Jekyll and Hyde Club

Fast Facts
Jekyll and Hyde is open seven days a week
11am to 11pm Monday through Thursday 
11am to Midnight on Friday 
10:30am to Midnight on Saturday
10:30am to 11pm on Sunday.
Most major credit cards are accepted.
375 employees including about 24 actors
The 400 seat Jekyll and Hyde Club has annual sales of 10 million.
For further Information Call 312-644-9900.

As some themed restaurants like the Fashion Cafe, All Star Cafe, Planet Hollywood and The Dive are cutting back expansion and closing locations, a new entry into the national themed 'eatertainment' race is just getting started. The Jekyll and Hyde Club is taking its horror show on the road and attempting a transformation nearly as frightening as turning the good doctor into a thing of evil. "I think the themed restaurant business is getting the tar kicked out of it", said Tim Gavigan, President of Jekyll and Hyde. "To some degree, we deserve it, because we haven't created great restaurants, we tried to create great brands." 

The first national restaurant with dark and haunted décor is embarking on an ambitious, nationwide expansion, with two new locations opened in 1999 in Chicago, Illinois and in Grapevine, Texas. Four more, as yet undisclosed, locations are planned for 2000, and six more soon thereafter. While the first two restaurants in the chain are 25,000 square feet seating 400 plus people at 7 - 10 million dollars per location, the next phase calls for smaller more intimate clubs seating about 200-250 at a cost of around four million dollars each. "We've gotten the opportunity to learn from the other company's experience", says Gavigan, who feels that most of the themed cafes have forgotten the fundamentals of a great restaurant experience which are great food, great service and a spotless environment. 

All of the Jekyll and Hyde restaurants will feature the Bizarre Bazaar, a retail element that is estimated to produce 20% of the total location revenue (much less than the other "themers"). Jekyll and Hyde's goal is to offer high quality products at a good value. The company has developed a range of new graphics including a new logo to reflect the classic fun and edgy feel of the concept. Each graphic is tailored to a different guest segment. Jeffrey Rothenberg, Director of Merchandising was formerly Vice President of FAO Schwartz and Director of Line Development at Disneyland. The Bizarre Bazaars were designed by J. Newbold & Associates, also responsible for design and theming of FAO Schwartz. 

What a Ghoul Idea

Great ideas have a funny way of becoming reality, and for a young man named D. R. Finley, his great idea was a restaurant and pub with a dark and foreboding theme, a "restaurant and social club for eccentric explorers and mad scientists, where guests can eat and drink among the bizarre and unusual," described Finley, "incorporating the latest technological advances in animatronics." Over the years, his idea grew into one of the surprise restaurant themes of the 1990s, the Jekyll and Hyde Pub. But some ideas are too good to keep a secret, and when an entrepreneur is faced with fast growth of his company, it can stop being fun. Enter a group of investors with visions of their own for taking a good idea to the next level, and cash to back up their climb. Who would not want their baby, their pride and joy to grow up and be famous someday? Who was D. R. Finley to stand in the way? 

Eerie World Entertainment, LLC

Enter Warner Fite, a former investment banker at Merrill Lynch. In November 1997, he and some of his colleagues saw huge potential in the Jekyll and Hyde concept and decided to arrange the purchase of the midtown Jekyll and Hyde location and controlling interest in Finley's company. The investment group included a university endowment, several private investment partnerships and a group of individual investors. The price reportedly was "several tens of millions" of dollars. D. R. Finley, still owns and operates the Jekyll and Hyde Pub, and the Slaughtered Lamb Pub, both in Greenwich Village, but sold controlling interest in the midtown restaurant and is not involved in the expansion plans. 

Now as Eerie World's new Chief Executive Officer, Fite wooed some of the biggest names in their field to join him on taking the haunted themer national. In 1998, Tim Gavigan, previously Vice President of Rainforest Café, a jungle themed restaurant, complete with animatronic animals, became Eerie World President and Chief Operating Officer, and began to plan the expansion. 

Realizing that good food was the key, Gavigan hired Steven Goodwin from the Manhattan space travel themed eatery, Mars 2112, as Corporate Executive Chef and charged him with revamping the entire Jekyll and Hyde menu. The result is a new menu described as very fresh and higher quality than offered by most themed restaurants. Unlike the typical burgers and pizza, the Jekyll and Hyde menu includes sesame pork tenderloin, spicy shrimp quesadillas, and crispy pesto fried calamari. 

At 43 East Ohio in Chicago, Illinois, the Jekyll and Hyde Club is in good company, adjacent to Disney Quest and ESPN Zone. The design of the restaurant was done in house with a creative team that worked closely with Karen Daroff, a noted Philadelphia architect and designer. Scott Campbell and his crew atLifeformations in Bowling Green, Ohio were hired to create the proprietary animatronic characters that interact with the patrons, sometimes in the middle of a meal. A diner about to bite into his burger might suddenly find himself in an impromptu conversation with a decaying corpse stuffed into a burlap sack. If the Jekyll and Hyde club can get the food right, the interactive nature of its entertainment could give it an edge. "It gets the patrons involved, says Max Pine, a restaurant consultant with BNY Capital Markets. It is different from a Planet Hollywood where you sit and stare at memorabilia on the wall. 

