How Malone's Became a Scotts Valley Institution

Everyone in Scotts Valley knows that Malone’s Grille is the place to get a great burger. But what a lot of people might not know is how owner Patti Malone has managed to grow her business into a Scotts Valley institution.

For 31 years, Malone has ridden the waves of an ever-changing economy and faced all the other challenges that come along with running a restaurant. However, the building, itself, has been around since before Scotts Valley was even a town.

According to Malone, the building’s rich history dates back about 80 years, when the construction of the Granite Creek Bridge began. One of the men working on the bridge had some of the lumber hauled to the location where Malone’s now stands. The idea was to build a place where his wife could stay busy and the men could go for a drink. Called Wawona, the original structure still stands today as the bar area in Malone’s.

Over the years, the place was also known as the Rusty Lantern and Taylors. Structural changes, including a kitchen and what is now the dining room have been added. As a result, what we now know as Malone’s is the oldest business in Scotts Valley and has always been run as a bar/restaurant.

“When we started in 1980, there was one stoplight and no fast food restaurants," Malone recalled. "Horses were able to walk up and down Scotts Valley Drive. Customers would come in and tie up their horses outside.” 

In the early days, Malone’s wasn’t the full-service restaurant that it is today. A drink cost a mere 90 cents, or a dollar if you wanted juice with it. Beer was only 25 cents.

“This was a place for loggers and truckers,” Malone said. “This was really the only place in town, so it was kind of like our mini Our Town. Everybody that came here lived here.”

It was during this time that Patti Malone’s business philosophy began to form, even if she wasn’t aware of it, at the time.

“I just try to be happy every day, and I want other people to be happy every day,” she said.

That was the mindset that drove her and her husband at the time to host their first parties at the restaurant. With little more than a boom box, they would put on '50s-themed parties or hold big barbecues, and the whole town would come out.

“Whatever we did, people would just go with it. It was just a lot of fun,” Malone said.

Inevitably, things changed. The town was beginning to grow. The corporate landscape was flourishing. It was the early 1980s, and technology had taken hold.

“One day, these suits came walking in,” Malone said. “And we thought, ‘Well, what are we going to do with these guys?’”

Those suits turned out to be Seagate executives.

Once again, Patti’s nature of wanting to make people feel happy took over. She embraced the suits, and it wasn’t long before Malone’s became a sort of after-hours office to the Seagate crew.

“Pretty soon, we had sandwiches named after them on the menu,” she said.

At one point, after Seagate moved its manufacturing to Singapore, the company even had phone lines installed in Malone’s so employees could continue to work into the evening hours and in the company of Malone’s.

“There were contracts and all types of business negotiated here,” Malone said.

And there was just as much loyalty coming from her side of the bar.

Malone recalls a time when a Seagate executive would call at 11 p.m. requesting something for the next days’ service. She would promptly make it her priority to fulfill that request.

“They taught me that there is nothing you cannot do,” she said.

At Seagate’s request, Malone’s even opened three food-service cafeterias on the Seagate campus. At one point, Malone says they were feeding up to 900 people a day.

As predicted, however, the tides of change would prevail.

Seagate’s changing business landscape meant that they would have fewer and fewer people living and mingling in Scotts Valley. And in 1990, Malone and her husband split.

She retained the business and quickly began to realize that the bedroom community in which she was operating her business had a life outside of Seagate.

Malone put her people-pleasing skills to the test, yet again.

“I tried to focus more on family,” she said. “It was pretty difficult at first, because families didn’t come in here at night. They knew it was always a bar.”

But Malone knew that she wanted to expand her customer base. She added the outdoor patio and began serving dinner.

This has led to the evolution of Malone’s as most Scotts Valley residents know it today. And even though she feels the business is quite established, Malone contends that she has “got to feel entertained, too.”

She says she is always trying to do something new—besides the constant events, like Wine-down Wednesdays, an annual Cinco de Mayo party, the Scotts Valley Idol competition and a St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

Perhaps Malone is the purveyor of the local form of je ne sais quo?

“I want people to come here and then go home and say, ‘Wow that was just so great. I don’t know exactly what it was … it was everything,'” she said.

Looking ahead to retirement, Malone admits that she is working hard at figuring out what her next act is going to be.

“I think if I sold this place, I’d just have to buy a ticket someplace and just go far away for a month,” she said.

With no hard-pressed plans for the future, Malone says  she still gets excited about new things—and that for right now, she’s “just trying to work on mellow.”