Lekumberry is a household name in Carson Valley.
Driving through town on a Friday night, you can see their family restaurant glowing like some magnificent monument to the past, like some unmistakable landmark of immigrant sheepherders and cattle ranchers, rustic men in black berets with cigars dangling from their mouths, small cups of picon punch gripped in their hands, all framed by the red, white and green emblems of the Basque Country.
Even though the 19th century building was moved from the Comstock more than a century ago, the JT Basque Bar & Dining Room still sits squat and electrified as the literal cornerstone of downtown Gardnerville. Passers-by need only look through the windows on a given night to see that the Basque tradition in Carson Valley, or more specifically the Lekumberry tradition in Carson Valley, is alive and well in the 21st century.
Beneath a ceiling littered with dollar bills, walls ringed with famous hats, patrons still stand shoulder-to-shoulder waiting their turn for the silver soup bowl, for the platters of bread, salad, beans and stew, for the French fries and sizzling steaks, buried in garlic, all washed down with chilled red wine.
"We had a huge outpouring," Marie Louise Lekumberry said Monday afternoon. "It's just wonderful. A lot of people came to visit us. The response was thank you for keeping it going. A lot of people have connections with the place and they just want it to continue. They're grateful the JT is still here, still with the Lekumberrys. They feel great about it and have a lot of wishes for the next 50 years."
Marie Louise, 49, and brother J.B. Lekumberry, 45, spent the weekend celebrating the restaurant's 50th anniversary, which falls on April Fool's Day. At a lunch on Monday, there was plenty of joking and storytelling about the siblings' shared experience in what has become one of the most popular and well-known establishments in the Valley.
"It feels good. It's a milestone," Marie Louise said. "We set prices the same as April 1, 1960: $1.50 for dinner and $1.25 for lunch. We didn't tell anyone, not even the wait staff, so a lot of people were surprised."
"We're just grateful," said J.B. "We're so appreciative of the good fortune we've enjoyed and the opportunity given to us here. It couldn't happen in a better community."
For both Lekumberrys, the family restaurant is more than a restaurant. It's their home, their anchor, dropped by their late father Jean Lekumberry whose photo patrons still see all over the restaurant and bar - that ubiquitous image of a man in a black beret, either with a hefty cigar in his mouth, or with a glass in his hand raised to toast the onlookers.
In the late 1940s, Jean Lekumberry, a young inhabitant of the French Basque Country, decided to set out for the New World. He had three uncles in the Americas, two in Argentina and one in Nevada. He wrote letters to all three, and by a stroke of luck, more than anything else, landed in Carson Valley. Working as a sheepherder, he married an American girl named Shirley and fathered three children: Robert, Marie and J.B.
"Marie Louise was in the womb when they bought the JT," J.B. recalled.
It was 1960 when the Lekumberry family, including "Uncle Pete" who'd followed his brother over from the old country, purchased the Gardnerville establishment from the Jaunsaras and Trounday families, from which the name is derived.
"It first started as a boarding house. That was its primary function," said J.B. "They served lunch at noon, dinner at 6, and there was one seating."
"In 1960, there was one cook (Uncle Pete) one bartender (Jean) and one waitress (Shirley)," said Marie Louise. "They all did the dishes."
Now, she said, they have 25 part-time employees who work the dining room and bar. But the same rooms were once home to younger versions of the Lekumberry family. For years, the children slept in the hotel upstairs, but they spent most of their waking hours downstairs amid the customers.
"I did my homework in the bar," J.B. said. "It was like our living room."
Besides school work, the kids had plenty of chores to do. They dusted bottles in the bar and set tables in the dining room. By the time Marie Louise was 13, she was doing the books, including payroll and bills.
"It wasn't like, 'Oh, isn't it cute the kids work here,' No, we were integral parts of the business," she said.
Yet, like most hot-blooded youth, the kids reached a point when they wanted to leave, wanted to discover the world on their own terms.
"I trained J.B. and told dad that J.B. knew how to do what I was doing," Marie Louise said. "If there was one thing I was very clear about, it was that I had to get away."
Graduating from Douglas High School in 1978, Marie Louise soon took off for college in Ashland, Ore. She later spent four years in San Francisco and then a year in Europe.
J.B., to whom she'd bequeathed her responsibilities, was close on her heels. Graduating from Douglas High in 1982, he took a week off from the restaurant business and went with some friends to break trail in the High Sierra. By the time he returned, though, his father had fired him.
"My dad said, 'Think you can take off, huh? Well, you don't have to come into lunch today. I've already replaced you,'" J.B. recalled. "Really, not going to work that Saturday was like cutting the umbilical cord."
J.B. followed his sister to San Francisco and became an apprentice electrician. He then did some traveling of his own, down to Mexico and Guatemala, before meeting up with his sister again in the Basque Country of Europe.
By 1985, the siblings had gotten the wanderlust out of their systems. They returned home to the restaurant.
"You come back to your roots," said J.B. "But you got to go out there to know what the other is."
Both said their father never closed the doors.
"He made you feel invested in the family business, but free as a bird," said Marie Louise.
"There was never an inkling we couldn't come home," J.B. said.
When their father passed away in 1993, the Lekumberrys knew they had to take over the business.
"For me, there was no question," said Marie Louise, who at the time was in her first year of graduate school at University of Nevada, Reno. "It was pretty clear. The university was always going to be there. Either let the restaurant go or stay home and go to work."
"I had something to prove to myself," J.B. said. "I hadn't been working at the JT then. I had quit in the spring because I'd had enough. But then he died that August."
Now, nearly 20 years later, the children feel like the stewards of their father's tradition.
"I attribute a lot of the place's success to my dad," J.B. said. "He enabled people to foster a lot of memories and good times here. He's the one who hung onto it when he had a lot of reasons to get out. But he dug his feet in."
Besides the occasional remodel and some additional entrees on the menu, the restaurant hasn't changed much over the years.
"Nothing's been staged. It's just authentic. Real food and real people," J.B. said. "I don't foresee the JT ending. It's been an evolutionary process the whole time."
At the same time, J.B. said, he doesn't want to put any pressure on his own kids, Etienne, 11, and Anna, 14.
"We have good lives, and we don't want to close any doors," he said. "There's always the possibility we might do something else, but we're not looking to do something else."
In fact, what J.B. does when he's not in the restaurant seems to serve the restaurant in some way. Overseeing the grass-fed beef operation on Genoa's historic Ranch No. 1 provides the Gardnerville eatery with a constant supply of natural beef. He and Marie Louise try to buy local as much as possible, whether onions from Yerington or potatoes from Winnemucca.
"We try to keep as close to town as we can," J.B. said.
As the final illustration of their family story, the siblings recounted the time their father was approached by some men with a "serious offer" to buy the restaurant.
"I was 15," J.B. said, "and my dad comes to me and says, 'What do you think?'"
J.B. said he told his father to wait until he was 21 before making any decision. Then, he said, he'd be old enough to know better.
"He didn't really want to sell the place," Marie Louise said. "Of course, that was the answer he wanted to hear. He always made you feel part of it."
Located at 1426 Highway 395, JT Basque Bar & Dining Room serves lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner 5 to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Dinner starts at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, and the restaurant and bar are closed on Sunday.
For more information, call 782-2074.
