Leader Of The Lost Boys
Mike Rypka loves to throw parties. The big kind, sometimes with hundreds of people. Many of his friends and guests are also cigar smokers. So when he purchased a home in 2017 and began renovations to create a space for extravagant get-togethers, he outfitted the Austin, Texas, property with a walk-in humidor and a cigar patio by the pool. It was superb, but he felt it just wasn’t enough. Three years later, he added another surprise for his party-goers: he bought the house next door and transformed it into a smoking lounge.
“I want people to have a good time when they’re over my place,” says the 48-year-old Rypka. “I love entertaining. It’s all about great food, music, hanging out with people. Cigars are a part of that, too.”
Rypka is the founder of Torchy’s Tacos, a restaurant chain with 125 locations across 14 states. He’s wearing a white polo, blue shorts and Off-White sneakers as he leads a visitor through the palatial home where he lives with his wife and son. The approximately 10,500-square-foot mansion is surrounded by oak trees and sits on a slope above the tranquil waters of Lake Austin. Modern artwork and sculptures adorn the walls. The ceilings are more than 20-feet high. Looking out the window, you see the pool below, the volleyball court and the smoking patio.
“The cigar porch was something I added to the house,” Rypka says. “It’s a shaded structure with TVs and lots of seating, all screened in. There are heaters and fans and misters you can run depending on the weather. In the winter, you can put up plexiglass siding to keep the heat in.”
Most people would be content with a four-season patio where you can smoke cigars, but Rypka wanted more. He had added all types of enhancements across the property—renovations took more than a year to complete—and included a restaurant-quality kitchen where he could cook for a crowd, and what he dubbed his Chill Room, complete with a foosball table and a mohair-upholstered Eames lounge chair. Rypka says that he lights up “anytime, day or night,” but often before dinner, and prefers to smoke with his friends, “a solid group of 20 or so guys.” It’s this same tight-knit group that inspired him, just a few years ago, to create an indoor smoking lounge.
“I wanted an indoor place to hang out with my buddies and smoke cigars,” Rypka explains. “You know, where we could shoot pool, play poker, watch the game. Have a few laughs.” Instead of remodeling another room in the house, he came up with an unconventional solution. “I bought the house next door,” he says with a grin. “I turned the whole downstairs into a smoking lounge.”
Rypka moves outside, past his koi pond and Zen garden, taking a mulched path beneath the oak trees to his second home. It rained the night before and the smell of damp earth is in the air as he strolls past an enormous fire pit surrounded by Adirondack chairs and a bed of gravel that looks like the surface of the moon. Limestone slabs in the formation of a staircase lead up a short incline to another mansion. You’d think he was heading over to the neighbor’s house to borrow some power tools, but this is Rypka’s personal cigar lounge.
He punches in a code in the front entranceway. The double doors swing wide, revealing a backdrop of cigar boxes mounted to the wall: a fitting prelude to the cigar paradise that lies beyond the foyer.
Measuring around 7,000 square feet, Rypka’s second, smoky home is spacious and bright, with high ceilings, tall windows and rooms that prioritize comfortable seating, TVs and gaming tables over frivolous furniture. “There’s a bunch of bedrooms upstairs,” he says. “Downstairs it’s all cigar lounge.” A wood and glass-paned cabinet humidor stands close to the front door, filled with his friend’s smokes. Many of the boxes are marked with a felt pen, bearing the scribbled names and initials of their owners.
In the kitchen there’s a bowl filled with torch lighters and a lever-action cigar cutter sitting on the countertop. Nine chairs surround a poker table in the breakfast nook. A metal sign hangs above the refrigerator that reads, “Lost Boys Lounge.”
All across the house, the walls are adorned with antique smoking decorations and memorabilia. He enters a room with a giant light fixture shaped like a cigar hanging over the pool table. The ember at the foot of the cigar glows red.
There are Rabbit Air purifiers in every room. One of the largest areas has a fireplace and a 75-inch television, along with eight reclining leather chairs, each braced by a side table and standing ashtray. A window-lined back wall opens to a porch that looks out over the treetops, with more chairs and ashtrays outside.
There’s a media room off the kitchen with another large TV, eight more leather chairs, side tables and ashtrays. While Rypka teamed up with an interior design firm for his main house, he handled the interior design of the second house by himself, selecting all the furniture and cigar-themed decor. “I have experience renovating places into Torchy’s Tacos locations, so I understand a lot about design and the cost of certain materials.”
