School District demolished the Renton restaurant where Red Robin founder learned the business

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.

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.

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.