Originally published Saturday, April 25, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

There must be days when John Kazdal walks into his Sodo District warehouse and thinks: "This would make a great restaurant . . . and just a good outfielder's throw from the new baseball stadium."

Kazdal has opened dozens of restaurants. But he's lost almost as many openers as the Mariners. And sold and moved and reopened again, under a new name, almost more often than all the teams in both major leagues.

But he's had a long, unbroken string of winning seasons since he took himself out of the restaurant-owner lineup almost a decade ago and into the field of restaurant and bakery equipment. His Budget Equipment Sales, at 1534 First Ave. S., is a top contender and heavy hitter among small Sodo businesses.

"I had a restaurant that wasn't doing well and decided to close. I called my creditors and told them I'd be selling all the equipment myself. After I'd sold it all, I was surprised at how much money I made. And my wife said: 'Instead of opening and closing restaurants, why don't you go into the equipment business?'"

Like a hard-hit bouncer, the notion bonked him right between the eyes. Eight years ago, he leased a 40,000-square-foot warehouse, which he now owns and which is jammed full of gleaming stainless-steel ovens, mixers, refrigerators, freezers and you name it.

"Some of (his former) restaurants didn't make it because of location," he said. "But look around you . . . this is location. There's only just so much that can be developed around here, and I'm right in the middle of it!"

Kazdal has been near the middle and fringes of the local restaurant scene since he came west from Chicago, where he ran a bustling restaurant and lounge in the late '60s. He launched nine Outrageous Taco restaurants in Seattle and Ellensburg in the '70s, Kazdal's Deli in the University District at about the same time, Big Momma's Pizza and a dozen or so smaller, more forgettable places.

In the restaurant business, as in baseball, you don't have to have a hit to get to first base. And Kazdal has gone to bat again and again because of his "win some, lose some" attitude -- until he got into the used-equipment business.

"I'm like the guys who went to the Gold Rush just to sell shovels," he said. "While the others are busting their buns looking for the gold, I'm getting rich selling shovels."

If you're looking to get into the restaurant or bakery business, Kazdal probably has, or certainly can get, whatever equipment you would need.

"This is an 8,000-pound machine that mixes 750 pounds of bread dough at a time!" he bragged as he led me on a Willie-Wonka-kind of tour through his amazing amalgam of restaurant and bakery equipment.

"And that 5,000-pound oven -- lemme tell you, moving that one was one helluva job!" he said, pointing to a huge stainless-steel contraption that took up a whole lot of space in one section of the warehouse.

Kazdal, with a crew of a half-dozen or so workers, bids on, buys and moves most of the equipment that passes through here. Technicians rebuild and refurbish the equipment as it is sold.

Anyone between Cashmere and Kharkov (Kazdal is expanding his export market to Russia and China) can buy anything from a sausage-stuffer to an espresso cart here. There are steam-heated soup cookers large enough for an aircraft carrier and croissant-stuffers small enough to fit on your kitchen counter.

"A lot of restaurants go out of business or close for lots of reasons, and even the successful ones want to be more successful. In either case, there's good used equipment to sell, if you know what you're looking for," Kazdal said.

Which is not to say it all moves well, or at all.

"We had to sell three big truckloads of stuff as scrap metal last year . . . stuff that wouldn't sell or stuff that would be too expensive to refurbish," Kazdal said.

But that's all part of doing business in a big way in a big field. And nowadays, when he locks up at night, Kazdal knows this is one shop that won't fold because of lack of business. Or location.

"I still think a guy could open a helluva restaurant this close to the new stadium," he said, stroking his big jaw and eyeballing his 40,000 square feet of prime Sodo property.