Rooster tales: How our local watering hole overcame the odds

It was a rocky beginning for The Roost Sports Bar & Café nine years ago.

It was then known as True Grit Tavern, a tip of the cowboy hat to the popular 1969 John Wayne flick “True Grit”.

Owner Ralph Skrzypczak, who jokes about his last name being a good online password, remembers well the struggles of starting up the business in a strip mall on North John Wayne Parkway.

That was a few years before entrepreneur Jon Taffer’s reality TV show, “Bar Rescue”, renamed it The Roost. It is a branding that Skrzypczak interprets to mean a place where anyone can come in and hang out.

The eighth season of Bar Rescue covers The Roost’s revamp travails, focusing much on Skrzypczak himself. Almost overnight, exposure from the show tripled The Roost’s business.

Skrzypczak first planned to open a dispensary in Colorado after recreational cannabis was voter-approved there.

But in 2015, he got a call from his father who moved to Maricopa with intentions to retire here. His father told him True Grit Tavern’s owner wanted to sell.

Skrzypczak initially balked at the thought of going into the restaurant and bar business because he had no experience in the industry. He said he only knew it was one of the toughest in existence.

“To this day, it was probably the worst thing I ever did without doing the inspection and my due diligence,” Skrzypczak recalled. “I just said blindly, ‘OK Dad, let’s do it.’”

A week after cutting the ribbon, the father-son duo found the tavern was riddled with black mold, which cost $125,000 to remove. The business loan was only $150,000.

“We were left with $25,000 cash to basically start this business with,” Skrzypczak said. “We had huge, huge aspirations and then within a week into it we said, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to lose half of our startup money with like 90% of it going to a wall that nobody’s going to see.’”

With the remainder of their loan money, they bought the booze to replenish a dwindling inventory.

The Roost also survived the pandemic years beginning with a total restructuring in 2020 when most restaurants shuttered for months or more. But the restaurant closed down for two weeks.

Skrzypczak had just expanded the business and there were loans to pay. But grocery stores were also running out of the products he needed to sustain the business.

“The toilet paper shortage had already started, and then the meats and grains had already started to slow down too, or at least you couldn’t get them from the shelves,” he said.

Doing whatever he could to survive, Skrzypczak offered customers free toilet paper rolls with their orders.

“I just pulled everything I could out because those bills were coming,” he said. “It was totally bizarro world.”

Ultimately, he said government entities left it up to businessowners despite the fact they knew little to nothing about health care.

Even though the business survived the pandemic, Skrzypczak said it took a severe toll.
“We ended up having to sell my mom’s house in Colorado — the house that I grew up in — at the end of 2020,” he said.

The government loans were intended to keep people employed at the bar, he said. It could not be used to pay off debt.

The business has a “lean” staff of 25 today, he said, down from 50 before the pandemic.

“The weirdest part is covid changed human behavior, so we don’t participate in things like we used to,” he said. “There’s just a lot more angst in the world today. From my feeling in the bar business, in the hospitality world, we’re walking around on eggshells more than we were before.”

He said more online orders also changed the dynamic of business, along with higher pay for staff and rising costs in general.

Today, Skrzypczak said he’s trying to give people what they want. Consequently, the menu covers everything from a hotdog and soda to a steak and a glass of fine wine.

“We want a place that the community is proud of to call their own,” Skrzypczak said.

“Cheers,” a nod to the TV comedy based on a bar “where everyone knows your name,” is something Skrzypczak said he hears from customers when describing The Roost.

“When we celebrate, we do it here,” he said, speaking of his regular diners and barflies.

He said he recognizes more such places are needed in Maricopa to keep customers from having to drive deeper into the Valley and metro Phoenix metro through the aggravating traffic of State Route 347.

New online ordering and delivery concepts are under consideration, he said. A popular promotion is raffling off a 85-inch TV during football season.

A $6.99 “fire sale” breakfast and $1 beers at 3:47 p.m. are among the bar’s unique and rotating promotional offerings.

“As Maricopa grows into the future, I just want to have a place that can be represented across the board, generationally, for everyone,” Skrzypczak said. “It’s a place where everyone can just come and hang out and feel comfortable being themselves.”