First 20 years were easy compared to last five, but Mort’s is still thriving in Old Town
Mort’s Martini Bar sailed through its first 20 years of business mostly hiccup free.
Opened in 1996 in a old gas station building at the corner of First and Washington, the bar quickly gained a following of people who loved its big martini menu, its live music, its large patio, its free jalapeno-flavored popcorn and its location right in the heart of Wichita nightlife central. It was so packed on opening night that founder Morrie Sheets remembers he had to escape for a while and take a rest.
The first two decades saw a brief change in ownership, and Mort’s — a haven for cigar smokers — had to overcome the ban on indoor smoking that started in 2010. But eventually, that just made its patio business stronger.
Now, as Mort’s prepares to celebrate 25 years in business, its owners are coming out of a bit of a tough stretch.
In September 2019, co-owner Matt Sheets — founder Morrie’s brother — died at age 62. Matt was the one who took care of maintenance for the building and who each day hand-drew the colorful sandwich board outside the bar that advertised the day’s specials.
Losing Matt was a blow, said Mort’s co-owner, Emma Russell, who has managed day-to-day operations for years.
“I still talk to him every day,” Russell said. Matt Sheets’ widow, Sharon Sedvidy-Sheets, has since taken over his spot on the ownership team — and also now draws the specials sign.
A year and a half later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and all businesses that counted on big groups of people getting together to socialize took a hit. Mort’s was among them.
The bar proactively shut down twice during the pandemic, even when it wasn’t required. Between March of 2020 and February of 2021, when it officially reopened, Mort’s was closed for a total of 31 weeks.
“It was definitely a hard decision,” Russell said. “But we chose to take care of our staff and clientele. We always said through the whole thing that we were playing the long game. We didn’t believe it was going to be a quick situation, and it turned out it wasn’t.”
Now, the owners feel like they’re coming out on the other side of their hardest five-year stretch. Business has returned — and so have the nightly bands on the patio.
Mort’s will celebrate 25 years this weekend with a party that will spill out into the parking lot west of the building. The Wichita Wagonmasters will serve food, and the bar will offer drink specials, a photo booth, games and 10 different bands performing each day. The celebration is scheduled for noon to 1 a.m. Saturday and noon to 10 p.m. Sunday. (Owners are still deciding whether to charge admission but said it will be nominal if they do.)
Russell said business has returned since pandemic restrictions were lifted, and although crowd sizes are up and down, the owners feel fortunate, she said. To celebrate their return and their birthday, they just added a colorful new mural on the south-facing side of the building that features cartoon versions of musicians performing, people eating popcorn, sipping martinis and smoking cigars, and even an image of one of Matt Sheets’ hand-drawn sandwich board signs.
It’s fun for the owners to think back to the early days, when Mort’s was one of Old Town’s only attractions, Russell said. At the time it opened, the bar’s only contemporaries were River City Brewing Co., Larkspur and Heroes.
But Mort’s got off to a quick start, attracting that overwhelming opening night crowd and then, a year later, landing a feature on the front page of USA Today under the headline “Good times roll in Wichita.” The story, which featured a photo of Morrie Sheets, talked about the city’s strong local economy and low unemployment rate and pointed to Mort’s cigar-and-martini motif as a sign of local prosperity.
A new generation is now discovering the bar, and its crowd is regularly made up of people ages “21 to 85 in sweatpants and tuxedos, and you’ll see all of those in here at the same time,” Russell said.
“I’ve been doing this 24 years, and one of my favorite things to see is kids run into their parents here, and they didn’t plan it,” she said. “That makes me feel like we’ve done something right. If you can run into your mom at a bar and it’s cool for you both, you’ve done an okay thing.”
This story was originally published June 23, 2021 at 1:10 PM.
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