Man of the Moment

Restaurateur Scott DeGraff is remaking the Aspen/Snowmass social and culinary scene.

Scott DeGraff is the owner of Junk and Liquid Sky, the groovy new hangouts in Snowmass where the DJ music on the outdoor patio draws you in like a siren song as you're skiing down Fanny Hill. DeGraff is also behind the hottest restaurant opening, or reopening, in Aspen: Junk at the Red Onion. In person, he comes across as Mr. Low-Key—always in a baseball hat and jeans, eyes averted. He is also Mr. Change-Is-Good: The whole aesthetic of his Junk projects is different from usual ski-town gathering spots. At Junk and Liquid Sky in Snowmass, the look is more Jetsons than Edelweiss. The mood and style are zippy and colorful—like candy, which DeGraff loves. He looks a lot like actor Wallace Shawn, but unlike the angst-ridden Shawn he’s calm under pressure and obsessed with fun.

His three-year-old Aspen company, FunWorldwide, is headquartered in an office on Main Street that feels more like a college dorm than a place of business. It's full of stuff (jars of candy and beef jerky, baseball caps with smiley faces on them—DeGraff wears one all the time—and bottles of champagne as tall as toddlers). Wherever you look, there is something yummy, or something that blinks if you touch it or looks cool if you put it on. In one corner, there's a rack of outfits for the Liquid Sky waitresses—black leggings, turquoise boas, moon boots.

DeGraff was practicing real estate law in Chicago in the early ’90s when he decided to quit and do something much more entertaining. He and his best friend, Michael Morton, formed a company, N9NE GROUP, and began opening super-sexy, high-tech, slick steakhouses and nightclubs, mostly in Chicago and Las Vegas. N9NE created places with plush suede banquettes, art on plasma screens, secret VIP entrances, catchy names like Skin Pool Lounge and Ghostbar, and futuristic lighting. "Color and light are always important," DeGraff says. "Think about it. If you want to ruin a party, turn on the lights, turn off the music, cut off the booze."

When DeGraff, his wife and two children (now six and nine) moved to Aspen, he began brainstorming about new projects. "I wanted to take the sizzle of Vegas and mountain-ize it," he says.

Junk, at the base of Fanny Hill in Snowmass, looks like a futuristic cafeteria inside. It's at once high tech and folksy. The walls are decorated with a combination of chalkboard menus and plasma TV screens. As in all his restaurants, the light fixtures are cool and fun: long, rectangular chandeliers made out of recycled knives, forks, and spoons—"750 pieces of silverware," DeGraff says. "We wanted to take some junk out of the world."

One floor above Junk, past the cereal dispensers and cupcake displays, there's a staircase leading up to Liquid Sky, an adults-only nightclub with a willowy bouncer in moon boots. Here the music is even louder, the light fixtures groovier, and waitresses carry cocktails as colorful as tropical fish to people gathered on low-lying couches. Advertisements for Junk and Liquid Sky convey the message that these are gathering places that welcome everyone: the immature, the mature, the hard-core international and the hard-core local, angels and devils. On a recent visit, both were packed with all kinds. In Junk, there were cute lifties with baggy snow pants and tiny T-shirts that let their belly buttons show, alongside tired moms with infants in Baby Björns. There was a polished New York City couple in their 40s next to a young Rastafarian couple in blue jeans and hemp. There were kids drinking lemonade from jelly jars, sitting with their parents who were drinking cocktails in the same jars. The plasma screens flickered, the silverware shook gently like aspen leaves, and the music blared. "It's mayhem, in a positive way," DeGraff says.

Likewise, the lunch menu is all-inclusive to the point of mayhem: There's lox n' bagels, Maine-lobster rolls, a Reuben sandwich, mac ’n' cheese, organic-chicken salad, matzo-ball soup, gumbo, tacos, shrimp cocktail, shrimp po’boys, pizza, potato latkes, edamame, and ten different kinds of s'mores. On the patio outside, there are curvy banquettes and couches, "blanket service," and the ubiquitous après-ski fire, only like everything else it's been updated. There's no stone fireplace or real wood. This fire flickers on top of a long, narrow table, like a table runner made of yellow flames. You turn it on by flicking a switch. "The aim is to make people smile," DeGraff says. "We pour big drinks. We have friendly waitresses—we insist they're that way. My background is as an attorney; my hospitality came from living. This is not brain surgery. "

Next to the patio, there's a row of outdoor showers like a series of giant question marks (Will anyone ever use them? Will I want to look?) "We let people's imaginations run," he says. "We don't take ourselves that seriously."

When it comes to updating Aspen’s venerable landmark, the Red Onion on the Cooper Avenue mall, DeGraff seems to understand the pitfalls in trying to please the locals while still making a viable transformation. Junk at the Red Onion, scheduled to open this month, will be a rebirth, not a repetition. It will have "lots of fun treats for your eye," he says, like chandeliers made out of recycled beer bottles. "I wanted to pay homage to the past and also push things into the future," he says. Pulling out some black-and-white pictures from the Red Onion in the 1950s, DeGraff points out the beautiful tan customers and says, "The Red Onion was the social scene and congregating place of Aspen. That's what I want it to be again—people smiling and having fun."