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NICK Sanders grew up in the restaurant business. His father owned a Maysville restaurant called deSha's, where a young Sanders spent his spare time learning the trade and occasionally mopping floors, scrubbing plates and wiping down tables. "I was a little kid back then, hanging around that restaurant and my dad all the time," said Sanders, 55, whose first name, deSha, is his grandfather's, father's and son's.
In the late 1950s, the senior Sanders sold deSha's and a few years later became a Long John Silver's franchise owner. At that point, the son was old enough to shake the grease off the fries and drop orders of shrimp in the fryer. It was in those fast-food restaurants that Sanders watched thousands of customers enjoy fried fish, fries and soda pop, and he realized there were profits to be made. He wanted to own one of those gold mines.
In 1973, the University of Kentucky college student opened his first restaurant, a Long John Silver's in Maysville. "I was looking for the closest town to Lexington, because I was in between my junior and senior years at UK," he said. It wasn't long before the tall and lean 20-something kid owned 18 Long John Silver's from Cincinnati to Naples, Fla. "But after growing all those stores through the '70s, I was itching to do something on my own, other than just a franchise concept," Sanders said.
As he was toying around with ideas, something coincidental happened. Or perhaps it was fate. The building next to his father's old deSha's restaurant became available. That's where he re-opened deSha's in 1981. Sanders later opened two more deSha's, one in Lexington and one in Cincinnati. Today, his holding and operating companies, the Pub Holding Company and the Tavern Restaurant Group respectively, run four brands: The Pub, the Polo Grille, Nicholson's Tavern & Pub and deSha's.
One restaurant in particular has jumped out of the...