I Know A Place: Victory Sandwich Bar & Ian Jones
Season 2: Episode 2
If you’ve ever spent anytime around someone with a motorbike, you’ll learn very quickly that it’s an expensive hobby. You tinker, craft, break, repair, break again, and ride on the weekends. It’s an easy obsession; restoring an old cafe racer, scrambler, bobber, or even a scooter, all for the sake of cracking open a beer, racing on the flats, while listening to rock & roll, which has entered the fantasy of many men. Well while you’re dreaming of long rides across country, as your waiting for your new parts to come in the mail, there’s a place in Atlanta that you can go to, to feel like you’re already hanging out with the “King Of Cool” himself. Victory Sandwich Bar is nestled away in Inman park and grafted into the Decatur square. A place for fast cars, cheap beers, and a quick sandwich to top you off. I spoke with Ian Jones, one of the founders of Victory, to tell their story.
The Place: Victory Sandwich Bar
1. The Story
2. Why Sandwiches?
3. Atmosphere
4. First time order
5. Events list
What’s the story of Victory Sandwich Bar?
It's like a bartender's bar, is kind of how it started. My business partner and I worked at a place together in midtown and then a friend of ours went to open a restaurant. It was supposed to be a lot of different things that it turned out to not really be, and we went to help them do it. Then we thought, “oh what if we just kind of did the thing we thought this was going to be? We just do it ourselves, but somewhere else.”
So that's kind of what Victory was, and we just did it to be a place that we figured we'd be working every day and tons of hours. We just wanted it to be very much a place where we'd want to hang out all day long, and that’s kind of it.
Why sandwiches of all things?
Well we were bartenders and we can't cook. So sandwiches are easier to do.
We did have good friends at the time that were like fancy chef people, that helped us kind of put our menu together and help us with it. Honestly though, our first space we were able to kind of get, it was like, “what can you do with so little space?” and “what can you do without a real proper kitchen?” So it was like, “oh, we can do sandwiches!” Then initially, it was just sort of sandwiches, small sandwiches that are kind of the equivalent of tacos, you know? You can get one or two different kinds. You don't have to get this one big giant thing, but rather get different flavors. It can be more snacky. It was just something pretty easy for a couple of bar dudes to do.
How would you describe the atmosphere at VSB?
You know, it changes over the years a little bit, but we were just kind of doing a thing where it was reflective of our interests. A little bit rock & roll, a little bit garage-y, and just kind of fun. We used to jokingly tell people, if people even get this reference, is it's like if Steve McQueen had a sandwich shop, you know what I mean? That's kind of what we're doing here. It's very much as if you were a 12-year-old boy, and you'd be like, “yeah, this would be really cool. I'll play ping-pong, and a little rock & roll. We'll eat sandwiches and hang out with our friends.” It's not very highbrow at all.
What do you suggest someone get their first time here?
I think when you walk into Victory, it's good to know that they're half-sized. Usually for me, I'll get two sandwiches. One that we've had on the menu almost the whole time has been the Hambo, which is like a very quintessential Italian. It’s like, if you go to Italy, you can get a panini that'll have ciabatta and buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto and probably some vinegar. We put arugula on ours, and the only thing we do a little different would be that we have a Granny Smith apple slice in there. I love that one. We also have a special right now that we haven't done in a while that's called “The Big Kahuna,” which is again, Italian. It’s olive oil-packed tuna with chickpeas and red onions and parsley and a sherry vinaigrette. So it's like an Italian-style pasta salad, non-mayonnaise-y. We shove it into, a hot pocket like ciabatta roll. It's kind of good and fresh and summery and light and bright.
Then, you know, a beer. Every Victory has High Life on tap, which is the cheapest beer that I like. It's a good cheap beer. We have other nicer, fancier beers, that other people appreciate, but I don't have that sort of palate.
What sort of events do y’all put on?
Well, we do a luau once or twice a year at our Decatur location, which is pretty big. We do that with our Tiki Bar S.O.S and Victory and it's usually about 200 to 250 tickets sold, for an all-you-can-eat luau buffet and we have Tiki drinks all over and friends of ours from around the country come and help bartend that work at other fun bars. Victory does its anniversary party once a year. We have local bands come play, which is pretty cool. A lot of times, they’re actually bands that are people that work with us, which makes it more fun. Stereo's been picking up and doing record releases and kind of smaller events like that. Every store has about one or two big things a year.
The Person: Ian Jones
1. Who is Ian Jones?
2. Hobbies
3. Toughest detail in a restaurant to get right
4. What inspires new concepts?
5. Why Atlanta?
6. What does Victory represent?
7. Where do you draw your design from?
Who is Ian Jones?