Scariness and Humor

Before entering the Jekyll and Hyde Club, guests are corralled into an exitless room. Here we meet the caretaker of the club and are given a test to see if they are brave enough to enter the club. Once inside, the 27,000 square foot, two story restaurant and social club for eccentric explorers and mad scientists is reminiscent of a quirky 1930's English Explorers Club, where guests can eat, drink and shop amongst the bizarre and unusual. 

Designed as a grand Gothic Mansion comprised of a series of eight eclectically themed rooms grouped around a central stage. The rooms include the Great Hall, Artifact room, Conservatory, Armory, Observatory, Explorers room, Mausoleum and Library. Each room is filled with antiquities of the late Victorian era in which author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde. "We want you to feel that you are stepping back in time to an old English Club", said Gavigan "It is not just a horror place, there is a lot of comedy in the whole thing. It is a combination of scariness, excitement, adventure and humor." Shying away from the more extremes of horror-film idiom, the Jekyll and Hyde Club does not hurt anybody except for skeletons, and they are dead already. 

One never knows whom he might run into at the Jekyll and Hyde Club, there are numerous costumed actors involved in the Club's continuous productions. At any one time there are as many as 16 actors roaming the facility including a mad scientist, haughty butlers, unscrupulous black widows, hunchbacked lab assistants, and explorers. Not to mention the animatronic skeletons, corpses, vampires, gargoyles and a talking rhinoceros that utilize closed-circuit video to customize their scripts, interactively, for the patrons. Both floors open onto an atrium where audiences can view the skit performances which transpire throughout the night. For instance, the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, the musical comedy team of Femur and Patella (skeletons of course), the animatronic Sphinx or the effects laden Frankenstein's reanimation. If your seat does not face the stage you can still experience the performances via closed circuit television monitors which are deployed throughout the club. 

Haunted Attraction

The Laboratory is a 25 foot long bar located on the first floor. Festive drinks and an assortment of potions are served in a variety of souvenir glasses. Guests may also experience a separately priced interactive walk- through called the Experiment in Terror located on the second floor of the building. The attraction takes those who dare through the private laboratory of Professor Wiley McBatty and into the clutches of his associates. While tame in comparison to even the average October seasonal attraction, the walk-though is very well done and has some effects that are surprising. 

D. R. Finley

A native New Yorker, Donald R. Finley, graduated from Columbia University in 1986 with a Master's degree in Business Administration. Before launching Eerie Entertainment, Inc., Finley worked as a strategic planner for Merrill Lynch & Co., but left to become a computer consultant and continue his studies of natural history. In 1988, he founded one of the most unique artifact stores in Greenwich Village, Old Harrovian, across from the Peculiar Pub on West 4th Street. When the pub relocated, Finley took leased the building and opened the Slaughtered Lamb Pub. 

The Slaughtered Lamb was so popular that D. R. bought another nearby restaurant space and renamed it the Rooster Bar & Grill. Finley admits that he was new to the bar business and recognized the "cute theme" was not working. He gutted the Rooster and converted it into the Jack the Ripper Pub. 

Later the Jekyll and Hyde Pub was built in Greenwich Village, within blocks from Finley's other two establishments. According to legend, the Pub was founded by Dr. Henry Jekyll, who fled London in 1931 and traveled to New York, a city filled with outcasts and wanderers. Continuing his research in hope of finding a way to rid himself of his malignant alter ego (Mr. Hyde), Jekyll formed a close circle of advisors and allies and together they founded the club. It became a social meeting place for explorers, philosophers, biologists and other daring men and women whose exploits into science and adventure were deemed too unorthodox by their colleagues in accepted society. But these visionaries shared a common goal: to understand the darker nature that lurks within us all. Its motto, translated from the Latin, "Excess is not enough!" 

As an entrepreneur, Finley has financed his dramatic expansion internally and is still trying to curb his enthusiasm for special effects. He is right at home with the fellow explorers and mad scientists at the Jekyll and Hyde Pub, because many fascinating objects in the club are from Finley's private collection. 

Finley's latest creation, the Night Gallery Café, also in Greenwich Village is now closed as part of the corporate buy out, along with the Jack the Ripper Pub. 

Being a huge fan of the original Jekyll and Hyde Pub, I am disappointed in the "quiet' feel that Eerie World corporate has decided to give to the new locations. As Haunters we know that a child will come to an adult Haunted Attraction, but an adult will not go to a child's show. The new motto, "So good, it is almost Scary!" and the new anthem, which is done as a sing along is a far cry from the rude and ruckus adult themes of the original concept. The mixed message that the present format is sending is showing in lack of revenue at the Texas location. Recent polling showed that the mall traffic thought Jekyll and Hyde Club was a retail store only, and did not know that there was a restaurant in the back. Plans are underway to rip out the entry room to open up the interior of the club to the mall. 

Still, the Jekyll and Hyde Club is an exceptional Haunted Attraction, done with incredible detail and creativity. It is a year round Haunted Attraction, bringing much needed year round visibility to our industry. The food really is good, and I would be very pleased to hear that a Jekyll and Hyde Club is coming to my hometown! 

Leonard Pickel is owner of Hauntrepreneurs(TM) International in Charlotte, NC. He can be reached at 704-366-0875 or via email leonard@hauntedattraction.com