A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
On a rainy Monday afternoon in May, there was a mandatory front of the house (FOH) meeting for Bank Street Brewhouse’s employees. The Mother’s Day brunch had gone quite well, and capped the highest sales week of the year to date.
(For those readers interested in foreshadowing: "But all was not as it seemed")
At the FOH meeting, my business partners at New Albanian Brewing Company joined me in performing a solemn ritual, one we’d never before had to do. We threw in the towel, raised a white flag and punted. We shuttered the Bank Street Brewhouse kitchen, and began planning for altered existence as a brewery taproom only.
In keeping with the endearingly quirky history of our company, it was a hard transformation to explain. We were not closing a business, because we would remain open to the public, selling NABC house beers for immediate consumption and carryout. The brewery would continue to brew, and beer distribution to the outside world would be uninterrupted.
In fact, while any transition is a coin flip, the upside to being a taproom alone appeared boundless in terms of creativity. We already had customers, and all we had to do was sell a new concept to them.
For many, the closing of the BSB kitchen has proven a deal-breaker, and that’s understandable. To them, nothing seemed broken – so why fix it? However, our decision was all about the numbers. No matter the abacus, we just couldn’t make them come out right. It was clear for a very long time. We merely chose to ignore it, and to continue making tweaks when minor fixes couldn’t address larger issues.
It was frustrating and bittersweet, our perfectly rational act of analysis and reformatting. That’s probably because eating and drinking aren’t always numerical equations; they’re spiritual, sacramental acts, and any alterations to their cadence can be a decided jolt.
At the same time, the opportunity to renew the business by focusing on beer and placemaking continues to be positively invigorating. Moreover, my hope is that by plunging forward into a creative unknown, at least a few ghosts of decisions past will leave me alone.
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If being in the restaurant business was easy, everyone would be doing it … and making money. NABC should know, right?
When Bank Street Brewhouse debuted in 2009, we’d operated a pizzeria in New Albany for more than 20 years, and we all thought we knew a thing or two about kitchens. How hard could it possibly be to have a brand new (well, for us) stand-alone culinary concept, one requiring completely different equipment, a well-trained, chef-driven staff, two dozen hitherto unknown suppliers, and a whole pot of rapidly diminishing money?
An overnight leap from conveyor pizza oven to French terminology couldn’t be that difficult, right? To the contrary. Looking back, it would seem that even when draft craft beer is consumed in copious quantities, it isn’t enough to cure one’s rampant naiveté.
Given the sheer complexity of the learning curve, it’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did. Having quality people helped. From start to finish, our employees were troupers. Letting them go was the hardest act I’ve been obliged to perform in 22 years as a business owner.
When we opened BSB’s doors in 2009, our talented young chef Josh Lehman hit the ground running with innovative small plates, multiple homemade sauces for hand-cut frites and a Croque Madame better than any I’ve ever consumed in Belgium.
Local eyes blinked – at the food, portions and prices. We referred to it as a “gastropub,” a term that worried me. For one, the prefix “gastro-“ was unknown in New Albany apart from customarily being attached to bouts of “intestinal flu.” Moreover, the word itself struck me as vaguely counter-egalitarian. Were we setting ourselves up for a fall?
We tried to use local farm-raised meats and produce whenever possible, and alongside our own beers, there were craft sodas, small-batch spirits from independent companies and Indiana-made wines. I suppose it really was a gastropub, albeit located in a city seemingly forever defined by steam tables and White Castle.
Off we went, opening in March of 2009, and what I’ll always remember about the first weeks comes in three broad groupings of consumer feedback (followed by my gentle, veiled whisper in reply):
Size matters: “C’mon, Rog -- these portions are way too small for the price! Ya, gotta feed people, you know?”
(but you see; local food and quality labor is a bit more expensive, in the kitchen as with the BREWERY we have here … )
Low-calorie soda rules: “Where’s my Diet Coke, and while you’re at it, how about a soda straw? What do you mean, no Diet Coke? We won’t be back, no sir.”
(but we’re trying to stay away from evil multi-nationals, and besides, we’re a BREWERY too … )
Wine whines: “I know you want to be local and all, except that local wine is so incredibly wretched, so can you just bring in something from Chile, California or France? You know, for the sake of the food!”
(if I believe that local wine can’t be any good, then how am I supposed to feel about local beer, seeing as though we’re a BREWERY and all … )
The gastropub concept evolved, then devolved. The menu became more fixed, and less experimental. Josh moved on, to be replaced by Matt Weirich, who managed to find a better overall balance. Somewhere along the way, we began using the phrase “bistro cuisine.”
A Sunday brunch was added to the build-your-own Bloody Mary Bar, and both became popular. As the kitchen stabilized, we developed a following. We even succeeded in convincing diners to drink local wine, and many of them approved.
When Bank Street Brewhouse was hitting on all cylinders, it was great, and when we weren’t, it still was fairly good. In fact, there was only one problem: The restaurant remained unprofitable.
Some times were better than others, but in five years, we never found a sweet spot when it came to the numbers, and the restaurant became a slow-bleeding, loss-leader of a vanity project. In some ways we were fortunate; there always was the pizzeria and brewing operations, and because of them, the noble experiment lasted longer than it would have otherwise, but early in 2014, it became obvious that the whole company was being starved of investment.
It had to change, and so it did. Not that it was easy …
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The jury’s still out, and BSB’s new phase is evolving.
One thing I didn’t clearly grasp until the kitchen stopped was the extent to which it had become a veritable 800-lb gorilla, albeit one existing on life support. In a business that had been imagined as balanced between FOH and brewery, with one supporting the other, we’d gotten to a point where even the smallest bright marketing idea (beer, events, opening hours, promotions) had to be vetted in the strict context of the food program’s needs, which became maddening.
Now, anything goes. An idea may be good or bad, but at least there is nothing to prevent it being tried. We can tout a burger wagon, another restaurant’s carry-out menu, delivery pizza and a pop-up dinner – all at the very same time, sans contradictions. We can host social gatherings, musical performances, flea markets, guerrilla theater, revolutionary cells … or just watch a game and drain pints.
It is liberating.
Gazing at those unrepentant numbers for almost eight weeks since the shift, I’ve noticed one very interesting trend. Of course, gone are the food sales, along with their high cost in both ingredients and labor. Still there, holding strong, are the house-brewed beer sales, which have accounted for only marginally less in the absence of food than they did when accompanying a gastropub’s meals. Beer alone may or may not be enough; only time will tell. But if the value of the food didn’t enhance the beer any more than that, what was its purpose in the first place?
I can live with these beer sales figures -- and live without being told that it simply cannot be expected of discerning diners to eat locally sourced cuisine of a certain quality without commensurate wine from somewhere else available alongside it. Perhaps we needed to be reminded that while food is good and liquor is quicker, we’re all about the beer.
Now we can proceed to sink or swim accordingly, and that sounds fair to me.
