by Thomas Cullen, photo by SR studio
There have to be hundreds, probably thousands, of Scott Johnsons in America. Scott Johnsons in Texas and Chicago and Los Angeles, not to mention all the Scott Johnsons in town after town in Wisconsin.
But it’s easy to locate Scott Johnson the restaurant owner (one of nearly 40 Scott Johnsons listed in the Milwaukee metro area) on Google. Born 1966 in Menomonee Falls. A motorcycle fan and world traveler who roamed to Romania and other exotic locales. Romantically involved for years with Leslie Montemurro, with whom he opened Fuel Cafe, the first of their many cafes and restaurants in Milwaukee.
“Where did you find out all of this stuff?” Johnson says on a February day inside Balzac, the wine bar he owns with Montemurro on the city’s East Side. “Is it on the Internet or something?”
The unassuming restaurateur apparently doesn’t think of himself as significant enough for his backstory to be public domain. But he is. Along with Montemurro, Johnson has redefined cool in Milwaukee: For more than 15 years, they have honed the cutting edge in Milwaukee restaurants, successively opening Fuel (1993), Comet Cafe (1995), Hi Hat (1998), Hi Hat Garage (2000), Palomino (2002), Balzac (2005), the Bradford Beach House (2008) and Honeypie (2009). Mixing high and low, funky and fashionable, retrofitting classic old spaces, creating an urban vibe with good food and a relaxed yet responsive style of service, they have created a unified sensibility. And yet each place is unique; they never do a retread. Johnson and Montemurro have made the city’s culinary universe a much quirkier, younger and more exciting scene.
But they are not trying to be cool. They are not aging hipsters, feebly grabbing at trends on the back end. They just do what they do, creating spaces they like, and people respond.
Johnson, 43, is a relaxed, engaging man, his curly hair poking out from underneath a stone-colored hat. He wears thin-framed glasses, listens intently and seems open to whatever a conversation might bring. In his spare time, besides riding motorcycles, he plays winger in an amateur hockey league with friends. He’s not married and doesn’t have children, so he’s free to pursue fun on a dime. Scott is the driving force behind the design of their restaurants.
Montemurro, 45, has dark hair that falls onto the shoulders of her jacket, a wine glass in front of her on another day at Balzac. Originally from Kenosha, she doesn’t love Wisconsin weather, but when the snow melts and the birds soar, she gets into archery, canoeing and other outdoor fare. She has a boyfriend who does metal sculptures; sometimes she escapes work and helps him with his creations. Montemurro is the financial mind of the pair, yet she is warm, funny, articulate and, all in all, hardly accountant-like.
“She’s kind of guileless,” Johnson says. “She’s her own person. She’s just, I don’t know, just a super kick-ass woman.”
And one with a kick-ass dream: Montemurro had been to Europe, and the welcoming coffee shops of Amsterdam solidified her long-held fantasy: She wanted to open a cafe. She began selling Scott on the idea almost as soon as they became a couple. But he resisted. “Actually,” she recalls, “he said the only thing he knew he didn’t want was to be in the restaurant business.” Scott Johnson rode dirt bikes growing up in Menomonee Falls. After high school, he went to UW-La Crosse for two years, a time he remembers fondly as full of partying, before heading to Texas Tech for a year and then finishing up at UW-Milwaukee. Then he traveled, most notably in Greece, where he picked oranges, before landing back in Milwaukee. And he met Leslie.
Leslie had come to Milwaukee to finish her studies in English at UWM. She spent her time after college working in restaurants and editing and writing for a weekly newspaper in town. She, too, had traveled to Europe.
She met Scott when his brother was dating her best friend.
“Yeah, my brother, Todd,” Scott recalls. “[Leslie] was drunk the first time I met her, and I thought she was kind of nuts.
“But the second time I met her, I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” he continues. “I was immediately like, she was a total fox, I want to be with her.”
The two started dating in 1991 and later set out on a meandering cross-country trip in Scott’s van, which he describes as “one of those really cool R2-D2-style of vans.” Their romantic journey took them from San Francisco to Brooklyn, New Mexico to Manhattan.
“I don’t think we ever, ever, ever stayed in a hotel or a motel,” Leslie says. “Every once in a while, we had friends we could stay with. Otherwise, we had a futon and slept in the van or camped anywhere from a parking lot to Yosemite National Park.
“Basically, the whole time on this trip, I was trying to convince him we should open up a cafe,” Leslie continues. In each city they visited, Leslie looked for the kinds of coffee shops and restaurants she liked: less corporate, a little edgier and more relaxed. She took note of what she liked and brought what she learned back to Milwaukee.
