Players Sports Bar & Grill owner discusses switch to Brooklyn Chophouse and Brew Tavern

WICHITA — Players Sports Bar & Grill owner David Chaffin is now ready to talk about his plans to convert to Brooklyn Chophouse and Brew Tavern.

Have You Heard? broke the news about Chaffin’s plans for his West 21st Street business last week, but he wasn’t yet ready to discuss them.

“It’s been on the back burner for five years,” Chaffin says of the changes.

The main change is a menu upgrade, and Chaffin says that necessitates a name change.

“If I do that, and I called it Players, it’s a tough sell,” he says. “It really is.”

Now, almost all the meat he’ll serve will be choice grade, and he’s eliminating what he calls junk food — such as a plate of fried appetizers — from the menu.

“It’s not that we were ashamed of Players food,” Chaffin says. “But we had food that reflected Players Bar and Grill.”

He adds, though, “Anything that’s great about Players we’re keeping.”

He chose the Brooklyn name because he was going for a New York feel, with what he calls New York kind of steaks and deli sandwiches.

“Bronx didn’t sound right,” Chaffin says.

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Gardner Design’s Bill Gardner critiques logos for Fortune online gallery of makeovers

pepsiWICHITA — Fortune magazine has a new online gallery of logo makeovers from companies like Pepsi (left), UPS and Starbucks.

Wichita’s own Bill Gardner of Gardner Design was asked to be one of the experts who critiqued the new logos.

Gardner has Logo Lounge, which includes a series of books and a Web site devoted to logos from around the world.

Gardner liked some of the designs spotlighted by Fortune, such as IBM’s, which features lines that IBM says are supposed to represent “speed and dynamism.”

“They owned the lines going through it before everyone started using lines,” Gardner told the magazine. He added that due to the logo’s simplicity and originality, “you have a hard time desiring to mess with it.”

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