Well, I am one of the partners at Victory, and before that, I worked in restaurants and bars since I was probably a teenager, even through college. I went to college for design, as did my business partner, and then we both just ended up kind of slacking off in bars instead, and kind of ended up doing our own thing. Before I did Victory, I helped other people build out and open their bars, and I had a fabrication shop. I would make furniture and things, where most of the stuff at Victory that you sit on or eat off of, I made. I'd say all of our businesses are very reflective of our personalities, and it's a lot of work to do restaurants, so it should be fun, it should be what you enjoy doing, and we love it, and we love just hanging out. Biggest kick I get out of it, is so many friends I have now, that I met just from them coming into Victory, that aren't regulars. I don't see them as like income streams, I see them as friends of mine, and watching everybody kind of grow, watching the staff grow, and some move on, and what they get up to and what they end up doing is really cool. So yeah, that's kind of it. I’m just a middle-aged dude that runs a sandwich shop.
What’re some hobbies you have outside the shop?
During 2020, I started making speakers and tooling around with that, which you can see at all of our stores now. You'll start to see or already see speakers that I've made, that will sound a little better than the standard fare. I try my hand at surfing, which is a bad habit to have when you live in Atlanta, but you can fly around, which is good. Real life outside of work, is just like being a dad and chilling out at home with my kid.
What’s the toughest restaurant detail to do well?
I mean, in a restaurant, I always notice stuff that you're not supposed to notice. It's hard to hide the function, so that it's attractive and not a pain to work in, but isn’t still customers kind of “seeing behind the curtain,” you know what I mean? I think it's tough to get lighting right. What I've been noticing more and more that is an afterthought in a lot of places, and starts to bother me the more I start messing around with speakers and sound, is places that are cacophonous and too loud, and it's really tough to address acoustics. I think it's something a lot of people forget to address that can really have an effect on the comfort of the guest.
What inspires new concepts for you?
Man, honestly, it's just if we are bored and we need something different. Sometimes we get tired of eating sandwiches, so then we did Little Trouble because we wanted to eat Asian food, or when we get tired of that, we did Lloyd's so we could eat pizza. Even in a very backwards way, we stopped wanting to pay for coffee every day, so we opened a coffee shop. Which that isn’t the least expensive way to get your coffee “free,” but that’s kind of it. So yeah, if we've been kind of sitting around for a while, and we need to feel rejuvenated in what we do, that's kind of the move.
Why Atlanta?
I never thought I'd stay in Atlanta as long as I have. I grew up in kind of the burbs, but it became one of those things where when you're here long enough, you start to have roots, or connections, or a community around you, and it becomes easier to do.
Our first store would never have done anything if we didn't already have a bunch of buds and a bunch of people that we knew that wanted to come and be supportive, work, and hang out with us. I don't know that it would take a long time to move to a new city and develop that level of community that allows you to build out a place, but it's tough. You need an absolute ton of support to open something. At least something that you hope lasts. A lot of people think they have an idea and want to open a thing, but if they don't know, you've almost got to already have half your community ready to go, or it’ll be really difficult to make it through the beginning.
I think Atlanta has the scene, especially in my industry, that’s super supportive. It's not competitive in a way, where people are concerned about, “oh, they're opening this, or somebody's opening that.” Everyone's very congratulatory and wants to help everyone else succeed. It's a very Southern hospitality take on this industry. The amount of resources you have in Atlanta, to reach out to other business owners, or other peers in the industry, and their willingness to help, is great.
What does Victory Brand represent?
We just try to be a place that is like a hangout. All of our stuff isn't about how much money we can make. It's just about wanting to have cool places in our town that people can afford to go to, that feel homey, or feel immediately comfortable in a way where you don't feel out of sorts. Inside of that, we want to have products that we are proud of, that we know we put time and effort into with a crew of people that we're also proud to be working with, and happy to be contributing to their growth while they're contributing to our growth.
Where do you draw design inspiration from?
I think that we maybe try to present classic sort of things. I think that because of our design background, our goal is not to be of the moment, you know? Victory now, looks the way Victory looked 12 years ago, and it still works. The goal is that it feels lived in, and it doesn't feel retail, or staged. The goal for us is to have places that would feel cool now, will feel cool in 50 years, or would have felt cool 30 years ago.
Recommendations:
1. Throwing Parties
2. Music
Recommendations for throwing a party?
First, have a playlist. You don't need a ton of stuff. You don't need fancy this and that. We batch most of our cocktails at most of our stores. You can pre-mix all your alcoholic ingredients and syrups and stuff. Heck, if you're having a party, you can put it all in, and just have a big punch. When I have parties, I just have like a big igloo cooler, and then mix a drink in them and you just pour it yourself, like on tap. There's no point in going crazy on it. That, and you always need ice. You never have enough ice. No one ever has enough ice.
Music recommendations?
I'm currently dorking out on just a bunch of random old jazz or like African kind of psych stuff. Old dude shit, honestly. I still can't let go of my early youth of punk and metal bands and stuff like that, but if I'm chilling out, I'm listening to really mellow old school hip hop. I love a lot of South American, like Bossa Nova kind of stuff, Brazilian music. I was listening to, and it probably ties back to just liking this band in my 20s, but there's a new Elbow album out that I like a lot. Elbow's like a bunch of old dudes in England, that have this kind of cool, early Britpop-y, kind of style, but it’s a little more, soul-ish or something. They’re pretty cool.
As McQueen once said “Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting.”