Pastiche at The Metro

I thought I knew better, and I was wrong...

One quick note: I said this way back in the beginning, and this seems a good time to repeat it- these stories are just that, stories. Sometimes I was present when things happened, other times they were relayed to me by others who were there. Though I was usually at Brown Deer, as I had my hands full there, I was in regular touch with Phil and Rachael and, when necessary, hotel management. I always did my best to verify everything, because when there are problems, there’s finger pointing, and two sides to every coin. There were problems during this time, and some are hard to believe. If I’ve told you something that’s wrong, let me know and show me why I’m wrong, and I’ll be happy to correct it. So anyway… back to this one.

I reached out to Jamie about a year or so before our lease was going to be up. A few months earlier, he’d brought some friends to Pastiche, and after a nice dinner and a few glasses of wine, he was feeling pretty warm and fuzzy. Giving in to nostalgia, he wistfully recounted our good times together, how he missed my cooking and how fun it’d been being on top of the game back then. He said it was the only time the restaurant had made any money. After that, he said he was sorry that I’d left and asked me why I’d gone. I replied that he’d fired me because he “wanted to go in a different direction”. He canted his head and looked surprised for a moment until he remembered, nodded, and remarked that that hadn’t been one of his best decisions. We laughed it off and had another glass of wine.

So I felt like there was something left there we might be able to rebuild on. Being that we were both older and presumably smarter, that there was enough water gone under that bridge, and that the Hotel Metro had been existing without a decent restaurant for so many years, I started thinking about whether or not that might be a good move for us.

Downtown in 2014-15 seemed on the upswing. The DNC had just announced that they’d chosen Milwaukee to host their convention in 2020, there were plans to start a light rail project (eventually the “Hop”) that’d make it easier to get around, and NML was ready to expand their campus dramatically. Bay View was still cool, but there were signs of restaurant saturation that would dilute everyone’s share of the dining pie. During the time we’d opened and experienced some initial success, a few other places like Odd Duck, Hue, and even C.1880 in Walker’s Point opened, and there was talk of others on the way. Downtown was populated by a few steakhouses and some other nice restaurants, but nothing really like us. I emailed Jamie.

You could ask why I was thinking it’d be a good idea to get back in with these same guys that had cost me so much back in 2000. It’d be a fair question. My answer would be because we’re all businessmen, and if they can profit from our being in their hotel, they would be likely to entertain the idea. I felt we could profit in that it’d give us at least two revenue centers we hadn’t been able to enjoy in Bay View; room service and banquets. I felt that I knew the place well, and I had ideas for the rooftop lounge and for some cool events we could do. I’d succeeded there before. It felt good to me. When I met with Jamie and John, it was all positive and felt like we had that old mojo going again. I was optimistic, but also realistic.

Hotel work is a hard dollar.

Anyone who’s operated their restaurant in a hotel, even a beautiful and well-run hotel, can tell you that it’s a unique challenge. First of all, you’re never really closed, which means there are built in inefficiencies you have to work with, like paying a third shift to sit around and wait to see if a late night room service order comes in, or having to work with three different menus every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. People don’t expect much of a hotel restaurant, so they often ask the concierge to book them a table at the place across the street or at a well-known place they saw online. You have to practically pull them in to get them to even have a cocktail at your bar. In a hotel, you’ve got a lot of people doing different things that affect you. Instead of having a linen service, you have to depend on the hotel laundry. Instead of having your restaurant manager handling the booking and execution of your banquets and meetings, there’s a hotel sales staff. Instead of a host or hostess, the person the guest comes into contact first is the concierge. In other words, as opposed to a truly independent restaurant, you’re subjected to the whims and foibles of people who have no vested interest in your success.

I’m not naive when it comes to all that, but I just kept going back to the idea that we were all there to make money; the lease was even set up so it’d be in all of our best interests to work together to do so. It seemed that Jamie and John were on the same page with that, which is why I had such a hard time understanding how it all went so wrong.

In the end, it was basic human nature that doused any hope we’d had of succeeding there. After we signed the lease and before we even started operating the restaurant, a friendly member of the sales staff let us know that the General Manager of the hotel told them that since the hotel no longer had any financial interest in booking banquets and meetings, they didn’t need to put their effort into anything other than selling room blocks. To me, this was a big problem in that we were paying a healthy percentage of their salaries as part of the lease agreement, yet had no authority or leverage to get them to do their jobs. The hotel GM was a personal friend of Jamie’s and, although previously a successful businessman in his own right, was not a leader or even experienced in running a hotel, and he treated it like a pastime rather than a serious and challenging job. John had always been more on the periphery and Jamie had always been in charge of operations, but Jamie had become distracted and was now gone, and John was opening some restaurant or pub in Berlin. The hotel staff, in reaction to our presence, had bristled at the idea that they couldn’t just go back behind the bar and pour themselves a soda or grab a bowlful of bar snacks. There was never a time when our bartender wouldn’t give them one, but it was a territorial dispute. The laundry put our stuff at the bottom of their priority list, and since half the machines or half the people who were supposed to be running them were either out of service or absent on any given day, we quickly went to a linen service for our needs, which increased our costs but at least we had kitchen towels and linens for the dining room. The room service was delivered by the valets, so they’d benefit from the tips, but it was also low on their list so the orders often sat in the kitchen for a half hour or more, then when the guest would complain about the food, the valets and front desk would blame the kitchen.

No matter what you do, though, It’s impossible to succeed when every time you turn around, someone is sabotaging your work. Phil, our GM, and Rachael, the Executive Chef and Partner, were frustrated and demoralized. As many times as they tried to reason with the hotel GM, or the sales staff, or pretty much anyone there, it didn’t matter. The wanted us to fail because we were working hard and slowly gaining ground, which made them look bad because they had no desire to do anything more than necessary to maintain the status quo and not lose their jobs. No one there seemed to see the bigger picture.

It became very clear that I’d been wrong in thinking that the desire for financial success would unite us.

She looked nice dressed up for the holidays.

What made it even more inexplicable in my mind was that our rent was based on a fixed percentage of our revenue.

In order for the hotel to make money on the restaurant lease, the restaurant needed to make money. It’s easy and transparent math; if we’re paying them 5% of or gross revenue and sales are $100K, our rent is $5000.00. If our sales are half that, our rent is, too. There was no logical reason for them to try to make us fail, except human nature. We had invaded their space and it didn’t matter how well we treated them or how nice we were, it was about ego and I’d failed to see that.

Earlier that same year, we’d bought the River Lane Inn in Brown Deer from Jim and Claire Marks. I had no desire to have two restaurants, but since I’d invested a considerable amount of money into having an attorney draw up a fair lease and we’d negotiated for close to a year, I asked Rachael if she wanted to have the Metro Pastiche for herself. I told her she could do pretty much whatever she wanted to with the food as long as it was within the rather loose parameters of what we’d become known for. As a career move, it seemed like a good thing for her, and I felt she was ready. Phil would be along with her to make sure the business and service were on point, and as talented and hardworking as both of them were, there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t be terrific. I told them that I’d help as much as I could but that my plate was pretty full with the place in Brown Deer. We got both places up and running and lots of people were coming out to kick the tires. Everyone was working hard at both places, trying to keep up with the business spikes and challenges that new places experience, but that’ll be another story.

Andrew was helping at the Metro, and one night shortly after we opened, he called me at Brown Deer. The kitchen was about an inch deep in filthy, smelly water backing up from the floor drains. He and another guy were mopping as fast as they could, but it was getting worse. “Here we go again”, I thought, and grabbed my car keys to head downtown for a long night…