Nomad owner bringing sports bar to downtown
Prolific restaurateur Mike Eitel is preparing to open a sports bar someplace he hadn’t expected: downtown.
SportClub is due in late February at 750 N. Jefferson St., timed for the NCAA basketball tournament.
It’s in an area with a dearth of sports bars but near plenty of offices and new, high-end apartments.
Eitel said he was drawn to downtown by its “palpable energy,” represented by construction such as the two new Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. towers.
“I’m kind of stoked, to say the least,” Eitel said.
He says SportClub will be different from other sports bars; Eitel wants to appeal to non-fans as well as fans by framing it as “a celebration of the celebration of sports.”
Eitel also sees SportClub as the cul-
of his experiences traveling and starting businesses, perhaps even a prototype for more SportClubs.
“This sort of synthesizes the last 23 years and what I’m passionate about,” he said, including world travel, reflected in the international menu of hand-held street foods and Middle Eastern-style mezze platters.
Eitel’s businesses started with Nomad World Pub on E. Brady St. and the co-founding of Diablos Rojos, the restaurant group that became Lowlands, which has Cafes Hollander, Benelux, Centraal and Bavaria, in Milwaukee, Wauwatosa, Mequon and Madison.
Eitel kept Nomad but stepped away from the operation of Lowlands in 2014 (later giving up his financial stake, too) to relax and spend more time with his family.
“That ‘retirement’ lasted about two months,” Eitel said.
Eitel is again empirebuilding. He’s been opening and planning so many properties that he’s creatout,” ed a new hospitality group called Caravan.
He opened a second Nomad a year ago, in Madison. He bought a decades-old, rougharound-the-edges bar on Upper Nemahbin Lake in Summit a few years ago and named it Panga.
SportClub will have about 20 TVs, but they won’t all be on continually if there isn’t a game to watch. Some TVs might show old clips from ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” or eating competitions.
“What I don’t want is just mindlessly leaving TVs on SportsCenter and people feeling micromination waved when they come Eitel said.
Since the bar’s focus will be on the celebration of sports, Eitel said, and celebration often means bubbly, SportClub will have it by the bottle and the glass, a half-dozen or so versions of the mimosa plus other sparkling-wine cocktails, as well as 30 draft lines for beer.
The sports bar “needed something a little bit off the rails,” Eitel said, but also classy, “something that met the needs of people downtown, whether they’re working downtown or living downtown.”
Despite sparkling wine’s tony image, SportClub will serve its food on disposable dishware made from post-consumer recycled products; the only flatware will be bamboo sporks and wooden chopsticks, Eitel said.
The bar will be open for lunch, dinner and weekend breakfast, and it will have a “concession stand” for quick, takeaway menu items at lunch and late at night. Chef Joshua Moore is developing the menu.
“Having global street food, if that’s the ethos, it gives us so many options,” Eitel said. “I don’t think we’ll ever run out of ideas.”
Prices likely will be $7 to $12 for most of the food, with mezze platters for two to six people around $17.
The main bar will have an increasingly popular amenity: outlets where customers can charge phones and laptops as they’re working while hanging out.
To pull in people leaving work early on Friday afternoons, Eitel wants to have a “sports brunch,” in which the brunch is the sport: a set price for bottomless mimosas and an afternoon of grazing on mezze.
In all, SportClub is expected to have a capacity of about 200.