The Sink Turns 90

The Sink turned 90 years old this year, and owners Chris and Mark Heinritz threw a bash to celebrate the event on the evening of July 20. More than 175 old Sink Rats, former waiters and bouncers gathered to get reacquainted, reminisce, toss back a few cool ones and attend a rock concert at the Fox Theatre.

Ninety years — wow. It turns out The Sink is Boulder’s oldest restaurant.

It is a sobering thought, so to speak, but when The Sink opened in 1923 as Summer’s Sunken Gardens, named after its founder, Mr. Summers, it didn’t serve beer or anything else alcoholic. (Something about Prohibition.) It featured European cuisine, and it had a sunken fountain in the floor, which prompted students to start calling it The Sink.

Happily, in July we did not party like it was 1923. Guests at the event were greeted with mini-Sinkburgers and beers.

OK, we didn’t party like it was 1963, either. That was the year The Sink sold more 3.2 beer than any other bar in the country. (Morey’s at Yale was No. 2.) No bouncer came through the revelers with a nightstick in hand and a keg on a dolly shouting, “Watch your feet.” Ninetieth birthdays tend to be mellower affairs.

“When we bought it, we were a bar with a restaurant; now we’re a restaurant with a bar,” says Mark Heinritz who has owned The Sink with his brother Chris since 1992.

Speaking of Sink bouncers, Tony Capozzola, who flew in from Los Angeles for the occasion (he has his own jet), shared how he was hired as a bouncer. He was fresh out of the Marine Corps when he first walked into The Sink and found then proprietor Herb Kauvar on the floor with some guy striking him. So he grabbed the guy by the hair and tossed him out of the place. Herb dusted himself off and offered Tony a job.

“At the time, jobs at The Sink were so prestigious that they didn’t pay you for the first year,” Tony says. “But they started paying me after six months.”

Amazingly, The Sink didn’t serve beer until 1940 when it was bought by John Pudlik (A&S’41), and it was 3.2 beer. Boulder didn’t allow any other alcohol to be sold in the city until 1967.

Pudlik named the restaurant The Sink. In 1974 Herb Kauvar changed the name to Herbie’s Deli, which lasted until 1989 when the space was remodeled and The Sink name was resurrected.

Speaking of sobering thoughts, here’s another. There is no living CU alumnus who was a student at the university before there was The Sink in its many incarnations. (OK, I’m guessing here. But if you enrolled at CU in 1923 at age 18, you would be 108 today.) Lost, Greatest, Boomers, Xers and Millennials, The Sink has been a shared experience for five generations of Buffs.

In a series of trail-blazing experiments conducted at The Sink in September 1960, Paul Danish (Hist’65) proved 3.2 beer, despite its reputation, could have potent effects.

Photo courtesy Coloradan archive