Buffalo Alice
1022 4th Street, Sioux City, Iowa 51101
Tel. 712-255-4822
On June 1st, 2006 we celebrated the grand opening of "Positively 4TH Street",
the new backside bar behind BA's!
Bar Hours
MONDAY to FRIDAY 3:30 p.m. - 2:00 a.m.
SATURDAY 12 p.m. - 2 a.m.
SUNDAY 4 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Kitchen Hours
MONDAY to FRIDAY 4 p.m. - 11 p.m.
SATURDAY 12 p.m. - 11 p.m.
SUNDAY 4 p.m. - 8 p.m.
NOON LUNCHEON BUFFET:
Monday Thru Friday 11a.m. - 1p.m.
It seems appropriate that Buffalo Alice's is located
on Historic Fourth Street in downtown Sioux City. The longtime Sioux City
nightclub gathering spot has gained quite a collection of memorabilia of the
city's past. Much of that nostalgic material now decorates the interior of
Buffalo Alice's. The atmosphere and
ambience are evolving with the move at Buffalo Alice’s. For the past two
decades, Buffalo Alice's was a nightclub located at 423 Pearl St.
Owner Mike Salviola explains , "We shut down there at the end of
November 1995 and opened on Historic Fourth Street Feb. 17, 1996 . We changed
the mood and the business with this move," Salviola says. "This is
designed to create a more old-style pub atmosphere with a bit of nostalgia for
Historic Fourth Street. We typically have more members of the business community
stopping by after work."
The 4th Street location has a lighter
visual appeal with large front windows brightening the interior. The interior is
showcased with the building's original maple wood flooring and the walls also
are trimmed in wood. The walls of Buffalo Alice's are decorated with a barrage
of signage collected by Salviola over the years including many that hold
information to Sioux City's past - such as a "Banana Ripening" sign
that once hung at the Palmer Fruit Company, a sign advertising Nehi pop, and a
1959 Wonder Bread sign that includes photos of baseball greats Mickey Mantle and
Stan Musial. The business also has
a genuine buffalo head adorning the walls named Alice.
Buffalo Alice's concentrates on making "great pizza and offering 115
different kinds of beer. We are trying to create an atmosphere where everyone is
going to feel comfortable coming down or just walking by and stopping inside.
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Buffalo Alice: Pizza Hut's rowdy cousin
Weekender
02/23/06
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photo by Jesse Claeys |
Mike Salviola has a lot to smile about.
Not only is his bar, Buffalo Alice, in it's 30th year of providing food and drink to Siouxlanders, it also took home the No. 1 bar food spot and No. 3 bar spot in this year's Siouxland's Choice Awards.
We sat down with Salviola at his watering hole, located on Historic Fourth Street, and talked about how the bar got its name, the secret pizza sauce and how old posters and street signs came to be the main decor.
WEEKENDER: The bar is 30 years old now. How do you explain its longevity?
MIKE SALVIOLA: Timing and luck. And maybe a little hard work.
W: How did the name come about?
MS: I've always hated naming anything because once you do you are stuck with it. To make my life simpler, the night before I filed for the bar's licenses I just grabbed a Rand McNally road atlas and leafed through it and stuck my finger in it. Wherever it landed, that was what I was going to call the place. It just happened to land dead between two little towns in North Dakota - one named Buffalo and one named Alice. The towns are between Fargo and Bismark absolutely in the middle of nowhere.
W: This place is known for pizza. What separates the pie from the pack?
MS: I'd say fresh ingredients and quality ingredients. We have 38 ingredients, three kinds of cheeses, three kinds of sauces. The actual sauce is a slight variation of my grandmother's spaghetti sauce. She came over on the boat from Italy. It was her sauce and we made it work better with pizza.
W: What kind of pizza do you like?
MS: Hamburger, hot Italian sausage, fresh mushroom and red onion.
W: Aside from the pizza, people like to come here to have a few cocktails. What do you think keeps people coming back just for the bar atmosphere?
MS: It's comfortable here. If I figured it out and knew exactly how to do it I'd franchise it, but it is very unusual to have an after work crowd, a dinner crowd and still have a reputation as a good night-life bar. It's tough to pull off.
W: One thing BA's customers say they like about this place are the interesting decorations. How did that come to be?
MS: When I first started this place I was dirt poor. I wanted to decorate and everything seemed lame. I didn't want to put up a bunch of beer signs and mirrors. I wanted something different that people could look at that evokes a lot of conversation.
W: Some of the pictures and signs are antiques. Are you every worried about displaying them in public like this?
MS: No. It's nice to be able to share this stuff and let people see it and enjoy it. It's really a lame version of a museum.
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