The 18 candidates on the ballot for eight seats on the Raleigh City Council apparently left a lot to be desired in some voters’ eyes.

Approximately 470 write-in votes were cast in the Raleigh council elections on Oct. 6.

While some were random attempts at humor – Kermit the Frog, Ivana Trump and pizza rat all received votes – many of them were cast in an apparent reaction to the city’s recent crackdown on late-night drinking in downtown Raleigh.

In the mayoral race, which incumbent Nancy McFarlane won with 26,800 votes, downtown bar owner Zack Medford garnered the most write-in votes with 15.

Medford co-owns Paddy O’Beers, Coglin’s and Common 414 on Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. He was one of the loudest voices against the new downtown dining restrictions and formed a nonprofit known as “Keep Raleigh Vibrant” to lobby for pro-business candidates.

Medford’s advocacy was enough to vault him past “Mayor Pat,” who got 11 write-in votes. Mayor Pat is likely a reference to Gov. Pat McCrory, former Charlotte mayor.

“A 25 percent margin of victory sounds like a mandate to me,” Medford said Thursday. “Patios for everyone!”

Medford said he was surprised that he got the most write-in votes for mayor considering polling showed widespread support for “Deez Nuts.” Nuts, also a satirical presidential candidate, rose to prominence after polling relatively well in Iowa, Minnesota and North Carolina.

Nuts drew a total of 10 votes across five of the seven council races, but posted only three in the mayoral race.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article41972844.html#storylink=cpy

Smedes York, a former mayor of Raleigh and owner of Cameron Village, was the first to speak. With his executive history he gave advice about leadership, saying, “a leader sets the goals.” He advised, “instead of catching people doing something wrong, catch them doing something right.”

The second speaker was Zack Medford, a community leader and owner of multiple bars in downtown Raleigh. Medford focused primarily on learning by doing. He spoke about how when he began, he knew very little about how to run a business, much less a bar. “The only way to do something is to jump off that cliff,” Medford said. 

City council member Bonner Gaylord focused on the importance of involvement in local government. “The city council has more impact on your lives than any other governmental body,” Gaylord said. He explained the importance of the city council in determining how Raleigh grows. The tremendous growth of the city at 63 people per day, a figure Gaylord quoted from the Triangle Business Journal, has prompted many new and important decisions to be made regarding infrastructure and quality of life.

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — There’s more backlash Tuesday night over new outdoor seating rules in downtown Raleigh.

Several business owners say that it’s cutting into their bottom line and will no longer offer patio seating. Some expect that trend to continue.

“We love being on Fayetteville street. These wide sidewalks are very pedestrian friendly. People like to walk up with their dogs, sit down, have a beer,” said Zack Medford the owner of Paddy O’Beers.

It makes sense to hear the owner of Paddy O’Beers talking about patio seating.

“We called it Paddy O’Beers because we wanted to have an area in Raleigh where you could sit outside on a big patio and enjoy a beer,” Medford said.

But he says Raleigh’s new rules regulating outdoor seating at bars and restaurants is impacting his bottom line.

Zack Medford is applying to keep his outdoor seating permit.

”If we lose our patio, that is our entire business model and Paddy O’Beers will have to close its doors,” Medford said.

Except the task force members didn’t see it that way. What Remer and the other staff members didn’t know was that on Tuesday, Paddy O’Beers owner Zack Medford and five other hospitality stakeholders held a private meeting where they hashed out their own compromise. It looks like this:
 
Propsed_PUPS_Text_Change.pdf

• Occupancy would be determined by the state building code, meaning: If you have fixed tables and chairs, you are limited to 15 square feet per person. If you have more transient furniture, like folding chairs, you are limited to seven square feet per person. If you have standing room only, it’s five square feet per person. For each bar, city officials would determine the magic number after reviewing a sketch of the furniture and space. 
   
• Outdoor use would be cut off ay 2 a.m., and stanchions would be required after 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Bars and restaurants would have to have a manager on duty after 10 p.m.; this manager is in charge of compliance and dealing the Raleigh PD. 
   
• The bars would be responsible for ensuring their areas were clean. 
   
• Permits would cost $250 a year, a 75 percent increase. 

Those six members circulated the proposal to the others ahead of today’s task force. There wasn’t universal agreement by any means, but it was grounds for hashing out … something. And if that was the case, the members decided they should try to agree on something, or at least on most things, rather than throwing up their arms and surrendering to staff, who some of them felt were trying to impose their agenda on the task force. 

