At JP’s five restaurants and bars, nearly everything is made in house. But he trusts Macrina with the bread. 

Jean-Paul (JP) Pirio runs five restaurants and bars across King and Pierce counties, and no two of them feel alike. JP’s Barroom in Renton is a 21-and-over dive with a focus on games and sports. Hy Iu Hee Hee in Gig Harbor has that log-cabin vibe and has been a neighborhood gathering place since the 1930s, where breakfast runs all day and many of the customers have been coming in for decades. JP’s Taproom & Grill in Kent is closer to a full-service restaurant, with hostesses and a menu that runs to steaks and crab towers. Time Out Ale House in Kent, the newest of the five, leans into the sports-bar identity, complete with pool tables and pull tabs. JP’s Tavern in Federal Way splits the difference: gastro-pub food, shuffleboard and darts, Sunday brunch.

What ties them together isn’t the room. It’s what comes out of the kitchen.

“We make everything in house,” JP says. “Obviously not the bread, but our pizza dough, all our sauces, dressings — everything we’re capable of doing in house, we do.” And you can taste the difference. The salmon is wild-caught. The ground beef is hormone- and antibiotic-free. The bread comes from Macrina, just down the road in Kent. The kitchens at all five locations work from the same playbook: scratch cooking, clean labels, ingredients you can pronounce.

That last part matters to him. JP came up in restaurants from his first job onward, and at twenty-five years in he’s seen every shortcut the industry offers. He’s turned most of them down. Asked what he wouldn’t compromise on, even when costs climb, his answer is immediate: the food. “I won’t sacrifice quality,” he says of cutting corners on ingredients. “That’s the one thing I’m not able to compromise on.”

The Philly cheesesteak at JP’s is a fair example of how that conviction plays out at the cutting board. It took five years to perfect. Five years of testing the meat, the cheese, the seasoning, the bread — adjusting one variable, then another, then circling back to the first. JP doesn’t describe it as a project. He describes it as something they kept working on until they got it right. Five years on a single sandwich isn’t a normal sports-bar timeline. At JP’s, it’s just how things get done.

Macrina has supplied the buns and breads at every JP’s location since the partnership began at the Kent Taproom in 2015. JP puts it the way he tends to put things — plainly. “What I like about their bread is, there’s four ingredients or five ingredients and they’re simple. It’s water, salt, flour. You know, things you can read.”

That bread shows up across the menu, and especially on the bestsellers. The burgers come on a brioche bun. The chicken burgers come on a potato bun. The salmon club gets the brioche; the turkey club gets the sour white. 

Five rooms, five different crowds. One kitchen philosophy. Worth the drive to whichever one’s closest.