have a son who works there who’s 25, and I have young employees, so I just try to pay attention to what their habits are and what they think needs to be done. There’s a big conflict between the older generation and the newer generation about how we view the world and do things and what they’re used to. So you just try to pay attention and do the best job that you can do.”

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The voluminous menu and an evolving list of specials — ranging from burgers and salads to small plates, pastas and heavier entrees such as steaks and seafood — reflect Burns’ desire to serve a wide range of tastes and evolving preferences.

“That was real, real important to me,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be where local people with families and kids couldn’t go out and eat a reasonably priced meal. But then we have a lot of business travelers and corporate people because of the Colorado Tech Center there in Louisville.

“The menu is much bigger that we’d really want it to be, but we felt we had to try to play both ends of the spectrum to be successful.”

Burns met Paul Bourrillion, now 740 Front’s head chef, 40 years ago. Bourrillion started in the business as a 15-year-old, washing dishes at the Denver-area location of a Victoria Station chain.

“He’s worked for me ever since, and been involved in everything we’ve done — Florida, Dallas, San Francisco,” Burns said. “He’s become a self-trained, very talented guy. We’ve had the fortune of working with some big-name people, so Paul learned from some of the top chefs in the country and had the opportunity to see some things and learn from them.

“Paul and I spent close to 30 years working in Italian food places in San Francisco, and I remembered going to places like the Blue Parrot and Colacci’s in Louisville with my parents,” he said. Even though 740 Front’s building “kind of dictated more of an American theme, we started to add pastas on the specials menu and sold the heck out of them.”

A Colorado native, Burns landed in the restaurant business after an injury ended his budding baseball career in the Kansas City Royals’ organization. With his arm in a sling, his job opportunities were limited, but some friends helped him snag a gig at that Victoria Station in Glendale, checking bar customers’ IDs two nights a week. He met the chain’s owners there, and worked his way up through the corporation to become East Coast regional manager. Next came helping expand Garcia’s of Scottsdale franchises, partnering with a member of Garcia’s board to open restaurants in Florida that they eventually sold back to Garcia’s, then spending 25 years operating Italian eateries on the San Francisco peninsula.

“When that business was winding down in 2013, my wife and I decided to move back to Colorado because that’s where our grandkids were,” Burns said. “I was going to retire, but a friend said, ‘No, you can’t do that. Do something low-key, like a family hamburger place.’

“My son-in-law Dave grew up in Louisville. His next-door neighbor, Chuck Sisk, had been the mayor for several terms. I met him at their wedding, and he’s the first one who said we should do something in Louisville because they had made some changes in that downtown with the historic district and all.

“We first went to the place across the street that was the Track Inn,” now Casa Allegra, “but there was no deal to be made there.” However, Burns’ partner Chip Pickard had a friend who was starting a restaurant in Austin, Texas, and had asked him, “Hey, if you see any neat old bars, take a picture of it because I want to try to build one.” There was a nice back bar in the Track Inn, but its young manager told Burns and Pickard there was a much prettier one down the street — in the space that until 2013 had been the Old Louisville Inn. The pair peered in the window and spied the magnificent “Del Monte” back bar built of cut-to-fit cherry, birch and mahogany and assembled without nails in the 1880s by the Brunswick Co. of Dubuque, Iowa. The bar had spent its early life in Leadville but had been transported to Louisville by wagon.

“We were very enamored by that bar because, when you walked in, that’s what you saw,” Burns said. “We realized we could do something neat here,” and the partners made a deal to buy the place.

Below the bar’s row of stools is a trough that had been the receptacle for chewing-tobacco spit and other bodily fluids — only men were allowed in bars at that time. “We put a light in it and covered it,” Burns said.

Close inspection of the bar’s front also reveals a bullet hole.

“When we were remodeling the place, we found more bullet holes and slugs in the front windows and front wall that were rotted out,” he said. Those could have been the result of fights in the bar, he added, but also, “when the coal miners went on strike in the early 1900s, the federal government brought in troops, and I guess they went up and down Front Street and shot the saloons all up.”

Each element in designing the new restaurant had to complement that room-dominating bar, Burns said. “That bar was the focal point. We didn’t want to do anything that diminished from it. We had to pick the right colors and right lighting to make it work.”

Each piece of décor Burns and Pickard added has its own colorful story, including the custom-built chandelier in the recessed skylight hole above the main dining room, the flooring that resembles dark wood slats, the wood ceiling in the loft room, the hand-cranked elevator that lifts supplies from the basement, the downstairs “Coal Miners Room” that had been a low-ceilinged ice-storage space with a slanted floor for drainage, and the credenza in the adjoining parlor room that was built on what had been a grass lot to the south that was part of the property.

On the next level down is the original basement, lined with posts that were supposed to hold up the building but that Burns described as “just looking like branches off a tree. If you bounced too much on the upper floor, one of those beams would just fall over. We had to put in concrete footings and steel beams to support it.”

From that room, now bricked-up tunnels ran across the street and connected to trap doors in other buildings, allowing turn-of-the-century gentlemen from more proper businesses to make discreet trips to the saloon and brothel.

Lurking over the whole place is rumored to be a mischievous ghost named Samantha.

Many of the young staffers of 740 Front are steeped in the place’s history and willing to show off its many attributes. Their input also helps Burns and his chef stay current with changing times and tastes.

“The dilemma is how to pare down the menu but still do different cuisines and make it work,” Burns said. “So much is dictated by what’s available in the market. There’s a price point you want to stay around, but it’s harder especially to find fair-priced seafood without it becoming too expensive. Between minimum-wage increases and the cost of goods going up, it makes it harder to have entrees under $20.”

But Burns will adapt, as he always has. “I may be 70,” he said, “but I’m not intending on going anywhere for a while.”