Henry Lee still remembers the outrage that greeted his decision to turn a former punk rock venue called DMZ into Vino’s in 1990.
“The kids were so mad,” Lee said. “We were taking their place.”
The kids needn’t have worried. Vino’s became their place more than ever - as well as a hangout for politicians and state workers, business people, out-of-town visitors and anybody else looking for something to do in downtown Little Rock when options there were few.
Lee didn’t just serve up a great slice of hand-thrown, New York-style pizza at Vino’s. He started making beer, pioneering the microbrewery pub business in Arkansas and bringing about the rewriting of state liquor laws in the process. He kept the music flowing - loudly - in the back room, opening the stage to future superstars such as Green Day as well as thousands of other musicians. And he proved that worlds can not only collide, they can sit down at adjacent tables and dine.
“Vino’s is an institution in Little Rock,” said Sam Ledbetter, a lawyer, former state legislator and friend of Lee. “There’s no place like it.”
“We became more than just that music place where all the weird kids hang out,” Lee said. “You’d have a politician talking to a kid with green hair and a nose ring.”
They still do.
A ponytail and earring are the wildest look Lee ever sported. The oldest of six children, he grew up in a south Louisiana family that appreciated good food and good times.
“I like to socialize,” Lee said, although he says he does it “less than I used to.”
That may come as a surprise to friends, who note that Lee makes time for New Orleans Saints football games (he’s a season ticket holder), duck hunting, trout fishing and other assorted pastimes.
“I always say I want to be Henry Lee when I grow up,” Ledbetter joked.
Lee earned an engineering degree from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston and spent eight years in the oil business. He was supervising a piping crew on the Gulf of Mexico when the bottom dropped out of the industry in 1987. He then started selling jumbo certificates of deposit in Florida. Most of his clients were Little Rock brokerage houses. Lee moved to the Arkansas capital in 1989, finishing that short race ahead of the savings and loan debacle that would have sunk him.
“We knew the end was coming,” he says. “I needed something to do, and no place [in Little Rock] had any good beer.”
With partners Alan Vennes and Bill Parodi, whom he later bought out, Lee decided to open a pizza joint with good beer, modeled on Fellini’s, a place they admired in Atlanta. They even bought the Georgia restaurant’s recipe, which Lee says he “hasn’t changed a bit” over the years.
The trio hunted for a location for six months before settling on a building at Chester and Seventh street, where DMZ was located. In front, where the restaurant now resides, they scraped up tar paper to expose hardwood floors and replaced windows that had been boarded up. The back room didn’t change much, although Lee points out that simply installing separate men’s and women’s restrooms doubled the number of those facilities in the place.
Lee cooked all the pies that Vino’s produced during its first six months. He said the partners “almost lost it” during that first year after running through their original $30,000 investment and straight into tax trouble with the state.
“I was so broke, I pawned my shotgun for $250,” Lee says. “I was living on pizza and sandwiches for months and months.”
To get people in the doors and generate cash flow, Vino’s hosted all-ages music shows in the back room, with the volume often set high enough to send shock waves through the tables out front.
“We had it cranked up,” Lee says. “We were like ‘the hell with it’ - rock ’n’ roll pizza place!” PRISON FARM AUCTION KETTLE
The musical specialty was up-and-coming bands playing every joint that would welcome them as they tried to become known. Green Day is the most famous of these, but there were many others: Rocket From the Crypt, Jello Biafra, Corey Glover, Kim Deal, Better Than Ezra, Agnostic Front, and MC 900 Ft. Jesus, to name just a few.
“A long time ago, this was one of the first places where myself and my friends, we could come and see a rock show,” says Chris New, who started going to shows at Vino’s as a teenager and is now Lee’s general manager. “Vino’s was always all-ages. Juanita’s was all-ages sometimes.”
And sometimes, hundreds of kids packed the room. Other times, it was 10 or a dozen die-hards.
“Fifty-six people paid to see Queens of the Stone Age before anyone knew who they were,” New says.
Evanescence, which formed in Little Rock in 1995 and has since sold more than 20 million albums, played its first shows at Vino’s. Hundreds of other local bands got their first exposure there as well, and for the most part, they played only original material. “I’m proud of that,” Lee says.
One of his favorite shows was the annual tribute to Louis Jordan, the legendary Brinkley bandleader. Lee, a trumpet player in high school, got out his trumpet for the first time since his teens to play “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (My Baby)?”
