Former Cedar Springs tavern diva Kathy Jack set her sights across the Trinity — and in her own Backyard

COME ON AND EAT: Partners Kathy Jack, left, and chef Susie Buck show off the soon-to-be ready dining room at Jack’s Backyard.

For the countless people who recognized Kathy Jack as the club goddess of Caven Enterprises for 20 years, her sudden departure in May 2006 came as a shock — as much to herself as to her customers.

“Quite frankly, I thought I was done with the bar business,” says Jack, who spent 28 years as a tavernkeeper, mostly with Caven. “I was tired of the hours and the grind. It’s hard on a relationship and hard on you physically. It was time to do something else.”

But Jack’s back.

Turns out it really is difficult to get alcohol out of your blood. The more time she was away from the bar business, the more she missed it. So for her first solo foray, Jack — who for the last 10 years has lived in Oak Cliff with her partner, Susie Buck — looked no further than her own backyard … literally. Jack’s Backyard, her new restaurant and lounge opens on Monday.

“The ‘backyard’ part was because Susie and I love to throw parties in our backyard, which I think is really comfortable,” Jack explains. “I saw that [the people of Oak Cliff] needed something — outdoor patios and more kinds of restaurants. We wanted to make it as comfortable as our backyard.”

That she has discovered such support for this venture might have surprised her only a decade ago. Back then when they told friends they were moving from Lakewood to Oak Cliff, Jack and Buck were greeted mostly by gape-mouthed incredulousness. It was too dangerous, they were told — a cultural wasteland in the poor side of town.

Not so, Jack insisted.

“The beauty of Oak Cliff is, you feel like you’re living in a small town. Everybody’s so supportive, which I didn’t realize as much before we started this process. It’s a hidden jewel. More people need to come and discover it,” says Jack.

In the last 20 years, The O.C. has evolved — especially its status as a burgeoning gayborhood.

“What I like most about it is, the people who have lived here all their lives welcome change. They want all of us gay people to move into their little township. I doubt you’d find that in Granbury,” Jack says.

As word spread Jack was opening a new place, many friends assumed it would be a lesbian bar. But the beauty of Oak Cliff, Jack says, is “you don’t need to label everything. You open a restaurant and everybody comes, whether they’re gay, straight, white, black — everybody’s comfortable with everybody.”

Jack loves how she frequently sees Hispanic people at Zen Sushi eating raw fish and loving it something neither she nor Zen’s lesbian chef-owner Michelle Carpenter would have anticipated.

“It’s pretty much like that in every restaurant,” Jack says.

While she knew she wanted to open a restaurant in Oak Cliff, Jack attributes much of the vision to her friends.

“I’ve listened to anyone’s suggestions. So a lot of people had a hand in this,” she says.

Her business partner, Karen McCrocklin, found the land, for instance, and convinced her that the Trinity River Project and Fort Worth Avenue development group would make them pioneers in the burgeoning sector with a “salvage chic” look.

“We love our location because we’ll be first and everyone else is going to come in,” Jack says.

Certainly the fact Jack has enlisted Buck to develop the menu and get the restaurant on its feet should help attract those new patrons. Jack calls herself “the best advertisement [for how good a cook Buck is] because I was in really good shape when we met.”

In keeping with her comfort theme, the menu will include hearty-portioned staples like burgers, barbecue, some heart-healthy items, “and some really unhealthy things on the menu, which is always the page I want to go to,” Jack says.

Getting to the menu — the end of the process — turned out to be more grueling than Jack expected. The germ for the idea started last November, and she figured it would be up and running with four months.

“We got our building permit on June 26. We thought we would be open by June 26,” Jack says. “It’s been a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be, but any time you do something away from the mainstream, you’re going to run into problems. I don’t think anyone took me seriously until I placed an ad for waiters and bartenders. But now all these people can see what I’ve been talking about for a year and see: It does exist.”

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This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 24, 2008.