Generations: Lucky Dogs is Julie Brandt’s post-retirement encore

Although she retired in June 2015, Julie Brandt hasn’t taken many days off since then.

Instead of winding down after 34 years of teaching, this hometown lady was sizing up the old Wright’s Service Station on the corner of Beltrami Avenue and Second Street in Bemidji and wondering what kind of business she could start there.

After driving by the location on several occasions, she started to visualize a service station-themed restaurant, reminiscent of 1950s drive-ins and hotdog venues in places she and her husband Tim had visited in New York, Chicago, and other places.

Although Tim had some doubts about Julie’s vision, he bought into it, taking on a variety of tasks and responsibilities, and doing the books while still employed full-time elsewhere. They bought the property in the fall of 2015, and Lucky Dogs opened Memorial Day weekend, 2016, less than a year after Julie’s retirement.

Although Julie had no business degree or experience, she says she progressed “from managing my classroom to managing my restaurant.” Nine years after starting the project, she refers to Lucky Dogs, now a successful Bemidji icon, as her “encore career.”

She says at first it was a little like going to the end of a diving board and wondering if there was water below or not. “Maybe I was naïve, but I didn’t really ever think it could fail.” She had drive, vision, and a strong work ethic. “All of those things should add up to something successful!” she says.

Julie worked with the Northwest Small Business Development Center to put together a business plan. Converting a gas station that had sat empty for 13 years into a restaurant took some doing. She worked with carpenters and plumbers; a crane had to be brought in to install the heating and cooling system on the roof; pipes to the street were broken and had to be dug up and replaced.

Old patio blocks that had been removed from the waterfront park by Paul and Babe had ended up in piles to be crushed into gravel. Julie needed 7,000 pavers and decided to salvage them, a few hundred at a time, and haul them to Lucky Dogs, where landscapers put them in place. She describes the task as a “labor of love” with an accent on both words.

By January, she had come up with the menu. That opening in May wasn’t like going into the classroom where she’d had everything organized and planned, Julie says, but after learning how to set up a till, surviving and making adjustments for menu issues, dealing with deliveries not showing up on time, and not having enough shelving, she found her groove.

The walk-up order window and full menu were put into place where a garage door once was. Customers order main dishes, sides, beverages, desserts, milkshakes and signature hotdogs with service station-related names. From the start, Julie featured the Hubcap, the Little Deuce Coupe, the Dipstick and the Model T.

The menu also gives nods to special people, like Wright’s Dog, honoring the previous owner of the property; the Milk Truck, honoring Julie’s mom; the Virgil for her dad; the Snowcat for Tim’s grandfather; and the Bel-Air, honoring a special customer from New York.

Grandparents come with grandkids; tourists take the short trip (just 1,350 hotdog lengths) from Paul and Babe to sit under colorful shade umbrellas and enjoy a hotdog; and canine friends are welcome on the green space where there’s always a bowl of water for them. In 2016, Bemidji’s former city manager Nate Matthews described Lucky Dogs as the best addition and improvement to Bemidji for that year.

Lucky Dogs was quick to become an integral part of the community. Although the restaurant closes for the winter, Julie re-opens for Night We Light. In 2019, when Bemidji hosted Hockey Day Minnesota, Julie and Tim flooded the patio area for a Lucky Dogs skating rink.

One day some out-of-town visitors stopped for lunch and decided to feature Bemidji as a destination on Erik the Travel Guy’s In Your Own Back Yard. The feature ran on Sept. 20, 2020, and launched a new episode in Lucky Dogs’ popularity. The episode can be viewed at

youtu.be/UdH8iFbBt0M.

“Julie’s on TV!” her mom said — in Florida. A boy from Germany who saw the program talked his parents into bringing him to Bemidji and to Lucky Dogs.

“You can’t get better advertising than that for free!” Julie says.

After remodeling, coming up with a name, filing with the state, getting food licenses, taking classes in Duluth, and hiring good people — most of them high school and college students — not only was the restaurant popular locally; it was getting international attention and selling hundreds of hotdogs per day.

A milkshake machine, added a few years ago, has been another favorite. An old refrigerator, wrapped to look like a vintage gas pump, holds Lucky Dogs T-shirts for sale.

Julie couldn’t have predicted how successful and rewarding her “Second Act Career” would be. “No two days are the same,” she says, “but all are fun.” Local customers keep coming back, but each day brings new customers with new stories. Lucky Dogs has served hotdogs to podcasters, travel advisors, tourists from across the country, campers, people who restore military vehicles, and unicyclists from all over the world.

“It’s been great, so successful — my pride and joy,” Julie says. “It’s mine, but I feel like it’s the community’s. I love seeing people sitting at my tables sipping coffee even when it’s not open.”

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