Marc Owczarzak: O's Pub & Grille

“I grew up here in Bay City where my mom and dad owned a meat market called the Meat Gallery. From middle school through high school, I worked for my parents and then decided I wasn't a small business person, so I went away to Michigan Tech to study engineering. 

I thought engineering was a good four-year-degree—easy to get a job—and mechanical engineering is a discipline that studies a little bit of electrical, a little bit of chemical…a little bit of everything. I thought if I found one area I loved, I could go that way. When I got my degree, I went to work for General Motors for about 17 years and then got a job for Consumers Energy, where I've been for about eight years. 

Laura, my wife, grew up in Auburn. She holds a degree in hospitality from Northwood and worked in the hotel side of the industry before we had children and then she decided it was best to stay home and help raise the kids—and we both agreed that was an awesome thing to do. 

After the kids were in school, she decided to go back to work. She worked for Dow Corning for seven years, and then had this passion to get back in the hospitality industry, so she and I started talking about doing something ourselves. We started looking and stumbled across the Sportsman Bar in Auburn, talked to the owner a few times, and it just ended up turning out. Laura quit Corning and began to run O’s Pub & Grill. 

I'd say it was a scary thing for us, but at that point, two of our kids were in college, and the third, our youngest, was a junior or sophomore in high school so it was a good time for a transition and to try something new.I thought the worst thing that could happen is we’d have to start over: I still had my engineering degree, so I thought, ‘What the heck!’ 

Laura really has made O’s go—her hospitality background, her attitude around it, how she carries herself, her positivity. I knew that getting her out there with people was just a winning combination. It was a little bumpy at first like all new businesses are, but we just stuck to it and kept going.

I can't say enough about the Auburn community. We love them. They support us. And now, the Auburn hotel is opening back up and they're supporting them as well.

I tell our team at O’s that many, many, many restaurants in the area have incredible food. We visit all of them, and I think O’s has incredible food, too. But I want the personal side at O’s to be what separates us. It’s how you're treated when you walk in. Even if you're down, you know, you begin to feel up, you hear a ‘woo-hoo!’ from our staff. O’s is a very special place—we always say ‘hashtag #loveOs!’

We want people to love O’s not just for food, but for the atmosphere and for people and relationships. That was really our goal: that O’s would be a destination, that people would say on a Saturday, “Hey, we're going to drive there!’”

“O’s Pub & Grill is a restaurant, but we have our own meat grinder. We get meat from meat suppliers and we grind our hamburger fresh every day right on site. We make our own patties. We slice all of our lunch meat fresh daily, too.

Other than just an all-American cheeseburger, most of our creations have evolved over time.

Typically on Burger Mondays, we're trying to come up with some kind of crazy creation to offer something a little bit unique that you might not get another day, and you can get it for five bucks. If we come up with a really successful one, we might consider adding it to the permanent menu on the next go-round. 

The signature O Burger on the menu is a fairly crazy combination of things: burger patty, pepper jack cheese, pastrami, pickles, horseradish, a little horseradish mayo…and then some maple aioli. You get some spiciness from the pepper jack, you get a little sweetness from the maple, a little horseradish-y from the mustard, dill from the pickle…it’s so good. We've had people come and say, ‘I really want to try that, but can I get it minus pickles or minus horseradish?’ And I say you can get it any way you want it … but I would get it just how it is because the combination of ingredients really mesh well. 

That one was an evolution: it took many iterations to finally get it where we wanted it.

Probably our best-selling burger is called Six Foot Separation. That was the burger we made through COVID and it’s won sixth best in the entire state of Michigan. It has smoked gouda, onion straws, bacon aioli, leaf lettuce, tomato and BACON JAM.

We make the bacon jam in-house and it’s delicious. Anything with bacon jam is super good. We do steak on Wednesdays and Saturdays at O’s and at the new place, H2O’s, we'll be able to offer steak all the time. 

We have fresh yellow lake perch on the menu all the time and that’s a really good seller. People in our area really value and understand fresh lake perch and what that means. We put a really super light dusting of a flour mixture on it and then flash fry it so it's real light. It comes out really awesome. 