As Medford told me in a Facebook message after the previous week’s meeting: 
 

Seems like whenever the group is moving towards consensus, staff suddenly backtracks to remind us unproductive things like "these are sidewalks not patios" and "it's a privilege". This was our fourth meeting, I think we should be past that point and focused on solutions.

“So those are the options that will be presented to City Council?” asked Joe Durham, a former Wake County manager who was representing residents on the task force. “No recommendation from this group? No recommendation from staff? … It’s not effective. I don’t see it as being effective.” 

Ashley Melville, the representative from the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, said, “I’m very confident we can come to consensus,” and at that point, Medford and ShopLocal Raleigh executive director Jen Martin unveiled their proposal. Indeed, within a matter of minutes, consensus had developed with respect to all but one major point: occupancy. I’ll come back to that in the a minute. 

The consensus looked a lot like Medford et al.’s proposal. A suggestion to allow bars to use the sidewalks in front of adjoining properties with permission from the building owner was nixed, as this would run afoul of ABC rules. And the group agreed to go along with staff’s more punitive violation fines and raise the permit fee to $300. It took some discussion, but eventually the task force voted in favor of Medford’s group’s more generous occupancy limits. (This made staff members uneasy, as the current code was written only for seating, not for standing, and it’s possible we haven’t heard the last of this issue.) 

RALEIGH, N.C. — City officials agreed Tuesday to work with bar owners and others on new regulations for outdoor dining in Raleigh.

A proposed ordinance change would have limited city outdoor dining permits to establishments that garner no more than 70 percent of their annual revenue from alcohol sales.

Downtown bar owners who have added patios or sidewalk seating in recent years protested the move, with Zack Medford, the owner of Paddy O'Beers on Fayetteville Street, gathering more than 8,000 signatures on an online petition to block the change.

"It upsets me a lot that the city created this ordinance without talking to any of us. Nobody from the hospitality industry was consulted at first," Medford said. "If we hadn't raised our voices so loudly, I think this ordinance would have been passed through without anyone noticing."

Opponents wearing T-shirts reading "#SavethePatios" rallied Tuesday and then marched to City Hall to fight the proposal.

RALEIGH 

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Zack Medford.

First he received an email from the City of Raleigh at 4:59 p.m. on Friday, May 29 letting him know about a Monday, June 1 meeting on a proposed rewrite of city rules that would strip bars of their rights to have tables on city sidewalks.

The change would cut Medford’s revenue in half at Paddy O’Beers, one of three businesses he owns with sidewalk seating on Fayetteville Street.

At the June 1 meeting, the outdoor minibar set up at Medford’s bar, Coglin’s Raleigh, during Brewgaloo on April 25 was used as an example of outdoor dining gone rogue.

While there have been ongoing conversations with city officials about crowding on sidewalks, the outdoor bar issue took him by surprise, he said.

“They are using this as ammunition against us and why this ordinance is required,” he said. “The funny thing is we are fully permitted, and on top of it they never told us that we can’t do this.”

Since at least 2013, Medford has been opening outdoor bars during most downtown events and believed it was sanctioned, he said, as he sought a temporary permit extension from the N.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission. The approval includes a map of the outdoor area with the bar and a sign-off with written comments by the Raleigh Police Department.

The situation is one example of the confusion and frustration stemming from city officials’ proposal – sprung on business owners last week – to revise city rules for restaurants, bars and other spaces that hold outdoor dining permits, which allow them to put tables and chairs on city sidewalks. The controversy is the latest version of an ongoing clash among competing interests and visions as Raleigh’s downtown revitalization takes hold.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/small-business/article23540431.html#storylink=cpy

BY ZACK T. MEDFORD

I opened Paddy O’Beers – get it? Patio Beers? – because I love sitting outside and sipping craft beer. I think Raleigh shares that passion, too – we have more than nine breweries in this city, as well as many new bottle shops. The website for the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau has a whole page dedicated to helping visitors find them.

Last week, the assistant city manager proposed an ordinance that would revoke the patio permits of local businesses that don’t sell “enough” food. If passed, we would lose two-thirds of our seating at Paddy O’Beers and likely be forced to close our doors.

This ordinance is a mistake, and public response to the proposal has been a resounding, “No.”

I started a petition asking the City Council to reject this proposal, and it has nearly 8,000 signatures. The residents of Raleigh have made it clear: Don’t take away our patios!

