Kito’s Kave has been an institution in Petersburg for decades. Established in 1965, the bar has served everyone from Petersburg locals to tourists to author Jon Krakauer.
At the start of July, brothers-in-law Jake Dougher and Anders Rosvold became the new owners of the iconic bar. Rosvold is a Petersburg born-and-raised commercial fisherman, and Dougher is a financial consultant who moved to the community a little over a year ago.
Dougher sat down with KFSK’s Baiz Hoen to talk about how he plans to uphold the bar’s legacy, and what drew him to it in the first place.
Listen here:
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Jake Dougher: My wife was born and raised here and we moved back a little over a year ago. Ever since I’ve been with her, we’ve been coming back up for the summers to see family and stuff. We were in there the night after we got engaged and we’ve had a lot of good experiences and great memories there.
Ultimately I talked to my brother-in-law, Anders, who was born and raised here and has lived here his whole life and knows the community really well. That was really important for me. If I was gonna do something like this, I was certainly aware that I am kind of the new guy in town, and it’s an old establishment and I’m sensitive to that.
So, I talked to Anders about being involved just because he is a local face [that] people know. He’s on the pulse of the things he really loves about Kito’s, but also the stuff he would like to see evolve.
Baiz Hoen: Have you ever worked in the food service industry before?
Jake Dougher: Yeah, I bartended for a long time when I was much, much younger. My first few jobs out of college were bartending.
Professionally, I run a financial consulting practice, and I’ve worked with a couple of different hospitality groups that have run restaurants and bars and things like that. So I’ve kind of seen the behind the curtain of how these things run, both with my own experience and then working with these other businesses for a while.
Baiz Hoen: There’s just like a mythos around Kito’s. I’m new in town too, and I heard about it the first day I got here. Is there a pressure to uphold that legacy a little bit?
Jake Dougher: I mean, I would be lying if I said there was no pressure.
There certainly is, but, it’s an establishment, you know? It’s an institution here in Southeast. It’s been around for years and years and years, and so there is certainly a part of that where I feel responsible for maintaining what has been here for so long.
But in conjunction with that, before I even put in an offer on all this stuff, I was talking to a lot of people I knew here in the community about, you know, what do you like about it? What do you think should evolve or change? I think kind of threading that needle, of maintaining what’s so special about it, what’s been here for so long, and also bringing it into a new kind of chapter is really the focus.
Baiz Hoen: What is the one-year plan for Kito’s right now?
Jake Dougher: This first three months has really been, or it will be, around operations. We put in new point-of-sale systems for the staff, and they’ve been awesome with trying to pick that up and learn it, and I think it’s really helped with service and being able to get your credit card back and all these things that I think are really helpful for the customer experience.
But it’s really around that. It’s me getting in there, understanding the place better. It’s the staff getting up to speed on that sort of stuff.
In a year, what I’d love to do is look up and say like, “Okay, this is starting to resemble what feels like a new chapter for Kito’s going forward,” while totally maintaining its history and place in the community with just a refresh to feel like it’s good for the long haul.
Baiz Hoen: And I guess similar to that, what is your big dream for it, way down the line?
Jake Dougher: Oh, wow. It’s an interesting question because like I said, so much of it is around maintaining its core soul. But, I do think that there are a fair amount of people in town who maybe haven’t been in a long time, and for whatever reason, maybe just feel like it’s not for them.
I am a believer that it is a place for everybody, and that whether you’re young, old, wanna drink, don’t wanna drink, wanna have a meal, wanna listen to comedy, music, whatever, just hang out, that it’s a place that people feel super comfortable being in, that they can come and enjoy themselves and have a birthday party or dinner with their family or just sit with a friend.
It’s not around the way things look as much as it is making sure everybody in the community and in neighboring towns or visiting always feels like, “Oh yeah, that’s a place I can go and have a good time and I’m gonna feel safe and welcome and everything.”
