Restaurant Legends

I’ve been in and around restaurants and bars most of my life. When entering a full-time restaurant career as a 20 something in the 1970’s I was greeted with a perspective of racial behaviors that are outdated by today’s standards. Over the years I thought I had done a good job keeping up with the changes and at times even got ahead of a few of them. But it took the killing of George Floyd and the events that followed to be woke as never before 

 I met Mecca Bos several years ago over a lunch of Blue-Ribbon pies promoting a book launch for the Minnesota pie lady Marjorie Johnson. I think Mecca was writing for City Pages back then. Later I came to know her as a restaurant cook and now Chef. What I got from her were the experiences of exclusion and repression that are all too common in the restaurant world.

Music;

"BLM (I Can't Breathe)" by Jihfa 2020 - Licensed under CC By 3.0

The upheaval the restaurant industry is going through now is no secret or hidden from view. We wear it on our sleeve with protest and the warning of a new normal. The nature of our business is to gather people together. Now we are asked to try to do that without letting too many people encounter each other too closely. We’re also treating our dining rooms as “clean rooms” with the staff looking and acting more like scrub nurses than cooks and servers.

Adam Platt is an observer, and the restaurant business seems to get a little more attention than the rest of the busines world he observes as executive editor for Twin Cities Business Magazine. It’s this affinity to hospitality that first brought my attention to his food writing at MSP Magazine.

Episode Highlights;

• MSP Magazine
• Twin Cities Business Magazine
• Independent Restaurant Coalition
• Restaurant Stabilization Fund; Endangered Restaurants Say $120 Billion Aid Would Pay for Itself, Washington Post 6/10/20 
• Fanny’s Restaurant Meat Sauce; Rediscovering Fanny's famous spaghetti sauce, Chicago Tribune, 8/10/03
• Chicago Cubs

Unlike just about any other industry, restaurants are truly a sum of its parts. Each part needing to fit flawlessly into the others to create the “thing” that draws guests to it and keeps them connected to it for years and sometimes decades. Jim Smart has learned over the years that when creating a restaurant, a hundred things need to go right and another hundred need to go perfectly. Now in the midst of the restaurant industry re-boot as the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be coming under some sort of control, restaurant designers are being tasked with the job of making plexi-glass look and feel sexy among other challenging assignments. The conditions may be changing, the goal remains to make a place look and feel right for the operator and the guests.

Here are some highlights of our conversation;

• Cocooning, a concept first noted by Faith Popcorn is becoming an important element in restaurant design and re-fit post pandemic.
• Black Sheep Playbook – plans for re-opening a restaurant
• The Kenwood Restaurant
• Smart Associates – website
• Smart Associates – Facebook @smartassociatesltd

Music : Jason Shaw

Solo Acoustic Guitar

Plantation

Link: https://audionautix.com/ 

Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com

When the Coronavirus began to spread out of Wuhan China, Italy became the first target. Restaurants were completely closed at first. Then, eventually things loosened to allow takeout and delivery. Two styles of eating that most Italians had rarely experienced. After 2 months the restaurants started come back with restrictions. Restrictions that are somewhat easier to swallow than those imposed so far by most states as they give permission to resume the restaurant business.  

Episode Highlights:

• Michael Cortelletti’s Food Democracy ; a small group of hospitality businesses including artisan pizza, pasta restaurants, an ice cream shop and a financial interest in winemaking, brewing and hospitality technology.
• The prescient re-arranging of credit and financing helped Food Democray ride the shutdown wave a little more comfortably than most restaurants or restaurant groups.
• Italian government’s version of a Payroll Protection Plan
• Pizza and Pasta are not good travel companions. There was a learning curve to the new operating model of takeout and delivery.

Music;

Modern Jazz Samba by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4063-modern-jazz-samba

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Reaching Out by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4265-reaching-out

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Wide Open Road by Claus Appel

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4703-wide-open-road-

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

When restaurants begin to make the changes they’ll need to make as the lockdown orders diminish, having a designer’s eye to advise and provide solutions can  make the “new normal” look and feel as palatable as it can be…considering. Here are some bullet points of a conversation with designer and architect Adam Meyer, AIA, LEED Accredited Professional:

• Studio M Architects are poised to complete a few projects still going ahead plus a new brewery ready to start design and build
• The design of future restaurants will have to take into account no contact transactions, social distanced staff and guests
• Choices of material that are easily cleaned and sanitized will also be part of the conversation
• Solving or mitigating “Sick Building Syndrome” involving poor ventilation will be a major priority in design.

