A popular longtime Annandale area dining spot that closed abruptly last winter will soon be back in business. The Bay Club will open as early as mid-October in the former McBride’s restaurant on Turtle Bay along Clearwater Lake, new owner Danen Shiek said. The opening will continue a tradition that dates back about 50 years when, according to a previous owner, the Turtle Bay Club was built on the site. McBride’s shut its doors suddenly in February, and the building remained unused until Shiek and his wife, Amy, bought it in September from the bank that had foreclosed on it. "We’re shooting for Oct. 15," Shiek said last week as he sat among the restaurant’s rustic pine tables and chairs. "It may be as much as a week later" before the place opens. Already former customers have been stopping at the club on Bayview Road a few minutes north of Annandale just across the Stearns County line. Five or 10 people stop by every day, Shiek said, and ask, "Are you going to give us back our place?" "I know the community really misses it," onetime co-owner Judy Schmitz said by phone from her home in Arizona, and people will be pleased it’s re-opening. She and her husband, Dave, came back to Annandale for a summer visit, and the closing was "all anybody wanted to talk to us about," she said. Many people told them, "What a shame it closed" and "We really missed it." Bob Krebsbach, the restaurant’s former longtime chef, will be back in the Bay Club’s kitchen, Shiek said. "We’ve brought Bob back and (customers) can expect to see a very similar menu." Under the previous owner, the food was good, the service was great, and people appreciated the club, he said. "We’re trying to give them the same or better experience that they had in the past because it was working." The restaurant’s business includes a certain amount of community loyalty and a certain amount of summer tourist traffic, he said. Community support is crucial to the restaurant, and the new owners won’t operate it strictly for part-time summer customers, Shiek said. "This is about our year-round community." Very visible Amy Shiek will manage the business, he said, and he’ll be involved in promoting it. "We’ll both be very visible." The Shieks most recently ran a financial services firm in Houston, Texas, and they were involved in couple of restaurants there but have never owned one, he said. According to Shiek, he’s worked for the Perkins Corp., Edina Country Club, Fingerhut and Target. "We’re not wealthy," he said. "We’re hoping to make a profit out of this, get our kids through college and enjoy the community." They’re the parents of Calen, 12, a seventh-grader at Annandale Middle School, and Haley, 10, a fourth-grader at Bendix Elementary School. The family lives on West Lake Sylvia after moving back from Houston, where they spent the last five years. He’s from Minneapolis, and his wife is from Cold Spring. "This is home," Shiek said. They’re both Vikings fans. "We both love the Gophers also and we’re suffering on both ends." Bob’s Bay Club Judy and Dave Schmitz sold the restaurant to Kyle McBride in 1999, she said, after operating it as the Bob’s Bay Club in the 1980s and ’90s. McBride called it McBride’s on the Bay and sold it before the foreclosure. Schmitz and her first husband, Bob Ludgate, bought the restaurant in 1978, she said, and he died in a snowmobile accident in 1982 on Clearwater Lake. They purchased it from John and Marianne Sonsteby, who called it the Turtle Bay Club and ran it for up to eight years. It was known as the Turtle Bay Club "for quite a few years" before 1970, Schmitz said, and Doug Erickson was part owner at one point. Schmitz said she believes the restaurant originated as the Turtle Bay Club about 1960.
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