Since taking over his father’s manufacturing business and relocating it to Vero, Tim Girard has focused mainly on pressure relief vents and magnetic vacuum breakers for tanker trucks, rail cars and containers.
“Getting your rig back on the road is our main objective,” says the Girard Equipment website.
Lately, though, he’s been mulling over wood-fired grills and Singapore Slings for Tradewinds, the new 1950s Tiki bar-themed steak and seafood restaurant going in the old Dockside Grill location on Royal Palm Pointe.
Girard closed on the property several months ago, but has tried to keep the project under wraps while deciding on a menu and décor. His retro concept is overlaid with 21st century nutritional concerns; his menu will include “a gluten-free section, a no-GMO section, a casein-free section,” and he calls main course selections “your protein.”
And don’t try to suggest that the long table of lettuces, vegetables and side dishes – with a stack of plates to grab from and load up – is a salad bar; it is not, he claims emphatically.
“It’s a fresh market table,” he says. “I deconstruct the meal. You walk in, you order your drink and you go to the fresh market table. By the time you get back to your table, your drink is there and you order your protein.”
Your “protein” can range from fish to a “16 oz. Porterhouse,” he says, on display in a glass case at the entrance. Behind it, the chef is manning the grill. “The chef is going to cut your meat in front of you, size it, weigh it and put it on the grill.”
If it sounds like a busy schedule, Girard is used to that. Rising at 5 a.m. to speak to associates in Ireland, he says, he expects to remain at the restaurant until 2 a.m., when the last revelers from the bar are finally drifting out the door. “I don’t sleep much,” he says.
Though his company has offices in New Jersey, Texas and Illinois, as well as the Netherlands and China, Girard as CEO brought the company’s headquarters to Vero Beach, largely for its lifestyle.
His first trip to Vero was in the 1980s, when he was a student at the University of Tampa. He crossed the state to stay with a friend when a hurricane was headed for Tampa Bay.
Years later in 2003, heading home after visiting his parents in Jupiter, he pulled off of I-95 to take a look at how the town had changed. Back home, as he went through yet another dreary New Jersey winter, the memory of Vero beckoned. He called the Chamber of Commerce and was given the full-court press to relocate the $20 million-a-year business here. Next thing he knew, by 2008, he had bought an old packinghouse near Gifford Middle School, and moved company headquarters south.
For the past 30 years, Girard’s only experience with restaurants was eating in them. He says he is a keenly observant customer, logging in details like “what kind of soap they’re using behind the bar.”
But before he was dragged into the family vent and valve business, he was happily running a restaurant in his hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey. Just 19, having quit University of Tampa and started at Monmouth College, he was studying hospitality management when, by his account, he turned around a failing restaurant and made it profitable in only six months.
“Two vascular surgeons owned it and they didn’t much care about the place. It wasn’t making a profit. They were $300,000 in debt. So I went to them and said, ‘I’m available. Why don’t you get rid of these clowns running the place and I’ll turn it around.” Six months later, he claims, television news crews were covering the place, with its “lines around the block.”
“I believed in my vision,” he says.
“When I go to bars and restaurants, I’m completely observant about what’s going on,” he says. “I’ve been served in restaurants around the world, watching how things are prepared. I’ve been to Brazil – the food’s delicious. Lots of steaks. In Argentina too. They don’t do a lot of rubs when they grill – just salt and pepper.”
Girard says he has already lined up a local chef but isn’t ready to announce his choice, only that “he’s in a big place.”
He says his plans for the building, which he has already gutted, are currently with the city’s planning department. If all goes well, he hopes to open in October.
“The bars in this town, they would not want me as a manager. I don’t think any one of them has captured what people want.
“It’s a hard business – and it is a business.”
He has great confidence in Tradewinds – not so much for being profitable but for being top quality. “I’m running five companies,” he says. “I don’t need to fall back on my restaurant. I’m never going to serve a bad meal ever. I can rest on that a little bit.”
Girard believes the first six months after opening will be critical to establishing a reputation. With his envisioned hybrid of restaurant and nightclub, people will first come for the food, and then “come back for the fun,” he says.
“After the food is put away, we take things off the floor and clear out a dance floor,” he says. “There’s a stage that comes out big enough for a ten-piece band, or an eight-piece band. Let’s just say a full band.”
The music will start around 9 p.m., and he says he doesn’t expect to go home before 2 a.m. “I live in the fingers, which is right there,” he points out. He has a plan to get his neighbors in on the action: he wants to decorate a street-legal golf cart with palm fronds and offer rides home to customers who live nearby.
“You know the expression, ‘Everybody’s got one book in them?’ Well I think it’s one good book and one good restaurant,” he says.
The Dockside Grille closed a year ago with promises to the daily paper by owner Jerry Maher that he would open again in the fall.
That claim was disputed by employees and the restaurant never reopened. Before Maher took over Dockside in 2008, it was a fine-dining restaurant known by its street address, 41.