AVON LAKE – Residents and some Council members say they’re leery of talks that a restaurant and bar featuring waitresses clad in tank tops and short shorts may be coming to town.

The restaurant, Knockouts USA, has been in talks with McCarthy’s Ale House owner Jack Kraddock to purchase the Walker Road pub-style bar, Kraddock told Council members at a meeting last week.

Kraddock, who has only owned the bar for about six months, told Council he can no longer control the clientele who frequent his bar. Calling them “thugs,” he said the men that go there seek to only pick up women and pick fights, said Avon Lake Councilman David Kos, whose 1st Ward is where the bar is.

“He wanted to transform it from a pub-type, drink-first, food-later bar,” Kos said of Kraddock. “His real intention was to turn it into a sports bar, but he didn’t have the money. He felt if he had the money to hire security and transform it, he would have been fine.”

McCarthy’s has drawn the ire of residents who live near the Walker Road plaza where the bar sits. Complaints about loud noise and police visits to the bar have increased in the six months since Kraddock took over, Kos said.

Last month, police said two Cleveland men deliberately plowed into two women outside the bar with a pickup truck after a fight inside the bar.

Although about 15 people had gathered outside the bar after the fight, police believe the women were innocent bystanders. They were treated and released from a Westlake hospital.

As a result of the all the problems he said he has had, Kraddock said he has a verbal sale agreement with Knockouts USA, which has a location in Parma Heights and whose parent company is Diamond Men’s Club.

“When residents found out that the owners were Diamond Men’s Club you would have thought the world was coming to an end at that point,” Kos said. “They thought some shady red light district kind of business was going in there, but, one, we’re not zoned for that, and, two, it’s a sports bar.”

Kos said he visited the Knockouts in Parma Heights last week with his wife and 5-year-old son so that he could be familiar with the establishment and decide whether it would be good for Avon Lake.

“I expected to see lava lamps and stripper poles, but it’s not that at all,” he said. “There were families and little children. Sure, there were girls in tank tops, but that was it.”

But Councilman Michael Stanek, at large, said he contacted a detective for the Parma Heights Police Department who said complaints about Knockouts have been on the rise since they stopped having an off-duty officer providing security there.

“She said she would not take her mother or her father there because she’d be embarrassed to have them there,” Stanek said.

Kos said if Knockouts does purchase the bar, which could happen as early as mid-July, he plans to have a meeting with the owners and police chief to inform them that they are on a very short leash because of all the problems that location has brought the community.

If the new owners do not comply, Council would have an opportunity to review the bar’s liquor license twice over the next seven months, once in September during the state’s annual review and again six months later when the liquor license would have to be transferred from Kraddock’s name to the new owners’.

“I’m going to let them know in fine detail about the problems we’ve had and what we expect of them,” he said. “I’ll let them know very specifically what will be tolerated and what will not.”

Kos said he also plans to have a meeting with residents and Knockouts’ owners if they do buy the bar so that residents will have a chance to speak their mind.

Contact Adam Wright at 329-7129 or awright@chroniclet.com.

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