Blue Jeans Cafe closes, makes room for Randy's Rib Shack

A “closed” sign hanging from the door of the Blue Jeans Cafe, located off Hospital Drive, tells would-be customers that the coffee bar and deli will reopen at 2:30.

The sign doesn’t specify whether that’s a.m. or p.m., but it doesn’t really matter. The cafe is closed for good.

Hospital workers and medical professionals who enjoyed the convenience of the cafe needn’t worry too much about Blue Jeans’ closure. The cafe’s owner Kim Mungle, has already found a new restaurant to take its place.

Randy’s Rib Shack, currently a seasonal restaurant based downtown near the cruise ship docks, will be taking Blue Jeans’ former spot at some point in October, if not sooner, according to rib-master Randy Sutak.

“The timing is good because this is all winding down now,” Sutak said, referring to the tourist season.

Sutak is making sure he has everything he needs to break into the year-round restaurant business at his new location. He’s still working to obtain two large refrigerators — each 50 cubic feet — which will take a few weeks to ship. Other than that, he’s nearly ready to go.

His lunch and dinner menus are pretty well set. Sutak will sell everything that he currently does at his shack near the downtown library. He’s still working to firm up his breakfast menu, but he said it likely will contain breakfast burritos of some form or fashion.

“There will be components of smoked meat in most of the foods I serve, obviously,” Sutak said Friday afternoon outside his shack while eating a piece of the smoked bacon he hopes to incorporate into his breakfast menu. “Well, everything except the coleslaw,” he added with a laugh.

And the probably the coffee, too, which he plans to serve. The Rib Shack’s new location will maintain roughly the same hours as the Blue Jeans Cafe, Sutak said.

Mungle, who works as a real estate agent, said the sale of the cafe is complete, and she’s excited about the new business.

“This is the first thing that’s going to be a fresh look for that spot,” she told the Empire Friday morning.

The restaurant formerly known as Blue Jeans Cafe has changed names more often than hip hop artist Sean Combs. Open for seven years, the location’s most recent change marks the first time the spot is leaving its coffee shop/deli vibe behind.

The cafe didn’t exist until the owners of Juneau Bone and Joint Center bought the building from the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium in 2009.

“John, my husband, got the idea that we should put a café over there and make it a campus,” Jamie Bursell said.

John Bursell, to whom she was referring, is one of the owners and physicians of JBJC. He is also a part owner of the building in which Randy’s Rib Shack will soon be based.

When it opened, the cafe was called RX Espresso. The Bursells and Tim DeHart created the cafe, but its name was short-lived. Law forbids any businesses other than pharmacies from including RX in their names, Jamie Bursell said, so the cafe became R Espresso.

Mungle bought the cafe in early 2014 and changed its name to Blue Jeans Cafe, a pun based on her husband’s last name: Jeans. Mungle ran the cafe for about a year before her real estate job began to eat away at the time she could spend in the restaurant.

“I loved blue jeans, and it was my dream to do it,” she said. “It was kind of on my bucket list, but I got so busy with real estate I didn’t have time to do both.”

She let her friend Kathie Parks, a baker, take over the business for about a year. During this period, the cafe once again switched names. Parks called it Sugar Buzz Delicious Cafe. After about a year, Parks handed the reins back to Mungle, who still owned the business and reverted its name.

That was about four months ago. Mungle has now passed the torch and the naming rights to Sutak. Though the business has switched hands — and names — more than a few times, Mungle and Jamie Bursell both said they are confident Sutak’s business will thrive in its new location.

“If somebody can be there and manage it and run it themselves, I think it’s going to be a great business, because it’s a great location,” Bursell said. “It just hasn’t been managed by somebody who is there working it all the time, and that’s what it takes.”

Sutak said he plans to work at the rib shack daily up until next cruise ship season, when he hopes to reopen his seasonal shack in addition to the new permanent business. Still, after running a seasonal restaurant for three years, Sutak is excited to be establishing a more permanent gig.

“I like the proximity; with the state, the paper, the radio station, the hospital and SEARHC nearby, it’s its own little community,” Sutak said. “If I become an option for them on any kind of regular basis, it’ll be a win-win for everyone.”

• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.