An Old Hat Comes Back In Style -- Owners Buff Up A Ballard Tavern, But Don't Want To Mess With Its History

Bringing back themural was part of the new owners' balancing act of squeezing the hand of new customers while still gazing fondly into the eyes of the old. -----------------------------------------------------------------

From atop his ladder at Hattie's Hat, where he worked swabbing 40 years of grease and nicotine off Fred Oldfield's Scandinavian mural, Peter Malarkey eavesdropped on the old Ballard restaurant and bar.

Inch by inch the fjords and Nordic beauties that adorn Oldfield's 20-foot mural regained their splendor and once again drew the approving attention of diners seated at the cafe counter that runs along its length.

"Whoever painted that painting was some painter all right."

Malarkey was soon forgotten as he went about his work as a paint conservator. Salmon deals took place behind him. Men and women met and fell in love, for the night, at least.

Voices of longtime regulars rose from the cafe, where instead of Blue Plate Specials there are blue-collar specials and breakfast is served all day.

"Ya know, after she broke her hip . . . "

And they roared from across the room, clearing the cedar partition that separates the cafe from the 19th-century mahogany bar, where plaid-clad shoulders hunch over stiff drinks morning, noon and night.

"Fishermen work their tails off!"

Malarkey usually works in his studio or in the quiet off hours of courtrooms or churches - none of it half so much fun as being a fly on the wall for 89 work hours at Hattie's, which at 5231 Ballard Ave. N.W. is glamorously situated between Ballard Hardware and Acme Rubber Stamp.

Bringing back the mural was part of the new owners' balancing act of squeezing the hands of new customers while still gazing fondly into the eyes of the old.

Malarkey was asked to show diners how Oldfield's mural must have looked when it was painted in the early 1950s instead of how it looked in 1996, when whole hamlets were buried under nicotine fallout and the bartender mistook painted fishing net for cobwebs.

Hattie's Hat has had several names over the past 90 years, all led by the informal modifier "hard-drinking."

At one time, perhaps when you could still hail a waitress with a buzzer in the booth, if you didn't get a table at Hattie's by 5 p.m., you might as well count your evening lost.

"You can tell people are at ease," Malarkey said. "They're looking out for one another, like family."

People in the bar hold their vices in close proximity, cigarette in one hand, swizzle-sticked drink in the other.

Over their shoulders, through the front window, two foreign objects can be seen: sunshine and stern-faced women on treadmills. The women are across the street at the health club, striding toward their window and Hatties. Like the drinkers, they don't seem to get anywhere, but they're trying.

Malarkey figures his two-week stint at Hattie's taught him less about traditional Ballard than about how Ballard is changing, as it drifts away from calloused, weathered hands to sporty driving gloves.

But changes at the restaurant, he added, "seemed pretty seamless."

Do the customers feel the same?

"Depends on who you ask," said a waitress of 16 years.

If you stop by Hattie's for the first time, you might wonder when the restoration is going to begin.

New owners Dan Cowan, Ed Beeson, Kyla Fairchild and Ron Wilkowski, who bought the place in October and then closed it every Monday so they could scrub and paint, want the changes to be minute.

Cowan shrugs and looks around when asked if smoking is allowed everywhere.

"Apparently," he said.

That will change. The back dining room will someday be restricted to nonsmokers. But, Cowan said, such changes are hard on the regulars, who see Hattie's as a last refuge from a world that disapproves. "Some of these people have been coming here 10, 15 years."

Food hasn't been a draw in recent years, but hard liquor did well. Cowan, who owns the nearby Tractor Tavern, noticed people rushing away from his beer and wine at breaks during Rockabilly nights.

Where were they headed? To the bar that came around Cape Horn by steamer to Ballard, where it has held up the elbows of regulars at Hattie's Hat for nearly a century.

The new owners are all familiar with tunes. Beeson ran the Backstage in Ballard and the Silver Spoon restaurant in Duvall. Fairchild is involved with the alternative country-music publication No Depression. Wilkowski is a banker but a "hip rock 'n' roll" banker.

