Brecksville Patch Profile: 2182 Owner Kevin Powers

Ask Kevin Powers, owner of , exactly how many years he’s been in the restaurant business and his answer will show you just how long his memory actually is.

“Since I was 3 years old,” recalls the now 35-year-old restaurateur with some amusement.  “I used to be able to run under the dining room tables and not hit my head.”

Needless to say, his days of scurrying between the legs of diners without suffering any major head trauma with have long since flown. 

But his love of food and busy kitchens never left him. In fact, it only grew and carried him through his later years as a chef for and a corporate chef for the former TRW Corporation in Lyndhurst. He even spent six years in the Caribbean as a hotel resort chef.

Given all this, running his own restaurant seemed to be the next logical step. So when a friend offered to sell Powers his restaurant in 2009, Powers jumped at the opportunity, purchasing the property and renaming it.

“I had worked for other people and there were things I had liked and there were things I wanted to do myself,” said Powers. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna do it my way and go out on my own.’”

“Instead of working for someone else, I’d rather work for myself and be my own boss."

His way, Powers said, is simple: he is a big fan of high-quality food, and the more obscure and hard-to-get it is, the better.

“Everything we do is from scratch,“ he said. “The things on my menu are things you wouldn’t find in the other local restaurants.

“I mean everybody has seafood and everybody has burgers, but I’m buying oddball stuff," he said, “I mean stuff you wouldn’t see unless you  drove all the way to downtown (Cleveland) and paid $20 to park your car. You can get the same thing here.”

“He really has brought a product that’s of good of a quality as anything, any, to Brecksville and he is a food fanatic,” add Brendan Rea, one of Power’s food suppliers who also occasionally helps at  the restaurant when it is shorthanded. “He just wants to show people the best things that are available in wine and food.”

Being a food fanatic seems to have served Power well in terms of business. In fact, Powers said that business has been so good that he is already looking to expand the restaurant, which current seats about 50 to 60 people.

“I have a very good following. This place is built on regulars now," Powers said. "When they want to go out and get something good, they come here."