Meet Julie Balink
BY EVAN _WILLIAMS ewilliams@florida-weekly.com

PHOTO EVAN WILLIAMS Julie Balink with her stepdaughter MaKenzie, 12, at H2

Julie Balink was at H2 Tapas and Wine Bar in downtown Fort Myers last Friday, witness to what happens there every Friday around 1 p.m.: the end of the last business lunch hour of the week. She wrote a check for a Budweiser delivery, then peaked around the bar to where her father sat, finishing his sandwich.

"Dad, time to pay up," she said, laughing.

She is the wife of Chef Harold Balink, owner of H2 and Harold's on Bay, and manages H2 most days, sometimes nights.

Balink has the potential to be unsparingly direct, eyes focused as laser beams, when dealing with deliverymen, her husband, or anyone.

"Make sure you always tell people how you feel about them before it's too late," she said. "I learned that from my mother dying."

Her mother died in 2001, the year she moved back to Fort Myers, where she has lived off and on for 31 years. Balink is 42. She's lived and worked, among other places, in Miami, Key Largo, even Eatonton, Ga.

"Eatonton was hell on earth," she said. "Not as bad as Toledo, but close."

She lived in Toledo, Ohio until the age of 11.

"It's like the armpit of the United States," she said. "My very limited memories of Ohio are that it's grey and dreary and dirty and the sun never shines."

When she moved to Fort Myers, Balink said it was culture shock.

"We moved from a busy, dirty city to North Fort Myers," she said. "It was pretty rural. We lived in a mobile home, in a trailer park."

She went to Suncoast Middle School and graduated from North Fort Myers High School, afterwards putting herself through Edison College waiting tables and bartending.

"I totally enjoyed it," Balink said. "It was fun, fast paced; you meet a lot of interesting people, and make a lot of money - especially in Miami."

She met her boyfriend at a restaurant in Fort Myers called Casa Lupita (no longer in existence) and she moved with him to Jacksonville.

"The smell of the paper mills there was very funky, a very distinctive smell," she said.

They were only 19 years old, Balink remembered. "Obviously, the relationship was doomed."

Her husband now, Harold, found Julie in 1996 at the South Seas Resort, which she managed, on Captiva Island.

"We couldn't stand each other," she said. "I thought he was just full of himself. It was kind of like 'When Harry Met Sally.'"

The two later formed an "alliance," she said, in their mutual disdain for an obnoxious restaurant manager they both worked with.

Balink has two stepdaughters. Kayly is 15 and MaKenzie is 12; she also has two plus-sized Bulldogs, Abbey and Oscar, and said she'd like to open a plus-size dog boutique. Something like "Paunchy Pooches," or "Not for Chihuahuas."

"My bulldogs both got two Halloween costumes each this year," she said. "But even so, the costumes are a little tight. Our pets are such a part of our family. I love it when you see pamperish things for dogs, but you never see anything for big dogs."

Life in Fort Myers is good, Balink said ("The weather," she noted, "is the best, and the worst, thing about it") but even so, she has been infected with that mythic American wanderlust.

"One of the crazy things I have a desire to do is rent an RV, pack up the kids and the dogs, and travel all over the West," she said, eyeing the piles of bricks wrapped up in yellow plastic on the newly renovated block of Bay Street outside H2, and maybe beyond that, at a riverboat parked on a lazy looking Caloosahatchee River.

It was nearing 2 p.m.; the restaurant had emptied itself of customers and was filled only with the afternoon light streaming through the French doors. Balink left the granite-topped bar, exited out the side door, and disappeared on a scooter, buzzing down the alley towards First Street and home.