The Bayview Pub is owned by the husband-and-wife team of longtime produce wholesalers Tony Buak, formerly of Wenatchee, Wash., and Patricia Fernandez Amighetti, an Italian and Uraguayan dual citizen, who purchased the Bayview Pub and moved to Sitka in November 2015.
With a commitment to high quality food, a full bar with the largest selection of beer in town, 10 TVs featuring a variety of sports programming, a game room, and entertainment events, the Buaks want to make sure that the Bayview Pub is THE place to go in Sitka.
One reason the Buaks purchased the Bayview Pub is because Tony wanted to return to the kitchen after spending more than 30 years running the export side of the international food business, Columbia Marketing International of Wenatchee. Tony was trained as a chef at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, which now is affiliated with Le Cordon Bleu of Paris. Tony spent three years focused on pastries at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, and had a training period in Copenhagen.
Patty earned a master’s degree in agribusiness in Italy, and has owned the international produce business Agrilink in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for more than 20 years. They met in 2001 at a produce conference in Orlando, Fla., and started working together about two years later.
About 10 years ago, Tony started bringing some of his business clients to Sitka for charter fishing trips. Five years later, he invited Patty, and she proved to be a better fisherman than all the men. She also enjoys the wild nature in Sitka.
It was during one of their fishing trips in 2015 that they came across an ad in the Sitka Soup about the Bayview Pub being for sale. The Bayview Pub opened on April 15, 2011, and was founded by the three Jenks brothers — Jamie, Dave and Jeff — who grew up in the bar business in Chicago.
The longtime dream of the brothers was to open a pub together, and Jamie Jenks happened to find a space in need of a pub after he came to Sitka to fly helicopters for the U.S. Coast Guard. When he told his brothers, Dave packed up his belongings and moved to Sitka, and Jeff joined them six months later. They decided to sell the Bayview Pub in 2015 because Jamie was transferred out of Alaska by the Coast Guard and Dave and Jeff were ready for new opportunities closer to home.
When Tony and Patty bought the Bayview Pub, they added an upgraded menu, a swag shop, increased seating capacity by 25 percent, and made other improvements.
But they also wanted to continue the vision set out by the Jenks brothers:
"Our vision of The Bayview Pub was to open a place that we would like to spend time in on our time off. A relaxed, any-and-all-welcome atmosphere coupled with good, fresh pub fare, a thoughtful selection of craft beers and wines along with cocktails made with care and precision. While we feel we have established a good foundation, we -- quite literally -- have strived to improve our space and operation on a day to day basis. We will never be fully satisfied with our place as we believe any operation can always improve itself in one way or the other. However, we feel with this type of effort, we can provide a memorable and enjoyable experience for everyone that walks through our doors."
See you at The Bayview Pub