These days, Vino’s presents bands two or three nights a week. Part of the reason for the decline in frequency is the development of the River Market District, where several other establishments host music on a regular basis. Lee says he supported development of that area, even though he knew it would cut into his business. The fact is, the back room has been mostly a break-even proposition from the start, with the real revenue coming from the food and beer.
Lee served good beer from the beginning - Guinness, Harp, Bass and other brands it was difficult or impossible to find elsewhere in central Arkansas. In 1991, he and Mark Crossley - a friend and Little Rock lawyer who died in 2011- decided to start making it themselves.
Their first boiler was a steam kettle bought from a Cummins Unit prison-farm auction. They made the stuff upstairs, where it was “cold as hell in the winter and hot as hell in the summer,” Lee said.
“We had no control over the quality of the beer we were brewing. Some was good, some was terrible. People drank it anyway.” FOUNDING FATHER OF CRAFT BEER
Brewpubs were already a big draw in other states, but to make one happen in Arkansas, Lee realized that state laws needed to be changed. With the help of sympathetic lawmakers, some of whom enjoyed a pint or two at Vino’s, Lee did just that.
“I can tell you that Henry is responsible for the statutes we have,” said Michael Langley, director of the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division since 2007. “He literally did sit down and draft the first proposal.”
Lee’s first move was to get the amount of beer that brewpubs could produce increased. He then won them the ability to sell their product out the door, to sell and distribute beer to others for resale, and eventually to sell beer to go on Sunday - something the state’s liquor stores still can’t do.
The biggest obstacle Lee and his coalition faced came from the state’s traditional liquor industry - wholesalers, distributors and liquor stores.
“It just took some educating,” Lee said. “They were worried about their livelihood. In reality, the brewpubs and the microbreweries in Arkansas were probably never going to be a major threat to their business.”
Former U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder was one of the those who helped Lee while serving in the state Legislature in the 1990s.
“People might have seen him as this young man that’s got this wild pizza place, but he’s a very smart guy, and he’s a very good businessman, and my sense was he knew how to get things done politically,” Snyder said.
Lee said the key was taking a gradual approach.
“I would shoot for the moon every other year, ask for all the things we wanted, then we’d pare it back.”
Today, he said, Arkansas has some of the most favorable laws in the country for small, local beer producers. Seventeen brewpubs and microbreweries operate in the state, with the biggest concentration in Northwest Arkansas. Although official statistics aren’t kept, Lee guesses that about 10,000 barrels were produced here this year.
“Our state policy is we encourage economic growth and we certainly encourage the expansion of craft beer in Arkansas,” Langley said. “Henry Lee is the founding father of that. That’s the best way I can put it.”BOILED CRAWFISH AND BREWS
Lee never did get his shotgun back from the pawnshop. But with Vino’s firmly established, he did have time to start hunting again several years ago.
“When he’s at our duck club, there’s no one else that gets in the kitchen,” friend and Little Rock political consultant Bill Paschal said. “Nothing gives him more pleasure than to cook and put a smile on someone’s face.”
Indeed, folks still remember some of his epic crawfish boils.
“I stood in his backyard with my pants rolled up, there were 400 people peeling crawfish under this tent, drinking beer in a downpour,” New said.
For years, people asked Lee when he’d open a second Vino’s. He finally did so, starting Vino’s Pizzeria 305 in Jonesboro with partners last year. It’s a sports bar with a full menu. It’s quite a bit more upscale than the original.
Despite the addition of real brewing equipment and a two-story deck out back, Lee has never done what could be called a renovation of the original establishment. Nor is he likely to.
“I think this place is what it is and it’s going to stay that way.”SELF PORTRAIT Henry Lee
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: April 9, 1959, Morgan City, La.
IF I WASN’T RUNNING VINO’S, I’D probably be working in some engineering management field.
MY HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS THOUGHT I needed to take on more challenges.
THE LAST PLACE I VISITED: New Orleans
THE PLACE I’D MOST LIKE TO VISIT: Australia and/ or New Zealand
I TELL NEW EMPLOYEES, “Do what we do the best we can do it.”
ONE THING I’VE LEARNED FROM CUSTOMERS IS it doesn’t have to be fancy.
I DRIVE a 2003 Ford pickup nearing 250,000 miles
MY FAVORITE ACT currently is Alejandro Escovedo; all-time, Frank Zappa.
I’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND PEOPLE who just follow blindly, never questioning authority or the status quo.
GUESTS AT A FANTASY DINNER PARTY: Isaac Asimov, Frank Zappa, Helen Keller
ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE ME: Learning
High Profile, Pages 33 on 12/29/2013