Among the many restaurants and shops along Hillsborough Street, one bar is hidden away at the top of an old, wooden staircase. Mitch’s Tavern has been a staple of the campus community for decades, through the good times and the bad.
Mitch Hazouri, owner of Mitch’s Tavern, said he is trying to decide whether to fade away or keep going another 20 years. Hazouri said if he decides to stay on the street and tries to grow his business to a profitable level, he plans to make certain renovations to both the outside and inside of the tavern.
“It’s a serious renovation,” Hazouri said. “I’m more than 50-50 planning to do this. This will put us here for 19 years.”
Some of the renovations include widening the existing balconies to have seven or eight tables and offering a dry overhang of five-and-a-half feet.
“A lot of people like to hang out there and drink. It’s a pretty good view,” Hazouri said.
But before the restaurant was Mitch’s Tavern, Hazouri frequented the nightclub that came before it, the Jolly Knave. While the Jolly Knave was mostly a beach music/shag dance club, the business did have troubles.
“The police were giving [The Jolly Knave] a lot of trouble – they were gamblers. There were a lot of card games that got busted and they wanted to sell it,” Hazouri said. “I didn’t have any money, but I went ahead and bought it anyway. I continued on with the business, and a lot of it left because I wasn’t one of them and I didn’t dance, like beach music, anything like that.”
After two years, on the fourth of July in 1974, Hazouri said he took away the beach music, put foosball tables on the dance floor and changed the business name to Mitch’s Tavern.
“It made a lot of people angry because even though they didn’t come here as much, they wanted it to be here whenever they did come around,” Hazouri said. “Up until 1978 we had foosball tournaments. We had people come in two hours early to sign up – we just turned it into a real student place. We probably had more business traffic in 1976-1977 than we’ve ever had.”
In 1974 Hazouri said the tavern got their food license and began selling hot dogs, but in 1978 other businesses created intense competition for them.
“In 1978 Edward’s Grocery opened, Free Advice opened, and we just did no business in 1978. We were sitting here during the summer, just doing as much in a week as much as we do one lunch here today,” Hazouri said.
Although the business was open 365 days a year, it took until the summer of 1978 to get business booming again.
“Ended up this guy gets killed at Edward’s Grocery in the summer of 1978 and my business grew the next day,” Hazouri said.
In 1979, he decided he should start opening up for lunch.
“When we opened for lunch we seemed to do more business all day – we seemed to do double, triple the business per day,” Hazouri said.
In 1981 and 1982, older students began frequenting the business, so Hazouri bought five TVs for the tavern.
“I put five TV monitors in here — the earliest monitors that came out on the market,” Hazouri said. “We were the first to be playing compact discs here. So people would come up here to listen to music and watch the games. We were really well known for that.”
In 1986 when the drinking age went to 19 years old, Hazouri said it was the biggest year they had ever had.
“We were the top Budweiser seller on the east coast, east of the Mississippi. We sold more than any independent business,” Hazouri said. “The Durham Bulls sold more kegs than we did, and I think the Atlanta airport sold more kegs than we did, but [no other independent business] sold more kegs than we did east of the Mississippi.”
Sport Magazine rated Mitch’s Tavern one of the top ten sport’s pubs in the country in 1986.
“They would look at the news reports and we would be in the paper all the time. People would come in here to watch Jimmy Valvano,” Hazouri said.
In 1987 Hazouri came back to Raleigh after travelling to find a business card at the tavern. When he called the number, Hazouri said it was the location’s manager for the film Bull Durham.
“It was certainly not Gone With the Wind, it was just a low-budget film. He said ‘we’re looking at four places and yours is one of them,'” Hazouri said. “So one night we had some people in here and these guys came in, and it was like we didn’t exist. They went around looking, had a conversation for about 15 to 20 minutes and left. Later, I get this phone call saying they’d like to use our place.”
The producer told Hazouri the set they were looking for needed to look like an old place near the ballpark.
“He explained to me, ‘first of all, we picked it because you can’t just make a place look like it’s been there for 80 years,'” Hazouri said. “So they filmed here and it’s one of our legacies and it’s a spectacular one. Every time I turn on the TV [Bull Durham] is on.”
In the early 1990s, Mitch’s became more serious about their food, and Hazouri said through the mid-2000s the business just floated along, until 2006 when smoking was banned in the establishment.
“That really caused us a lot of angry emails, etc., so I opened up the balconies so people could smoke, but we never really recovered from that,” Hazouri said. “Then the road project started. We’re up now over last year. The road project hurt. We’re operating in an environment where there’s a lot of competition, so now we do mostly food.”
Hazouri said the tavern is going to go up and down as a student place, but he certainly wants to be identified with N.C. State.
“We will connect, because we can do it. We have tradition and we have history here, so we will connect,” Hazouri said. “We get a lot of the big movers and shakers from the University here. We get mostly faculty, staff and administrators.”