“I could see myself making soup every day and waiting on people,” she says.
And somehow, little by little, she sold Scott on her dream. In September 1993, they launched a new coffeehouse in the Riverwest neighborhood.
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This was years before the first Starbucks cafe came to Milwaukee and one year before the first Alterra cafe. Stone Creek was just opening its first cafe – in Whitefish Bay. Milwaukee was a veritable desert when it came to the kind of coffeehouses Montemurro had spotted in city after city across America.
As for Riverwest, most of their friends didn’t know where that was. Johnson spent much of the cafe’s infancy just explaining the location.
“It was like a lark,” Scott says. “We picked the spot just because we liked it.”
Not everyone loved the idea. Scott’s dad, in particular, thought his son was about to wage retail war without the right weapons.
“Looking back, he was right,” Scott says. “But we were just kids.” So they just stumbled into the business, making mistakes but benefitting from a secret weapon: “A shitload of luck,” as Scott puts it.
What in retrospect looks like impeccable timing, plus hard work and a good product, propelled Fuel to success. It became an immediate draw for the under-21 crowd, who couldn’t get into bars and needed a place to hang out, but older patrons liked it too. The funky décor (motorcycling photos, huge old wood tables and a chalkboard menu on the sidewalk), thick fumes of cigarette smoke (the cafe finally went smoke-free in 2007), witty menu items (the super-caffeinated Kevorkian Crush, the Buttafucco sub sandwich) and laid-back atmosphere made Fuel a unique place to congregate. It was cool and gritty in a big-city way. Young people from the East Side and elsewhere were drawn to Riverwest, many for the first time. Johnson and Montemurro had created a scene.
“I remember Les and I having a conversation like, ‘Let’s just do it. It won’t work because it’ll be too off-the-wall,’ ” Johnson says. They planned to just move on if that happened. But it was a huge success.
“So then we were like, ‘OK, kick ass. We’re here.’ ”
Paul Miller, partner and co-founder of Alterra Coffee, has known Johnson for more than 17 years; Fuel was one of Alterra’s first customers. “Fuel was really instrumental from the outset in creating a cafe environment that was different than others,” he says. Johnson and Montemurro, he adds, “have always known what is cool.”
Today, it’s a staple of the neighborhood. “Fuel Cafe certainly defines Center Street,” says Mike D’Amato, current Wisconsin director for The SEED Foundation and alderman from 1996 to 2008 for the district that includes the East Side and Riverwest. Fuel was followed by several other restaurants and bars, as Center became a far more active retail area.
But if business boomed for Fuel’s owners, the personal side of their partnership began to suffer.
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The restaurant business is hard work. “We were sleeping next to each other and working all the time,” Johnson says. “We were both working open-to-close seven days a week, and did that for years. Then all of a sudden, we hadn’t really maintained the relationship.”
They eventually came to the realization they wanted to break up. They argued and tried to finagle work schedules to give each other some freedom.
“It was amicable, but we definitely struggled,” Leslie says of the breakup. It was like they had a child – Fuel Cafe – that needed their joint guardianship.
“OK, maybe we don’t really like each other right now, but let’s keep it separate from the business,” Scott remembers thinking back then. “We need to pay back the loans that we took out for the business. It’s a great thing, the business. Let’s not screw that up.”
Meanwhile, they had been thinking they wanted something more. Fuel was so successful, it might have been the start of a chain. But that wasn’t in line with their thinking. They wanted to start fresh with something new again.
And so, once the personal breakup was completed, a new business flowered: They dove headlong into Comet Cafe, which opened in 1995 on North Farwell Avenue. Comet was less smoky and more East Side, but similarly laid-back, with an ambience that made customers want to linger.
“Comet was like everything we learned from Fuel, plus a little more,” Montemurro says. “Fuel had a pretty simple menu. At Comet, we were doing edgier things like vegan pâté.”
Montemurro added the new place to her bookkeeping and payroll workload. She sometimes calculated paychecks and expenses with a pint of Guinness beside her at Nomad World Pub, a cozy Brady Street bar. That’s where she met Mike Eitel, who opened the bar on a break from his doctorate studies in 1995.
The two talked about their places, and then Montemurro talked with Johnson. The result was a partnership under the name MJE Inc., formed in 1997, the three letters representing the last name of each partner. The trio really hit it off.
“I got a million of them,” Eitel says of stories from his time with Scott and Leslie. “Our meetings were hilarious. We often laughed so hard we peed ourselves.”
Eitel, too, had travel to thank as the catalyst for his bar, which brought in world music and an international sensibility.
