SALT LAKE CITY — In the lull before the annual national hoop storm that began Thursday morning and will continue off and on through the next three weeks, Dave Ipaktchian, vice president of Iggy's Sports Grills, paused long enough to pay personal homage to the basketball madness of March.
"For us, it's the three busiest weeks of the entire year and has been for all 14 years we've been open," he said. "I attribute a lot of our success to just that."
The NCAA Tournament may not be the only reason Iggy's qualifies as a bona fide Utah business success story, but it's nonetheless a big part of the reason.
March has been very, very good to them.
Iggy's is a sports bar without the bar — a made-in-Utah business model that might not work anywhere else, but it's sure worked here.
The idea for Iggy's sprang from the fertile mind of Dave's dad, Hersh Ipaktchian, a man who didn't know much about basketball growing up — or Utah, for that matter. Hersh was born in Iran and didn't emigrate to America until he was a teenager in 1956.
He first lived in Los Angeles and came to Utah to attend Weber State College, where he fell in love with a local girl named Lola, married her, had four children and never left.
After a string of earlier successful restaurant ventures, including Mullboons, Peppercorn Steakhouses and Anthony's Pizza, Hersh, who at the age of 74 still runs Iggy's on a day-to-day basis, came up with the concept for Iggy's in 1996.
"He saw the need for an affordable family restaurant," remembers Dave, "but he didn't want to gamble on fads for a theme. His view was that sports wasn't a fad, sports wasn't a gamble. Sports was never going to go away.
So far, so good.
The original Iggy's has grown to nine Utah locations that stretch from Ogden to St. George, with four in the Salt Lake Valley. Each sports grill has seven big-screen TVs, three of them 110-inchers. Seating capacity is 200.
For any given NCAA Tournament game, capacity at any given Iggy's is virtually a foregone conclusion.
"We'll be packed; there won't be anytime we won't have a wait," says Dave, speaking from 14 years of experience.
That's 1,800 spectators/diners a game, not counting turnovers.
"There's just nothing that packs them in like March Madness for us," says Dave. "Not the Super Bowl, not the NBA playoffs, not the World Series, not the college bowl games. I think spring fever has something to do with it, and tax returns, but for the most part I think it's the fact that everybody went to a college somewhere — I went to Weber State — or they lived near a college somewhere. So everybody has a rooting interest."
That adds up to a lot of cheering, and at a sports grill that emphasizes the grill — Iggy's menu has over 100 choices — it also adds up to a lot of food.
Just how much food is illustrated by the number of wings Iggy's customers are projected to consume this weekend.
"Normally we do 6,000 wings on a weekend at the nine locations," says Dave. "This weekend we'll do 18,000."
The lack of a bar per se — Iggy's sells alcohol but not in a traditional bar setting — and Utah's tight liquor laws keep the bar tabs low, but it also keeps the roughhousing down.
"So far, nobody's been hurt at Iggy's," says Dave. "We might have had a few feelings hurt, but no fights."
"Dad wanted a place where you could take a 5-year-old and talk sports," sums up Dave.
Especially in March.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Monday and Friday. E-mail: benson@desnews.com.