BBQ added to Valley dining palette

PALMER — There’s a distinctive, mouth-watering aroma in the air downtown these days.

Pit master John Quiney has kept a trio of smoker units in the backroom at Klondike Mike’s Saloon and Roadhouse BBQ busy for the past several weeks cooking savory meats, their aromas pleasantly wafting across the city.

After an extensive renovation, the saloon now adjoins a restaurant serving an assortment of southern-style barbecued meats rubbed with Quiney’s own blend of seasonings, cooked for six hours and finished with an apple wood smoke.

The Roadhouse BBQ celebrated its grand opening with a morning ribbon cutting ceremony Aug. 2 and live music and door prizes that afternoon.

Quiney said he made 30 half racks Aug. 1 and sold them all. He said he had 45 racks ready to go by noon on the grand opening and more in the cookers.

“People up here are starved for ribs,” said Quiney who moved here from Florida to help open the Roadhouse. “The demand is here.”

Lilly Nyborg owns Klondike Mike’s and the Roadhouse with two partners. She said she spent a lot of time in the past few months sorting through Valley antique shops looking for maps, photos and other antiques to give the bar and restaurant a Palmer, Alaska, feel.

“We wanted to renovate the business and its image,” she said. “We decided the best way to do that was to give the community back their bar.

“We want people to feel like ‘this is our bar.’”

Valley folks may recognize familiar faces in the photos on the walls. One man left the bathroom in tears after seeing his father’s car in a pair of photos hanging in the restroom, Nyborg said.

The renovation was extensive, and necessarily so, she said.

Greater Palmer Chamber Director Ralph Renzi said he saw the piles of stuff coming out the doors from the demolition.

“I didn’t think there would be anything left,” he said at the ribbon cutting.

Nyborg said she was impressed at the way the community pitched in to help her and her business partners Armand Nyborg and Santiago Lara with the demolition and renovation.

“People came to us from all over the community to help,” she said, “‘we want to work. This is our bar.’”

Aside from the familiar red awning, the business doesn’t look like the old Klondike Mike’s inside or out.

The renovated saloon and restaurant includes a patio with games and outdoor dining, street-side tables, a VIP room with private service, and flat screen TVs, pool tables, darts, foosball, Karaoke and live music on the weekends.

Nyborg said she did the decorating in the saloon and roadhouse and made a point to use as many local businesses as possible, such as Poppert Milling that cut and polished the bartops and tabletops and Warning Lights of Alaska that made the two glass panels depicting the mountains and iconic Palmer water tower scene in the restaurant’s entry. Cover Ups in Palmer restored two early signs from Klondike Mike’s that decorate the restaurant’s entry and one of its staff members painted a barn-board look on one dining room wall.

Some important pieces of Klondike Mike’s remain, like longtime employee Daphne Slater.

Nyborg said it was important to her to have Slater on her staff.

“You are Klondike Mike’s,” she said, introducing Slater, who has worked at the saloon for more than 15 years.

“It’s nice to be home again,” Slater replied.

Klondike Mike’s Saloon and Roadhouse BBQ is at 816 Colony Way in Palmer. The restaurant serves food from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and the saloon serves a late night bar menu from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. The bar is open until 5 a.m. Contact them at 745-2676, or klondikemikessaloon@gmail.com.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.