“First of all, I didn’t know what I was doing at all,” he says. He opened Nomad on a whim and figured it would unceremoniously fail. Then he’d finish his doctorate. But Nomad didn’t fail. And the new partnership, sealed with plenty of food and beer, would last for 10 years.
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Mimma Megna has spent her days and nights on Brady Street since 1989, when she opened Mimma’s Cafe. “I couldn’t live anywhere else,” she says.
The one-time hippie enclave is now a bustling retail hotbed, though it still embraces oddity and passion. With its diverse range of bars, restaurants and curiosities like Art Smart’s Dart Mart and Juggling Emporium, Brady Street personifies the East Side. It is arguably the most vibrant part of Milwaukee. Both Johnson and Montemurro now live in the neighborhood.
Along with Eitel, they decided they wanted to open something new on Brady Street. The new place, Hi Hat Lounge on North Arlington Place, opened in 1998, but only after a major reclamation project. But the building, a defunct bar named Shenanigan’s, was a mess.
The basement was filled with rocks and rubble, pieces of metal and demolition refuse. “They had filled the whole downstairs,” Johnson recalls. But Montemurro suggested they put a bar down there. So they cleared the basement, but then they had to lower the floor three more feet just to make the space doable. They busted out the earth-moving tools and took two weeks to finish the project with the help of friends.
Scott uses the word “hell” to describe the process.
The renovation incorporated some of the building’s thick brick walls and idiosyncrasies while radically transforming the space. Customers who walked into what was formerly the first floor found most of it had been blown away to expose the floor below. The old first floor was now a kind of balcony, with intimate tables and a railing overlooking the old basement, which was now the main bar area. It was an environment unlike any other Milwaukee bar, and with its martinis and cocktails, a more high-end approach for Johnson and Montemurro.
The Garage, Hi Hat’s cousin (though it’s a more straightforward space), opened next door to the original two years later. The buildings, both owned by Joe and Mimma Megna, are connected but are standalone structures. Both spots offer sliders, salads, sandwiches and drinks in a neon-signed atmosphere.
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Johnson and Montemurro were on a roll. In 2001, she saw a classified: “Bar for Sale Bay View.”
“I called, and the guy answered, and I immediately knew what bar it was,” she says. “I just started getting heart palpitations because I was like, ‘I love that bar.’ ”
She called Johnson to gauge his interest.
“We made an offer in like five days,” she says. The space they purchased became Palomino, which opened in 2002 on the corner of East Russell Avenue and South Superior Street in Bay View, with an unimpeded view of the lakefront two blocks east.
“I love where it is,” Montemurro says. “It’s just a cool bar. It’s got old terrazzo floors. It’s got the old-school bar top, the cool pseudo art deco back bar.”
This would be a homey place, more like Comet. “It’s casual,” she says. “Comfortable. We wanted it to be a place people would use kind of regularly.”
When the watering hole opened, the Bay View bar explosion hadn’t happened yet, so Palomino’s business boomed. Over time, the two partners saw their East Side friends migrate to Bay View.
“Now, it’s almost synonymous,” Montemurro says of the two neighborhoods. “You go there, you go here. But back then, I remember people being like, ‘Bay View?’ It seemed like such a stretch to go there, which is so ridiculous.”
Increasingly, the two partners would move between the East Side and Bay View.
Their next venture materialized on Brady Street, in a building owned by Julilly Kohler, who had begun buying up property on the street in 1991, two years after Mimma Megna opened her restaurant.
“Brady Street was funky, it was eclectic,” Kohler says. “There were still strong heartbeats there.”
By now, the partnership with Eitel had added a fourth player, Eric Wagner, and the four partners had replaced the name MJE with Diablos Rojos. The quartet’s first venture would be a wine bar and fine-dining restaurant, Balzac, opened in 2005 in a building off Brady Street built and owned by Kohler.
“Oh, they’re just terrific,” Kohler says of Johnson and Montemurro. “Smart. High-energy. They’re really innovative thinkers.”
It was the first time Scott would be creating a space in a new building. He was lukewarm on the wine bar idea, but saw it as a design challenge. In essence, he had to shoehorn a Chuck Taylor-sized foot into a Manolo Blahnik.
Balzac works. With its dark, wood interior and fresh, small-plate spin on shrimp and macaroni and cheese, the restaurant lets people who can’t afford a steak get a taste of the finer things without devastating their wallets. The space is dark, with candles and a chandelier and other small light sources breaking the blackness. There are deer heads and period photos of old people on the walls. It feels upscale, but not exclusive.
“Even though I wasn’t particularly interested in it, now this is one of my favorite places,” Scott says.
