K&K Portage Market has been a West Side butcher shop since 1972, but the Kolar family’s roots in Cleveland’s meat business go back decades. Yaro Kolar opened the family’s first butcher shop on the East Side in 1940, drawing on the family’s Bohemian meat-making traditions
The business eventually moved west and was run by two brothers in the same family, Jerry and Rick. Earlier this year, it was passed on to a another generation of Kolars.
But Jerry hasn’t gone far. At 66, he’s still at the shop four or five days a week – often working alongside his son Jason, who recently bought the business.
And while plenty has changed, one thing hasn’t: K&K still makes sausage by hand, using a hand-cranked stuffer much as Yaro did generations ago.
How did your family get into the meat business?
Yaro Kolar immigrated from what is now the Czech Republic. But the meat business wasn’t his first choice.
He wanted to be a draftsman. Jerry remembers his grandfather as meticulous and fascinated by mechanical drawing, but there wasn’t money for him to go to school.
Instead, Yaro went into the meat business. In 1940, he opened Kolar’s Meats on Cleveland’s East Side. The shop later moved to a second East Side location before eventually closing.
But his recipes survived.
Jason Kolar, Yaro’s great-grandson, said K&K’s kielbasa, Hungarian and Italian sausage recipes all trace back to Yaro.
“They’re well over 100 years old,” Jason said.
How did the family business make its way to the West Side?
After Yaro’s business closed, his son — Jerry’s father — continued working in the meat trade.
He worked at Heinen’s for several years, then for Cleveland restaurant supplier Meyers Meats. He also worked part-time for a butcher at the old Woodland Market at East 55th Street and Woodland Avenue.
Jerry said that butcher helped propel his father back into the retail meat business. At 32, his father knew he wanted a shop of his own.
In 1972, he took the chance. He leveraged a six-suite apartment building he owned to buy a small butcher shop on the West Side.
Jason said his grandfather purchased an existing Portage Meats location and kept part of the name because it was already well known to West Side customers.
K&K operated a few doors from its current location until 1986, when the family moved into a space that is about twice as large.
What’s your earliest memory of the shop?
Jerry started working weekends when he was 12 years old.
That gave him the chance to learn alongside both his father and his grandfather. Jerry said he worked with Yaro for six to eight years.
And Jerry knew early that he wanted to stay.
In seventh grade, when his teacher asked students what they wanted to do with their futures, Jerry already had an answer.
“College was never in my dreams. I wanted to work with my dad,” he said.
After high school, he did. Eventually, Jerry and his brother Rick bought K&K from their father and ran it together.
A generation later, Jason Kolar remembers much the same kind of childhood.
“I was kind of born into it,” he said. “So involved by birth and now choice.”
His earliest memories are coming to the shop early on weekend mornings with his father and helping set up the meat counter. He continued working there through high school and college before temporarily leaving to pursue another career.
What was it like learning from the previous generations?
By the time Jerry worked with Yaro, his grandfather was in his 60s and still cutting meat.
Jerry remembers him as quiet and exacting — the same meticulous streak that had once drawn him toward drafting.
“It was fun to be able to spend some time with my grandfather and get to know him every day,” he said,
Eventually, Yaro had a stroke and could no longer work. But some of what Jerry learned from him remains part of how K&K operates today — right down to how the family makes sausage.
For Jason, the most important lesson he learned from his father and grandfatherwas how to treat people.
K&K isn’t a giant grocery store and can’t stock everything, he said. But the family tries to accommodate customers’ requests and “we know how to treat people right.”
What does carrying on the family business mean?
“It’s a passion. It’s in your blood,” Jerry said.
Jerry’s sons grew up around K&K just as he did. He has pictures of his son Jason wearing an apron when he was 2 years old.
But Jason wasn’t always certain the butcher shop would be his career. He went to maritime school to work aboard ships, earned a master’s license and spent several years sailing the Great Lakes.
COVID helped change his direction.
While working from home, Jason began coming to K&K in the afternoons to help.
The shop was extraordinarily busy, in part because it could get meat when some competitors couldn’t. Jason said his father, brother, uncle and other employees went nearly two months without a day off.
After six or eight months, Jason and his brother started talking.
“Why don’t we just, you know, give Dad and my uncle an out?”
Earlier this year, they did. Jason and his brother bought K&K in February.
“We know it, we love it, and we want to keep it going,” he said.
Jerry had worried about what could happen if the business were sold to someone else.
“The last thing I would want to do would be to sell it to somebody and have them just destroy all of our work ethics and our ideologies and our business practices and just ruin our reputation,” he said.
Selling the business hasn’t meant leaving it. Jerry still comes in four or five days a week, in part because it gives him something his own father once had: the chance to work alongside his sons.
“It means everything.”
Who shops at K&K today?
Some customers have been shopping at K&K longer than Jason has been alive. Others are the “same names, different faces,” he said.
He sees grandchildren of people who shopped with his great-grandfather and children of customers who knew his father and grandfather.
“It’s very much a tradition, very much kind of like an institution in the neighborhood.”
Jason credits those loyal customers with keeping the business going.
The customer base is changing, too. Jason said K&K increasingly gets requests from immigrant customers looking for particular cuts of meat. The shop tries to source or cut what customers ask for, including picanha, a cut of steak, which he said has become particularly popular.
What sausage is K&K known for?
Fresh kielbasa, particularly around the holidays.
Jason describes it as deliberately simple: coarsely ground pork, salt, pepper and garlic, with no fillers or soy.
“It makes your refrigerator smell like garlic,” he said.
Why does K&K still make sausage by hand?
K&K still makes sausage almost every day — and still uses a hand-cranked sausage stuffer.
Jerry knows that’s unusual.
“There’s some sausage people out there that laugh at us,” he said.
Modern equipment could save labor and time. But K&K doesn’t have a lot of storage space, commercial stuffers are expensive, and the hand crank still does what the family needs it to do.
There’s another reason, too.
“It’s still the same way my grandfather did it.”
Jason puts it another way: “We’re still kind of in the Stone Ages when it comes to stuffing sausage.”
The hand crank means a lot of labor, Jason said, but it’s how the family has always done it, and it fits the shop’s limited space.
The fourth generation, however, may depart from the previous three. Jason said he finds himself reconsidering that decision every holiday season, when K&K is making hundreds of pounds of sausage.
“Dad and Grandpa and everybody said, ‘Yeah, we don’t need one. It works fine the way we’re doing it.’”
Now?
“I think now we have a little bit of control over that, so it might change.”