Our pastrami sandwich and Reuben sandwich are great. We've gotten so many accolades on our nachos. You get a huge pile of nachos—and the queso is amazing.”

“If I were to give advice to a new entrepreneur in Bay County, my advice would be this: if it's your dream, find a way to do it. 

I think, as humans, we always have dreams, but we sabotage our own success by creating a dream and then telling ourselves, ‘I can't do it because of this, or I can't do it because of that.’ 

It makes sense to touch the water to see if it's cold or hot before getting burned or hurt, but you also need to challenge yourself and push against negative thoughts that will sabotage your own success.

People always ask me or Laura, ‘You're always working so hard—how do you do it all?’ 

I love my job at Consumers Energy. It’s a great place to be. And I love the stuff at O’s. How do I do both? When you love something, it doesn’t feel like it's work. It IS work, but I'm just doing the stuff that I love and when you do that, I think it prevents you from sabotaging your own success. 

Find something you love and do it.

I think regret is worse than failure by far. Failure teaches me something, so I just move on. But I don't want to ever think back: ‘I should or should not have done that.’ When my time comes, I don’t want to go with regret.

I always say to have a plan A and a Plan B. But my Plan B is my Plan A—just another way. 

When my kids say, ‘Dad, I really like this … I really like that,’ I tell them to go for it. Find a way. I'm here. I'll help you. There's no ‘buts’. Get rid of the ‘buts’! Try it! You can do it! 

When I have a dream, I try to build a picture of what that looks like in my mind and I keep that picture in front of me all the time. That picture is what keeps me going, it helps me get to where I want to go.”

“H2O’s will be our second location. It’s in Bay City at the end or start of Midland Street, depending on which side you're on. It will be on the river in the old Hooters location that had been there for maybe 15 years.

The building sat there through the pandemic. Art Dore had some grandchildren who worked for us at O’s, so he’d come in for lunch many times and say, ‘Man, you guys should look at Hooters. You’d do a really good job there.’ So I reached out to him after Hooters closed and he and I talked but we just couldn't swing it at the time, so we decided not to do it. But it was always in our mind. 

Then, closer to the end of the pandemic, Art stopped into O’s one more time and talked to Laura and said he should talk about it again. I actually met up with one of his kids and walked through it and spent some time and we agreed on the price and so we ended up buying it. 

We're super excited! It’s just a great location. There is just so much buzz about that particular property in Bay City. When Laura and I were younger, we used to spend a lot of time there. It was a hopping place and it's on the river, so there’s both boat traffic and people traffic. It will be an added destination for sure. We're super excited about it and we know we'll be really proud of it when we're done.

It will be different. There will be some window banks that we will be able to open to get some fresh air in there. O’s has an open kitchen and I love people to be able to see into a kitchen and watch their food being done. But in this case, the greater good was to make it more open air, so we decided we had to enclose the kitchen in order to do that. We'll have to move the bar to another spot and it will look extremely different. People will love it.

When Hooters closed, they sold the docks that were there, but the city of Bay City rents some docks on the marina side. We will also have some docks there. There were some fingers that went out into the Saginaw River in front that are not there now, but we do plan on putting those back in. We just gotta get approval from the Army Corps of Engineers. Hopefully that makes it by summer, but we're working on it to eventually we will have space for boats. 

There’s a process to all of that and it takes longer than some of us might like, but like I said, I'm hoping that we're ready come June and our docks are out there. 

Our target all along has been to open H2O’s March 1 of 2023. That could potentially slip a little bit. Renovation wise and building wise, there’s no doubt we'll make that target, but whether it's tables and chairs, or ranges and stoves and ovens and things need to put in there, lead time on those items is still long. So if we can get that stuff quicker, we might beat that date.

H2O’s will be a little bit different from O’s menu wise because we’ve got a full kitchen and so we can do some more things there than we can do at O’s.

But the environment, how people feel, the relationships, that’s all part of O’s and they will be part of H2O’s.”

—Marc Owczarzak, owner of O’s Pub & Grill in Auburn and H2O’s Waterside Grill in Bay City (opening in 2023)