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Sommelier David Bohula, wine director and floor manager of Radio Maria in Champaign, teaches Wine 101, Sunday, January 20, 2007. (Tom Root)

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Nearly every morning, David Spears scrupulously skins, carefully cuts and precisely portions pounds of animal flesh; a meat-made sculpture.

“I don't know why anyone opens a restaurant,” said the self-described iconoclast and co-owner of Radio Maria, a restaurant in Champaign's downtown. “It's god-awful.”

Spears described Radio Maria as a magnet restaurant founded in a downtown that was anything but thriving. The neighborhood has blossomed, though, and now Radio Maria has over two-and-half hour waits at the door.

“We built the bottom floor of downtown,” he said.

With 18-hour days and minimal vacation time, the restaurateur describes the demands of the hard-scrabble, high-culture lifestyle demanded by the white tablecloths and red wine of fine dining in a town not known for cosmopolitan cuisine.

“I have to be a capitalist to keep this business running and keep all these people employed,” Spears said. “But there's also that artist, that creative type I have to keep track of.”

The plaid, professorial Spears hurries about the restaurant, attention moving from place to place. The MFA sculptor's sinewy forearms emerge from rolled-back cuffs.

“Dave always has 10,000 things going on,” said general manager David Bohula. “He sometimes only gets to 70 or so of them.”

To that end, Spears has built much of the restaurant himself. A former escalator handrail snakes around the bar. Tabletops are doors culled from an abandoned downstate grade school and the old Harker Hall at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He said he likes to go after weird, heavy things.

“The U of I is very protective of their garbage, but it's great stuff,” he said. “I'm getting a return on my degree, finally.”

Lights were once tubes pulled from a dumpster near Loomis Lab. The step to the bar is from the Veteran's Affairs hospital in Danville. Spears said he pulled the would-be debris out of purgatory. The chairs and the table-bottoms are the only new furniture, he said.

Everything in the restaurant was welded, forged and tempered by Spears' own hand, Jon Stevens said. The friend, colleague and former employee said Spears can look into a pile of industrial junk and see sculpture. Walking into Radio Maria is like walking into a giant piece of instillation art, he agreed.

“There's very little I can't build. If there's something I want, I build it,” he said. “Being the way that I am, I practically built everything myself, including our unique, patented beer tower.”

For Spears, individualism was a necessity.

His family moved around a lot when he was a child; his father was in the Air Force. A brother was born Maine and Spears in El Paso, Texas. He didn't grow up with many long-term friends, he said. He spent his time drawing.

“Art can be a great, lonely friend,” he said.

With both parents originally from southern Ohio, Spears attended Bowling Green University. He thought he'd end up teaching sculpture or driving garbage trucks.

Spears wants to make things people have not seen before. He couldn't do that in someone else's business. Spears partners with fellow artist Sharon Owens, in the business and in life. Described as dark and nostalgic, her mixed-media painted portraits lining the walls of the tapas bar harmonize with the “mad scientist industrial” aesthetic of the space.

“I suppose that in Illinois we'd be man and wife by common law,” Spears said, “but I've never been one to have a piece of paper decide something for me.”

They agree that they did not know what they were getting into when they made the decision to start the restaurant. The 18 hour days take their toll. They are yet to have a vacation.

Before they opened the restaurant, Champaign had a whole different dynamic, Spears said. Market Place Mall and other growth north of Interstate 74 had moved the commercial center out of downtown. An ill-fated pedestrian mall came and went.

Before 119 Walnut Street was Radio Maria, it housed Brown's Paint Store. The store sold paints and wallpaper for years. The owners were planning to sell the building when they called Jeff Mellander, a local renovator, who bought the building in 1994.

Mellander renovated the building with the help of Jon Stevens, now a designer in Chicago. Stevens hung a sign in the window reading something like, “space available for interesting, creative tenant.”

Mellander and Spears found each other with the help of Jon Stevens. Spears spent a year and a half opening the restaurant.

“We wanted to blend all these things that we're interested in: art, architecture, revitalizing downtown,” and, he paused, “food.”

Spears is not a natural delegator. Very much an artist, Spears is passionate almost to a fault. Colleagues said he will not be stopped until he realizes his vision. If he is to transfer a task, he'll stand right beside the appointee and tell him how to do it, Stevens said.

David Buhola was hired as a server at Radio Maria on December 11, 2006. The tapas bar extension was set to open in a few days and staff had not yet been hired. Buhola, with a grin and a pony-tail, raised his hand and asked, “Can I be in hiring?” He never ended up serving tables.

“There was almost no organization in the place before I got here,” he said with a laugh.

Buhola was not the usual local musician or artist often hired at Radio Maria. With a degree in finance and economics from the University, he uses terms like “investment,” “barrier of entry,” and “brand.” The restaurant had very little structure when he came.

“In a place with so many artists, I'm that one voice looking out for the bottom line,” he said.

Downtown's growth has been a product of local people becoming entrepreneurs, said T.J. Blakeman, a Champaign city planner who focuses on downtown. Places like Cafe Kopi, the Great Impasta and the Blind Pig all faced the same challenges as Radio Maria, he said.

“Pioneer is probably too strong of a word for anybody,” he said. “(Radio Maria) was one of the first to take advantage of a market that was depressed at the time.”

Spears said art keeps him sacrosanct.

“(It) keeps me away from the mall and North Prospect, where I find the detritus of society,” he said.

He said he sees a wider cultural decline, one that has manifested itself in his alma mater. It used to be that schools were institutions of higher learning, he said. Students used to come to university to learn.

Schools tear down their art departments while building football stadiums. The University is becoming a vocation school, he said. It produces small-thinking people who don't see value in cultural history or the arts.

Spears said he can't cast into the future with certainty.

“When we built this thing we thought it would be for a few years and might taper off,” Spears said. With such attention to detail necessary, Spears doesn't know how absentee owners can function.

“We sort of want to keep it going and have it thrive,” he said, “but at the same time we have our own projects.”

In the meantime, Radio Maria provides Champaign with culture.

“At least that's what I tell myself when I'm doing dishes,” Owens said.