Now, with Beeson's help, they're learning about food. They want to bring the cafe back to be an equal partner with the bar.

Their first step was to hire a chef with upscale credentials from the Maple Leaf Bar & Grill and Green Lake Grill.

Their second step was to try to keep the Mediterranean and Cajun flavors that attract the younger dinner crowd from overwhelming the regulars, who might prefer ketchup on their steaks. You'll still be able to get corned beef at Hattie's; even lutefisk, on 24 hours notice.

That's the wrenching beauty of Hattie's Hat: It always has depended on tradition.

When the shake mill closed and fishing dropped off, the regulars came even more often. The bar lost a number of good lunch-hour friends when the railroad started giving urine tests.

But even the regulars have a way of not showing up one day.

"A lot of them have died, drinking or cancer," said Elsie Barros, who has poured the shots for 26 years in Aunt Harriet's Room, where affection and opinion are tossed back with the drinks.

"My pleasure, as usual, Elsie," said a departing customer.

"Don't stay away so long next time!"

From his two-week perch, Malarkey observed that the new owners are doing a good job of turning the place into a viable business without turning out the old.

Owner Beeson has said that every neighborhood needs a place that is part dive, part diner, where people can feel comfortable and have a good meal.

Apparently the new generation needs it just as much as the old. There's a whole movement of younger people swinging and swaying to the sounds of Hank Williams Sr., Cowan said. They were born to a time of constant change. To surround themselves with '50s memorabilia - not kitsch but the real thing - seems to provide stability.

"Retro is in," Cowan said, "and it doesn't get any more retro than this. Nothing's changed. The young crowd appreciates the storied value of Hattie's."

That story goes like this:

Hattie's started off in 1905 as "The Old Home," where gambling had no limit, the place never closed and liquor was served out the front and back doors, often by the case.

When owners Gus and Pat Malmgren bought it and changed the name to Malmen's Fine Foods in the 1950s, they found hobbles and feed bags in the basement, leftovers from the days when making the trip to Seattle was an all-day journey.

The Malmgrens gave the place a total remodel. Fred Oldfield, who was hired to paint the Scandinavian mural, recalls that liquor by the drink was just coming back, replacing "bottle clubs." Prominent watering holes around Seattle hired him to give customers something to look at.

The place did good business, and the new owners thought the customers deserved nicer surroundings, Oldfield recollects. But the remodel backfired.

"Business fell off," Oldfield said. "They got it looking really smooth. The workers stopped coming."

The next owner named the place after his mother-in-law, and it's been Hattie's Hat for 30 years.

When the latest owners took over in October, they too went down to the basement. The treasures they found were three more Oldfields.

"We wanted to put up on the wall only what had been here before," Cowan said.

When they discovered that Oldfields were selling for $8,000 apiece, they made the plunge to have the big mural above the cafe counter cleaned, although it cost 10 times the $400 Oldfield received for painting it 40 years ago.

Malarkey said he had never faced a painting so dirty. He experimented with a number of water-based solvents before finding one that would clean through the surface grime and dissolve the tar.

Small swabs wouldn't do it. He folded up big cotton pads so he could cover more territory. The foreground paint was thick and of high quality, but Oldfield had thinned the paint that covered the background mountains and water.

Malarkey left about 10 percent of the grime to keep from touching the paint. Then he protected it with varnish.

In 40 years of hanging over a boisterous cafe and bar, the only damage to the Oldfield was a few spots near the milk machine.

"It was in perfect condition," Malarkey said. "Not so much as a thrown tomato."

Malarkey said he was delighted to save such a large piece of the early work of a Northwest artist. Oldfield pronounced it a job well done, but, ever humble, added, "They couldn't hurt it."

Three more Oldfields hang in the back dining room, still uncleaned. The new owners will work their way back there. They may focus first on the dark grime of wallpaper in the bar, which legend has it once was red velvet.

The two Rodins on Plexiglas back-lit by the bar will stay, and so, the owners hope, will the regulars and their small talk.

"Well, she was over at his ex-wife's house and one morning . . ."