Studio M Architects

Some highlights from the Studio M portfolio

In Bloom

Red Cow

Uberrito

The Gorton fisherman he’s not. But I whenever we spoke, the image of a gnarled wind-swept chap standing at the helm in a yellow rain slicker kept popping in my head. Aaron Sechler is a supplier of Alaskan salmon and halibut to restaurants and direct to consumers via his version of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) that he refers to as a CSF (Community Supported Fishery). He’s leveraged his relationships with some of the boat captains who follow sustainable fishing practices in the waters off the rugged Southern Alaskan coast and river basins like Copper River to be a buyer of their just caught products.

We talked about the fish supply chain, from water to table, and how he’s trying to manage it now in the midst of the Coronavirus shutdown. We touched on how getting product to market is now and what it will be like as things start to loosen up and get back to the “new normal”, whatever that will be.

Along the way, his open and generous nature gave us a peek at his life that took him from the restaurant business of the Twin Cities to the bays and inlets of Alaska.

Restaurants are permanently closing, the PPP loans aren’t working for everyone. What will save the industry from collapse?

As deeply involved as you can get in a subject sometimes, for me that being the hospitality/restaurant industry, it can be pretty easy to lose perspective of how the rest of the world sees the things that you feel are so important. So when I received an email from a journalist wondering if I’d like to have her as a guest to talk about an article she just had published on the Washington Monthly Magazine website about the restaurant business during the pandemic, my Spidey sense saw the opportunity to step out of my bubble to view the subject from another perspective.

What I got was a peek into the investigative process to define the problems and search for the solutions on hand so far by a person who had a toe in the restaurant business while being able to see the larger picture with the eye of a reporter.

In week 8 of the lockdown the restaurant business around the country is beginning to stir like the giant it is with the thought of open dining rooms right around the corner dancing in their foggy heads. Shaking off the sleepy dreamlike state it was forced to take and testing the shaky ground beneath them.

After weeks of making it up as they go along. A well-practiced ability most restaurant people seem to have. The time is creeping closer for some and rolled over for others to start on the path, “back to normal”.

www.saverestaurants.com

www.tcrestaurants.com

www.restaurant.org

Nationwide Movements Mobilize to Save The Restaurant Industry – Food & Wine Magazine 5/11/2020

 Music; David Hilowitz   

Go anywhere today (this being the first week of May 2020) and you are faced with nearly empty streets shuttered shops and restaurants. The smattering of people you do see are broken into two major categories, the defiant without masks and the concerned ones covered not only with a mask, but often in a homemade PPE of sorts. What is less obvious but none the less a missing texture of our former existence are the gathered wedding guests waiting outside the church for the bride and groom to emerge or the parking lot filled with cars that carried partiers to an event. These missing pieces were the bread and butter of Chowgirls Catering, a company Amy Brown and her partner Heidi Andermak built from a tiny two-person enterprise to one of the premier caterers in the Twin Cities. Then in mid-March, like many other businesses they were closed by executive order from the Governor to help control the Covid-19 pandemic. For Chowgirls, that meant canceling or indefinitely postponing all the weddings, corporate events, birthday parties and other social events already booked for the near future. It even meant the cancellation of Chowgirls own “Sweet Sixteen” anniversary party celebrating their 16 years in business.

Many hospitality businesses, both restaurants and caterers, pivoted to takeout and delivery when the lockdown happened. Others, like Chowgirls, turned to their communities and said, “how can we help”. And so…Minnesota Central Kitchen was born in the Chowgirls kitchen. With the help of Second Harvest Heartland and others they have served over 70,000 donated meals so far and according to Amy, there’s no reason to stop even when Chowgirls gets the opportunity to get back up and running again.

Music: Bright Ideas by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Mark Gordon is a Chef. He’s not a famous Chef. And unless you lived, worked and ate in the Bay Area you never heard of him. Besides being a friend of mine, the reason I wanted to talk with him was because he’s indicative of the men and women who make it happen every day. One of the guys who makes sure the best ingredients wind up on your plate in the most creative way possible. He’s been the backbone of the same two restaurants in San Francisco, Terzo and Rose’s Cafe for 20 years. He’s now semi-retired yet still involved with those restaurants as a consultant and valued advisor. With that, he has a unique philosophical outlook on the business. I wanted to include him here to have his perspective and voice from a place of experience and a quiet love for the business.

The constriction of the restaurant business during the Covid-19 Pandemic sent many Chefs and operators into emotional and psychological places they don’t know how to deal with. But I can see why Mark, even though paring down his activities, has kept on with the restaurants he loved to be that voice of reason.