Rypka beams as he stands in the living room. You can tell he’s proud of the place, that it’s special to him. With all this space, does he still smoke cigars at the main house?
“Not as much as I used to,” he laughs. “Now that I have the ‘Lost Boys Lounge,’ what’s the point?” He smiles, looks around the living room. “This is the place to be.”
The name is a reference to characters from the works of novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie. In his stories, the Lost Boys were a group of orphan boys led by Peter Pan, carefree, playful and mischievous, who lived on an island where they never had to grow up. “We’re all a little mischievous,” Rypka says with a laugh. “It’s a place where you can be with the guys, hang out, have a good time. We’re all lost boys, really. We’ve had our struggles, we come from different walks of life. But we made it. We’re here.”
He kicks back in one of the leather chairs, and gets ready to light up. He has an extraordinary collection, much of it stored in an elegant glass enclosure in the main house that measures 40 square feet. The floor inside is made of Nero Marquina marble. Recessed lighting on the Spanish cedar shelves reveals rows of rare cigars, including Fuente Fuente OpusX, Cohiba Behike and Davidoff Oro Blanco. “I’m a cigar collector,” he says. “I’ve been collecting for 12 years.” He gets excited when talking about certain smokes that he’s acquired, like the Padrón Millennium humidor, released in the year 2000 and limited to 1,000 humidors, each with 100 numbered cigars.
“I smoke a lot of Padrón, Arturo Fuente, Davidoff. Padrón 50th Anniversary is one of my favorites.” He isn’t kidding—there are too many to count on the shelf. “I have over 60 boxes right now, but I’ve probably purchased closer to 100 boxes.”
Letting cigars gather dust in the recesses of his humidor isn’t part of Rypka’s long-term plan. He’s not afraid to burn his high-end smokes. “I smoke what I buy. Doesn’t matter if it’s a limited edition or a special release. I don’t buy them as investments. I’m not one of those guys that collects just to hold on to them. I’ve probably lost thousands of dollars on cigars that I could have saved and resold.” He shrugs. “They’re meant to be smoked.”
He lights up a cigar from his Fuente y Padrón Legends humidor, a new rarity that was released this year. “I worked really hard to get here. I’ve been in the restaurant business since I was 13 years old. I got a fry cook job at Popeyes. I think I even lied on my first application and said I was 14 when I was actually 13,” he says. “Later on I got a job at a country club, and that’s where I started to say, ‘Hey this is a cool industry.’ There was a chef there that gave me good advice, he told me, ‘Get into everything. Learn everything. Work everywhere. Try not to stay too long, go get your chops.’ So I took his advice.”
Rypka later went to culinary school in Miami, earning a hospitality management degree from Florida International University. Cigars soon followed. “I had my first cigar in Key West with some buddies from school. They weren’t pricey smokes, but it really got me interested in the hobby.”
After college, Rypka got his first executive chef job at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. “I fed all the World Bank employees and executives,” he says, up to 4,000 people a day. He was 22. “And cooks would literally laugh at me when I started, saying, ‘Who the fuck is this kid?’ So I learned early on how to gain people’s respect and win them over.” He later moved to Los Angeles, landing chef jobs at MTV Studios and Walt Disney Animation. Later, he worked at Enron in Houston and then Dell (at the time, known as Dell Computer Corp.) in Austin.
In 2006, he decided that he wanted to work for himself, and embarked on a journey that would change his life, opening the first Torchy’s Tacos out of a food trailer. “Food trucks at that time were not sexy, they weren’t cool like today,” he says. “Those first few years were tough. We weren’t sure if we were gonna make it. I used to drive around on a red Vespa and hand out free samples. We put in the work, and I knew by year five that we had something special.” From that humble start, Rypka and his team built a taco empire that’s grown to more than 100 locations and is still expanding. “It’s been a pretty cool journey,’” he says.
As if pulled from a dream, Rypka checks his watch and puts down his cigar. “I gotta head to another meeting,” he says. He walks out the door, down the limestone steps, past the fire pit and back through the yard. He can light up in so many places, but his favorite is the ‘Lost Boys Lounge,’ where he and his friends can shoot pool, play poker and smoke cigars, where they don’t have to grow up, at least for a little while. Until work calls, or reality sets back in. And it’s time to close the door.
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