HOLLISTER
When Tara Coughlin waits tables at Maverick BBQ Restaurant and Bar, customers often ask if the restaurant has some new owners.
Her answer? “Yeah, and I’m one of them.”
It’s a common mistake, Coughlin said, especially since she’s only 24 years old. Despite her age, Coughlin is, indeed, one of four new owners at Maverick, and at lunch, she runs the restaurant on her own.
“It’s a lot of work,” she said.
When previous owners Joel and Tricia Anderson offered to sell the restaurant, Coughlin said knew it would be a big responsibility. But she and her boyfriend Eben Lips both trained and worked as professional chefs.
For chefs, Coughlin said owning a restaurant is “your ultimate goal.” Luckily, the Andersons did a good job of building the business “from scratch,” Coughlin said, and many customers just want to make sure that things will stay the same.
“A lot of people think we’re just going to change everything, but we made a clean transition,” Coughlin said. “We’re trying very hard to keep it a success.”
Other than a few tweaks and additions to the menu, the restaurant will remain unchanged, Coughlin said, and it will still offer “simple but good” barbecue.
Coughlin said she’s been focusing her efforts on improving the lounge and the catering business.
Coughlin and Lips have already taken some steps to make the lounge a bigger attraction, including keeping it open until 1 a.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Special events like trivia night and karaoke draw crowds, but without “something happening,” the lounge stays pretty quiet, Coughlin said.
“(People) leave because they want to do something,” she said.
The lounge will offer more activities soon, including arcade games, a pool table and a deck for smoking.
Since taking over in August, the work has been tough but rewarding, Coughlin said. She also acknowledged that by running the restaurant with her boyfriend – her parents Allen and Cheryl Coughlin are “silent partners” – she was violating one of the cardinal rules for keeping a relationship healthy.
“People say that you shouldn’t work together, but we actually live together, work together and we just got a puppy,” she said, laughing. “But it’s been OK so far.”
