The world according to Doug

Beloved longtime Eichardt’s bartender Doug Clark hits the road

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

There’s just something special about Eichardt’s Pub.

The unpretentious local eatery and watering hole is Sandpoint’s closest embodiment to the European tradition of a public house — an establishment that serves drinks, food and often is the social center of a community.

Anyone who has spent more than a minute inside the pub has undoubtedly met Doug Clark, the soft-spoken bartender who has been a mainstay at the tap handles for 25 years.

It was bittersweet when Doug announced he was going on sabbatical for an undetermined amount of time. After some arm-twisting by the Reader, Doug agreed to an article sending him off in style after a few of his many admirers demanded we do so.

Doug was born on the west coast of Florida and spent his first 18 years there before taking off for college.

“Florida has beautiful places, but every time I went home, there was a new strip mall,” Doug told the Reader. “All the orange trees were gone. It was just growing too much. And, I was in love with the West.”

Doug’s family took him on a vacation when he was 14 to see the Grand Tetons, and the jagged mountains and pristine countryside left a mark on him.

“I said, ‘I’m going to live there someday,’” he said.

After obtaining a degree at Mercer University and meeting his future wife Meredith, Doug did just that: moved out West and settled in Moran, Wyo., to work in a kitchen for the Grand Teton Lodge Company.

“If you ever feel stuck, go get a job in a national park,” he said. “You’ll meet all spectrums of people, your housing and food is covered. You don’t make a ton of money, but what you do make, you sit on it because there’s nowhere to spend it.”

Doug flirted with different locations in the region, moving from Wyoming to Utah and New Mexico before heading to work at a wilderness lodge in Tennessee with Meredith.

While there, a customer came through and mentioned they were going to school in Missoula, Mont. Doug had all sorts of questions about Missoula, but the customer told him, “Missoula’s great, but if you get out that way, you should check out Sandpoint.”

Some time later, Doug and Meredith landed in Missoula with two dogs, two cats and very little money.

“It was November and we couldn’t find a job or a place to live,” he said. 

They eventually found a small hotel near the Jocko River and slowly began running out of money before spotting a classified ad for a $300 trailer for rent in Moiese, Mont. 

“The rent was negotiable with labor, so we rented from this great old woman named Heide Greirson,” Doug said. “She was a badass. She was an Alaskan native, had worn out three husbands, contracted polio in the late ‘40s, and was paralyzed in one arm and the opposite leg. When we met her in her early 80s, she was still managing a 400-acre section of her land with cattle.”

Doug and Meredith lived there and worked terrible jobs for the next couple of months. One day, Doug was looking at a map and saw Sandpoint on there, remembering what that guy told him way back in Tennessee.

“We got some days off and, in December, came to town and stayed at the Monarch Inn by the Bonner Mall,” he said. “I asked them where to go to eat and ended up at Eichardt’s.”

That was in 1997 and Eichardt’s was entering its fourth year as a public house in Sandpoint, already gathering a cadre of loyal customers lured in by the smell of garlic fries and held captive by the close sense of community.

“In the course of playing pool upstairs, we met some locals and bullshitted with them,” Doug said. “They said, ‘When you move here, we have a bus on our property with a wood stove. In the course of a couple hours, we got three invitations for places to stay. At this point, we hadn’t even talked about moving here.”

The next day, they drove up to Schweitzer, applied for jobs and were both hired. After a short trip back to put in their notice in Montana, they returned to Sandpoint and have been here ever since.

They found a place to rent up Pack River Road just past Buck and Edna’s and experienced their first North Idaho winter, when two or three feet fell suddenly.

“Some guy plowed us out,” he said. “We didn’t have any money, but I told him I’d have a paycheck to cash soon and he just said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ That has been our whole Sandpoint experience: people offering you a place to live, plowing you out, or Carla at Buck and Edna’s hearing we needed some wood and telling us to help ourselves. For the first 20 years of living here, that’s predominantly what I saw. Sandpoint had better community than any place I’ve ever been.”

Eichardt’s immediately became their home bar. Owner Jeff Nizzoli never actually hired Doug because he was out of the country for a wedding when then-bartender Tami Burlingame told Doug they didn’t have anybody to bartend that Sunday night. She asked if he’d cover the shift. 

“I said sure,” he shrugged. “At that point, around 2001, I’d been part of the pub in one fashion or another. Then I did the Sunday night and Tami said, ‘What about Thursday, and what about Fridays, we don’t have anyone on Fridays.’ By the time Jeff came back, I had three shifts.”

For Doug, Eichardt’s was more than just a place to work; it was the center of a local community coming to terms with a town that was beginning to grow beyond the size of its britches.

“To me, the pub represents what we talk about when we talk about community,” he said. “It’s open to everybody. It really lives up to the idea of a public house. … It’s quaint, warm, homey. It embodies a lot of the best characteristics of Sandpoint.”

Doug said he’s always had a lot of respect for how Nizzoli runs the place, giving the kitchen staff free reign to decide the menu, giving back to local causes and treating everyone the same no matter how much they have in their bank account.

“I remember years ago, Jeff subscribed to a couple of industry magazines and one had this ‘Never do these 10 things’ article for restaurants,” Doug said. “Jeff just smiled and said, ‘Yep, done them all and still doing nine of them.’”

After years of serving locals and tourists alike — and surviving working in a restaurant during the pandemic — Doug announced he and his 18-year-old son Oden will be hopping on a flight across the ocean to travel internationally into the undetermined future. He isn’t sure if he’ll come back to working behind the bar, but he has no plans to leave Sandpoint. 

Still, the news left his regulars a bit long in the face at the thought of losing their favorite bartender.

“Eichardt’s is run by a village of idiots and I’m just one of them,” he said. “The rest of you idiots can hold it together, I’ll be back.”

Doug said he and Oden have no set itinerary other than an initial flight to Iceland and a three-month European train pass. From there, they are going to travel into the continent, maybe through the Balkans, and live life one day at a time without any plans to hold them back.

“I feel like I’ve met a lot of my responsibilities and this is a good time to vacation from them,” Doug said. “I’m not done working, but I’m going to thoroughly enjoy the next six months or so of not working.”

Meredith is staying behind at first, but will join Doug and Oden at some point for a short stint.

“This is an opportunity for both of us to figure out what it’s like to be ourselves again,” he said. “Not a parent, or a spouse, not an educator. But ourselves.”

When Doug reaches the point where the money begins to run dry, he says he’ll return to town and figure out the next steps. And he loves that.

Doug’s last day behind the bar at Eichardt’s will be Friday, Aug. 29. If you’ve appreciated his company over the years, drop by to wish him farewell and maybe even drop a few bucks in his tip jar to pay for a pint during his travels.

He’s earned it.