Utica bar emerges from pandemic with a new look

UTICA, N.Y. — Running three bars during a global pandemic that, for a time, required her businesses to shut their doors was about the hardest thing Michelle Klosek has done as a business owner.

Knowing that she had to either figure it out or fail, Klosek rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

She watched countless U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) webinars offering advice, applied for and obtained various funding available to businesses, figured out how to sell her pub food to go, poured martinis in pouches when drinks-to-go were approved by the state, and even spent some time working as a contact tracer for the New York State Contact Tracing Initiative so she could pay the bills.

You learn “just how fast you can acclimate because you have to,” Klosek says.

When the bars were allowed to reopen with outdoor seating, she left the contact-tracing job and got back to work at the bars she and her husband Steve operate — The Stiefvater Room (The Stief), The Varick Bar and Grill, and Sickenberger Lane — on Varick Street in Utica.

Last summer after masking and capacity restrictions were lifted, business was brisk, Klosek says. “There wasn’t really anything to do but go out to a bar,” she said. Many of the area’s normal festivals and concerts had yet to return, which steered people toward bars as a social option throughout the summer and fall.

Then the Omicron variant arrived and the state once again implemented an indoor mask mandate. Klosek said she felt it would be hard to ask patrons to mask up once again, so she went a different route instead.

She temporarily closed The Stief instead. “It was really tough,” she recalls. But the closing provided an opportunity to complete a project proposed and designed by two of her employees.

Brendan Boucher and Isabella Fasolo, bartenders at The Stief, pitched a remodeling project to Klosek to give the bar a 1920s feel.

“They ran around for like two weeks,” Klosek says, putting together ideas and acquiring new furnishings and décor to replace the “average pub scene” look.

Away went the old booths and tables and beer signs on the wall. In their place, in came velvet couches, new lights, and a new drink menu.

“They’re very creative,” Klosek says of her employees, and she let them run with it. The project cost about $20,000 and “it’s been well received,” she adds.

The Stief celebrated the remodel with a ribbon cutting on March 3, also noting the 35th anniversary of The Varick at the same time.

Klosek is pleased with the new vibe at The Stief because it appeals to all ages. “It creates more conversation between people,” she says of the new seating.

With a fresh, new look, Klosek is ready for the nicer weather and the crowds it should bring. “I expect it to be normal, busy,” she says.

And if things change regarding the pandemic, Klosek is prepared with the lessons she’s learned and the tools she’s acquired over the past two years.

“It puts you in a better place,” she says of that hard-earned knowledge. Klosek  knows she can now quickly pivot toward to-go drinks and orders but hopes she won’t have to do so.