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Gerry Kingen, Renton High class of ’62, receiving a “Wall of Honor” recognition at a ceremony at Renton High in 2013. Photo courtesy of Renton History Museum
Note: I owe this blog post to Anon E. Mouse -probably not their real name 🙂 –, who left me a comment on this previous post about this restaurant at 423 Airport Way being demolished. I was not aware of the link between that restaurant and the founder of Red Robin, and I decided this information was worthy of a post of its own.
Gerry Kingen, the founder of the popular Red Robin restaurant chain (currently around 500 restaurants), is a 1962 Renton High School graduate. His mother Martha was also a Renton High graduate, in the class of 1940, and she too was a business success who owned and operated numerous restaurants– a role model for women in the 1940s and an important influence on her sons.
During his high school years, Gerry worked part-time with his parents and brother at Renton’s “Kingen’s Steak House”, one of their family’s popular restaurants. They served steaks, burgers, and other american-style food in a bright, inviting building that they had specially constructed at 423 Airport Way, across the street from Renton Municipal Airport.
An advertisement in a 1963 Catholic Newsletter shows Kingen’s serving dinner at 423 Airport Way in Renton
A Red Robin prototype? The 76-year-old Kingen’s Steakhouse Restaurant building as it looked two months ago, after a forced purchase by Renton School District; this building was inspirational for modern Red Robin restaurants
Interior of building that was once Kingen’s Steak House
After getting his education and learning the family business, Gerry purchased a small tavern in the Seattle U-District. He remodeled the tavern, added an outdoor patio, and he changed the menu to one that more closely matched the Renton family business. He changed the name from “Sam’s Red Robin Tavern, to simply “Red Robin,” and it became an immediate success. The “Red Robin” chain was born, and Gerry was soon adding restaurants and selling franchises.
In the following years he also founded the northwest fine-dining restaurant chain Salty’s, which has locations at Alki Beach, Redondo Beach, and Portland Oregon.
Salty’s website
Renton School District recently used the threat of eminent domain to acquire the still-pristine restaurant building that the Kingen family built that was such important inspiration for Red Robin and Salty’s. The District spent six million dollars in taxpayer funds to acquire the restaurant. Then, without acknowledging the building’s distinguished alumni history, they bulldozed it along with many homes and other businesses with an intent to construct a baseball field on the site in five years, likely the nation’s most expensive high school baseball field ever. The Superintendent and the Board based their actions, ironically, on their flawed premise that Renton High is an inferior school that needs its own lighted baseball field in order for its students to achieve their potential (the school currently already has several unlit baseball fields).
Gerry Kingen and his mother are among many distinguished alumni from Renton High, including Sally Jewel, former US Secretary of the Interior and former CEO of REI, US Olympian Aretha (Hill) Thurmond, Hollywood music producer Ron Hicklin, and many others. In this previous blog post I discussed other well-known and less-well-known-but-equally-important successful alumni from Renton High School.
The still-pristine Kingen’s steakhouse building was demolished last month. It had been freshly remodeled and was ready to reopen as an Asian food restaurant.
King County records show that the building was constructed in 1949, making it 76 years old when it was taken by school district (for $6,000,000) and then demolished.
Historic photo of Seattle’s original Red Robin Restaurant. (The building has been replaced by the Robins Nest mixed use apartments and pizzeria.) Photo and history in this Seattle History Blog
A typical modern Red Robin Restaurant; Photo from wiki commons
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