Raleigh is at a crossroads. We’re no longer the sleepy Southern town we once were. We are growing into a lively, well-rounded city. It is an exciting time to live in Raleigh, especially downtown. Growing up, however, doesn’t come without growing pains.

Rapid growth means more people, and with more people you get more problems. Restaurants have longer waits. Parking is harder to find. Things can get noisy. These growing pains are natural for any city. It’s up to us, as a community, to come up with solutions to these problems in an open forum.

This ordinance will do nothing to lower the volume downtown, increase public safety or clean up the city. Instead, it will close many responsible local businesses that have never had a single complaint filed against them. Raleigh should be working with businesses like Foundation, which was featured in the magazines Our State and Garden & Gun. It shouldn’t be trying to regulate them out of business.

It is not the government’s job to pick winners and losers. Nachos and hamburgers are not going to make a business quieter or cleaner. Specific establishments that cause problems should be addressed through code violations, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

We all love our city, and we’re proud of how far we’ve come these last 10 years since Fayetteville Street was reopened. Many people took a gamble on opening businesses downtown, creating the vibrant urban center we have today. We have invested our time, financial resources and passion into making our downtown a destination. We didn’t receive any state, federal or local incentives to open our business in Raleigh.

Instead of shuttering the local businesses that have made our downtown such a success, we should be working with them to address these growing pains. Together, as a community, we can overcome any obstacle.

Zack T. Medford is the owner of Paddy O’Beers in downtown Raleigh.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article23131995.html

Andrew Pepin sometimes prefers to enjoy his beer outside, but a proposed change to a Raleigh city ordinance could limit his outdoor drinking.

“One of the greatest things about Raleigh is being able to sit outside and enjoy the beverage, enjoy the weather,” Pepin said Sunday while drinking outside Paddy O’Beers.

Paddy O’Beers owner Zack Medford believes the proposal is targeted towards businesses like his. 

Medford started an online petition that has garnered more than 2,300 signatures.

“An ordinance that would take away our patio is kind of a slap in the face,” he said.

The issue was referred to the City Council's Law & Public Safety Committee, which will discuss it on June 9. The original ordinance referred to an "outdoor dining permit," officials said, so council members will look at the wording when considering any changes.

“I think Common 414 is a way to take cocktail culture and make it more approachable,” says Medford. “And we’re a place that costs $2,000 or $4,000 to rent. A lot of times we do events with just the bar tab minimum. Nowhere in Raleigh do you get a find like that, where you can come in a space this big and has this sophisticated an offering and say, ‘You know what? I wanna have my cocktail hour here!"

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article22430169.html#storylink=cpy

[2016 UPDATE: 2 years later, Isaac Hunter's Tavern re-opened its doors at 414 Fayetteville Street)

RALEIGH, N.C. — Isaac Hunter's Oak City Tavern will close its doors in downtown Raleigh on March 31, owners announced Tuesday. 

The tavern opened in 2009 amid the Downtown Raleigh Renaissance. Owners say that as their lease began to wind down at 112 Fayetteville St., their landlord, Pete Gillis, decided to go in a different direction, striking a deal with the owner of 606 Nightclub and Myst in Glenwood South to replace the tavern with a new concept. 

Owners Brad Bowles, Ben Yannessa and Zack Medford say they are "heartbroken to see the tavern finally close its doors so abruptly." 

"We are proud of our little bar, and we hate to see it end like this," Medford said, "but we know that we will bring Isaac Hunter’s back in the future, and this time make it everything we’ve always wanted it to be."

Three years ago, downtown Raleigh saw the first wave of craft beer bottle shops open with two: Tasty Beverage Co. and The Bottle Shop at Tyler’s Taproom.

Today, there are eight bottle shops between Fayetteville Street and the Five Points neighborhood. Across the Triangle, the N.C. Beer Guys blog lists 55 bottle shops. But this second wave of stores appears to be more like bars with a retail selection than traditional bottle shops with a few draft beers for beer geeks to sip sample while shopping.