After opening Hi Hat, Balzac and finally Café Hollander on Downer Avenue in 2006, Diablos Rojos split up in May 2007. Johnson and Montemurro took Hi Hat and Balzac. Eitel and Wagner got Café Hollander, Trocadero (which Johnson and Montemurro had infused with cash at one point) and the Diablos Rojos name.
The split occurred because the partners came to realize they had different goals. The breakup was stressful, but the four ex-partners remain friends. And Johnson and Montemurro remain partners, with a shared sensibility that binds them.
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The slow food movement had meanwhile led Johnson and Montemurro to a new partnership. Originally from the Chicago suburbs, Val Lucks met Johnson through a mutual friend. The two talked about how food made from scratch with a twist might work in Chicago. Then Johnson suggested trying the approach in Milwaukee. In 2005, Comet Cafe was expanded and relaunched in that vein.
“Nobody was just making pancakes or meatloaf,” Val’s brother Adam says of the food scene at the time in Chicago and Milwaukee. The siblings bought half of Comet. Val serves as the cafe’s general manager. Adam is executive chef.
Comet is now split down the middle, with a bar adjoining the restaurant. The restaurant’s interior is industrial, with thick pipes snaking across the ceiling. A rich wooden bar guards the drinks and bartenders, its shape echoed on the cafe side by a diner-style counter, where men fold sports sections over their breakfasts and women sip coffee and chat. Comet specializes in slow food, but the wait isn’t unreasonable. The hearty breakfast burrito or eggs over-easy with bacon fill up your stomach without weighing down your body.
A Saturday in March finds the place packed with an assortment of people: children, hipsters, even senior citizens. The restaurant is loud but not overbearing, and the employees work constantly but the rush never gets chaotic.
The Lucks seem to have re-energized Johnson and Montemurro.
“Val and Adam are totally awesome,” Scott says. “They had great ideas. They’re great managers.”
In 2009, the foursome opened Honeypie on South Kinnickinnic Avenue in Bay View. The vibe at Honeypie is similar to Comet but with more of a family aesthetic. There are more strollers. Less noise. More pie.
The light, bright, yellow-tan interior has simple but eye-catching accents: a clock with huge numbers behind the bar, and those signature black-and-white period photos, moody pictures of people from the distant past lining one wall.
Johnson and Montemurro also got involved in a project to help revive Bradford Beach. The beach had become a little-used eyesore before a combination of private donations and state, county and Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District funding helped pay for a cleanup. Next came the renovation of the old Bradford Beach House, spearheaded by Todd Gawronski.
A former volleyball player, Gawronski wanted to change the reputation of the beach (he uses the word “toilet” to describe its former condition) and make it a place for everyone in the city to enjoy. The prospective visitors would need food, so he picked Johnson and Montemurro from a pool of potential distributors.
“There’s a cool factor to what they do that you can’t just go buy and plug in,” says Gawronski. Partnering with Gawronski and Milwaukee County, Johnson and Montemurro opened a concession stand that caters to visitors with tacos, hot dogs and lemonade.
Today, Bradford Beach is one of the most people-friendly places in town. It hosts the Bradford Beach Jam, a sports and music festival, along with families and volleyball games from Memorial Day to September.
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Every summer there’s a motorcycle showcase cum street party held outside Fuel that’s called Rockerbox. People bring their bikes, families and appetites to Center Street for a day of music and hanging out. Johnson’s love of motorcycles still influences him, and he’s transformed it into a community-building party.
It’s just one of the many gathering places, from Bradford Beach to Bay View, from Riverwest to Brady Street, that Johnson and Montemurro have created. “They’re really creative,” says Joe Bartolotta, who’s brought Ristorante Bartolotta, Bacchus and other dining establishments to Milwaukee. “They’ve really dialed into a certain age and demographic.”
“We think about what’s current in the food and beverage world and couple it with what the building is like and what neighborhood it’s in,” Montemurro says. “We’re not stuck on some idea. It totally morphs.”
Johnson and Montemurro are the first to downplay their significance. “We’re just so lucky to have been this successful,” Scott says. “I really feel like we’ve fallen ass-backward into this. I mean, we’ve made a ton of mistakes, but none of them ever sunk us.”
Lucks, too, offers a similarly modest take. “We’re not saving lives. We’re making sandwiches.”
But people come to cities for the sociability, and nothing provides more pleasure at such gatherings than the simple act of eating. Neither Johnson nor Montemurro have children, but they’ve parented eight places that have changed Milwaukee’s dining scene. Their offspring seem poised to live a long and prosperous life.
Thomas Cullen is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer. Write to him at letters@
milwaukeemagazine.com.