That doesn’t surprise Zack Medford, who along with Ben Yannessa and Brad Bowles own Paddy O’Beers, a bottle shop and bar on Fayetteville Street that focuses on American craft beer. “It’s the neighborhood watering hole; that’s what the craft beer store has become,” Medford said.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/living/food-drink/article12485969.html#storylink=cpy

Paddy O’Beers Bottle Shop and Tasting Room will be throwing open their doors this Friday
November 8th at 121 Fayetteville Street Suite 114. The site was previously home to Travel
Leaders, and is a part of the Alexander Square building. The shop will feature numerous 
shelves holding a wide array of craft beers to take home as well as a number of bar 
stools and a classic wooden bar for those who would like to imbibe on site. The shop is 
the passion project of owners Ben Yannessa, Zack Medford, and Brad Bowles.

Doc Brown might not be a stakeholder, but Coglin's Raleigh plans to take you back....to the 1980s! 

The bar, set to open at the end of this month in the 200 block of Fayetteville Street, will pay homage to some of the greatest 80s entertainers, including Michael Jackson. 

Zack Medford, senior partner with Isaac Hunter's Hospitality, let us get a sneak peek of the place before it opens. The project is said to have been spearheaded by the mysterious "Randy Coglin," a bartender from the 1980s. 

One of the coolest things planned - drinks named after 1980s superstars. I am a little nervous to try the Corey Feldman...

• Tuesday, September 6, 2011 6 pm-7:30 pm

At their best, marketing campaigns roll out seamlessly. But have you ever wondered what was happening on the back side of the campaign? What were the business goals behind the event? What strategy was implemented? Were there mid-stream changes? What were the metrics for success? And in the end, was the campaign successful?

Come ask your questions and hear our panelists share the real story of what went on behind the scenes of their marketing campaigns.

Only 50 seats available. Sign up now to guarantee your place.

If you would like more info about Downtown Raleigh Marketing or have any questions about this event, contact Jeff Tippet at jeff@calvertcreative.com

THE SPEAKERS:

Britt Thomas, VP of External Affairs, Marbles Kids Museum
Britt Thomas is the Vice President Sales at Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh. Marbles Kids Museum/IMAZ boasts the #3 most visited attraction in Raleigh with over 550,000 people on their campus last year. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, Mr. Thomas has also worked with KRON Medical and Wachovia.

Zack Medford, Isaac Hunter’s / Joel Lane’s
Zack Medford was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. He went to W.G. Enloe High School before getting his undergraduate degree in Business Management from North Carolina State University. His passion for the hospitality industry led him to open Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern in the fall of 2009. Zack’s dedication to social media marketing was a major factor in the success Isaac Hunter’s. Zack and his business partner Ben Yannessa translated the success of Isaac Hunter’s into their second business, Joel Lane’s Public House, which just opened in August of 2011.

Chris Powers, Founder/Owner, Busy Bee
Chris Powers is the founder/owner of The Busy Bee in downtown Raleigh. Named one of America’s top 100 Best Beer Bars by Draft Magazine, The Busy Bee is one of the brighter spots in Raleigh’s electric beer community. Its exposed brick walls and rafters create an urban draw, but it’s the beer that really fills the seats. Nearly 80 bottles, including highly sought-after brands like Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast and Cascade The Vine, fill the fridges, while 14 taps round out the upstairs and downstairs bars.

Chuck Belden (moderator)
Chuck Belden is the founder/organizer of Raleigh Young Professionals and a real estate broker at Rtown Living.

"As locals to a cap city in constant limbo, teetering on the edge of a humble history and a booming up-build, sometimes we crave a relic of our roots—a regard for that space from where we came. And sometimes, we really do just wanna go where everybody knows our name.

Enter quintessential Raleigh sip spot Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern, etched faithfully on the Capitol-end of Fayetteville Street by a trio of self-made late-twenty to early-thirty-somethings—Ben Yannessa, Zack Medford and Brad Bowles—who built their bar on a dream, a hard-earned dollar and a decade-plus of tavern-esque training, from pounding the pavement at local poolside snack bars to cookin’ up cocktails at cross-coast pubs.

Florida-born, 31-year-old Yannessa shaped his heady hospitality know-how hocking lemonade and turkey legs at a Florida renaissance fest at the ripe age of 13, before making the move to Raleigh two years later. Traversing his new turf’s terrain, he went to Appalachian State University in Boone, before trekking eastward and back westward again. In Wilmington, he began to wrangle the rotgut ropes at a Hilton with basics like vodka tonics, before bouncing back to Boone for a few years and earning his bar-biz stripes at Blowing Rock's Six Pence Pub. He then made the fortuitous return to Raleigh in 2003, landing at Fox & Hound, where he doled drinks to sport-savvy fans for more than five years, until meeting Medford."