Kevin Boehm, cofounder, Boka Restaurant Group

Hi, I’m Stacy Shoemaker Rauen, editor in chief at Hospitality Design magazine. Welcome to our second edition of our podcast “What I’ve Learned” where I sit down with Kevin Boehm, cofounder of Boka Restaurant Group. I’ve known Kevin for years and have been a big fan of his restaurants throughout Chicago, like the Girl and the Goat but after hearing his moving speech at the Welcome Conference here in New York, I knew I had to invite him to our podcast. Kevin is one of those rare breeds who knew he wanted to open a restaurant from a very early age, and he has achieved that and so much more with his partner Rob Katz. His honest and humble approach is no less than inspiring. His spaces from a handful of designers are beautiful, and I love that his best lesson learned came from a a trip to a Wendy’s.

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi everyone, I’m here with Kevin Boehm from Boka Restaurant Group. Hi, Kevin, thanks so much for joining us.

Kevin Boehm: Hi Stacy.

SSR: Welcome to our second iteration of our podcast. Thanks for being a little bit of a guinea pig with us.

KB: I’m super happy to be here. I like being a guinea pig.

SSR: So the whole idea of the podcast is to get to know you a little bit better and learn what you’ve learned—to steal a little bit of your secrets of success.

KB: I promise to be candid.

SSR: Yes, please be. Growing up in Springfield, Illinois, did you know that you wanted to be a restaurateur? Was hospitality in your blood? Was there any kind of early childhood influences?

KB: Well, first of all, Springfield obviously is a culinary hotbed.

SSR: Well, obviously.

KB: It’s funny. I told my parents when I was 10 that I wanted to own my own restaurant. I didn’t know what the word restaurateur was at that point, of course. I grew up pretty modestly. I was kind of attracted to things that were opulent. I would watch Dynasty and I’m, like, ‘Why is Alexis Carrington eating caviar?’ You know, stuff like that. And at the same time, the people that I dug on TV, like Jack Tripper was a chef on Three’s Company, and Rick on Magnum P.I. owned the bar. I was intrigued by that whole thing, so at 10 I told my parents, ‘Yep, that’s what I’m going to do,’ some combination of that. But I was intrigued by fancy things because we were decidedly not fancy.

SSR: Well, it started you off on something good, apparently. And then you went to University of Illinois?

KB: I did.

SSR: But then you dropped out?

KB: I did. It doesn’t seem really realistic for some kid in Springfield, Illinois who doesn’t know anyone who’s in the restaurant business to just go and say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go to’ … I didn’t even know what culinary school was. It’s a much different landscape. It’s much cooler to be the in restaurant business or be a chef or do those things now than it was then. I was a good student. All my friends were going to college. I always wanted to go to the University of Illinois, so I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll go,’ but I get there, and I’m surrounded by all these people who knew exactly what they want to do. And I realized that most college kids don’t know what they want to [do], but for some reason my circle were all these people who had a ton of direction.

Two of my roommates, one of them Mike Hopkins was the last astronaut in space, so he was an aeronautical engineering major and I’m like, ‘So what are you going to do?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m going to be an astronaut,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, good luck.’ There’s been like 300 of them ever, and he became an astronaut. And then, one of my other roommates, Dave Eggers, becomes a finalist for the Pulitzer, and  Tom Hanks turned two of his books into [movies], so he was the editor of the Daily Illini, and knew he wanted to be a writer. So I felt a little bit like a fraud because I knew I wanted to be in the restaurant business and here I am studying political science.

Then one morning, I woke up and I said, ‘I’m going to drop out. I’m going to go work at a legitimate restaurant.’ And I could always come back. This is the beginning of my junior year. I was just like, what’s the worst scenario here? I go and I don’t like it or I fail and I come back and I finish school. So I packed my jeep up. I had about $500 in cash. I sold everything I had except what would fit in my Suzuki Samurai, and if you remember Suzuki Samurai, it’s small. It was like my pictures and some clothes. And I drove. I was going to drive to Florida. I was so sick of cold weather. And I didn’t really know where great restaurants were. But I figured, hey, tourists, it’s on the water, access to fresh fish—this was my rationalization. I go, ‘Yeah, I’ll just go to Florida.’ So I get to north Florida, and I’m like, I’m going to run out of money if I go too much farther. So I stopped in the panhandle of Florida, and I worked in Panama City. I get there, and no one will hire me. It’s the winter time, and the restaurants aren’t really hiring and so the only job I could get was a job at an amusement park.

All of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Okay, I dropped out of school and now I’m running the bumper boats in Panama City, Florida. What is happening right now?’ Then one morning, I just woke up and I go, ‘I’m going to write a fake résumé.’ And I went to one of those résumé places and I wrote a résumé up that was all these fake restaurants that had all gone out of business so they couldn’t call for a reference. I walked into the most fine dining restaurant in the city, and I’m interviewing. I remember the general manager Mike was like, ‘So, Kevin, what’s your favorite grape varietal?’ And I had no idea what he meant by that, and I’m like, grape varietal? And so Alice, who owns the restaurant, was walking by at the time, and she grabbed me by the cheek and she slapped me on the cheek and she goes, ‘I like this one, Mike. Hire this one.’ And he goes, ‘I guess you got the job, kid.’ I became a captain at this restaurant with no experience. I immediately went to the Jr. Food Store and bought a bottle of wine and a wine knife and went home and kept sticking the cork in and learning how to open a bottle of wine. And I faked it until I made it.

So I got a job there and I ended up getting a second job and basically I start dating a girl who was a really good cook and also wanted to open up her own restaurant. So the two of us saved our money and we opened up a little tiny restaurant called Lazy Daze Café. That was 26 years ago, six tables, and just the two of us in Seaside, Florida, which was like 75 miles away from there. And if you’ve ever seen The Truman Show, that’s Seaside. It’s in a lot of design magazines, it was this planned community, this little utopia. The first time I ever went out there, and I just spoke at the Welcome Conference and I told this story, but it’s such a great story, I took her to a little restaurant there called Josephine’s [Bed & Breakfast], and I walk in the restaurant and Bruce Albert who is the maitre d’ was taking us to our table, and as I’m walking to our table—there are only like eight tables in the whole restaurant—the table next to us is these guys who are drunk and loud and obnoxious, and I’m trying to have this romantic evening with my girl and I’m bummed out. I open up my menu and there’s a taped note inside and it said, ‘Dear Mr. Boehm, the guy on your left is an asshole. He will be gone soon, until then bear with us.’ And I was like, I like this town. And we left there and when the sun went down, they pulled a movie screen down and they showed Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the town square, and I sat there and a woman came by with the little box with wines in it and she’s like, ‘Sir, would you like a glass of Chardonnay?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I would like a glass of Chardonnay,’ and I sat there and drank wine and watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I said, ‘I am moving back here and I’m going to open up a restaurant,’ and we did, the two of us did together. That was restaurant one, Lazy Daze Café, 26 years ago.

SSR: And now look at where you are. So you had Lazy Daze, and then you continued, right? The two of you opened more?

KB: Well, no, the two of us did not. So my first lesson in the restaurant business: Do not open up a restaurant with a person that you are also dating. That seems to be a bad plan. So we fought a lot. Seaside got very popular. Time magazine did a big piece on it, and the real estate started to go up and somebody wanted our building and so they bought us out. A guy bought our restaurant, and he turned it into a bigger restaurant and it was there for years. So we took that money and she opened up a clothing shop, and I opened up a wine bar, sushi bar, rock ‘n’ roll bar. I had actually gone to New York, and I had gone to SoHo Wine Bar and Kitchen and this place called Mad 61 that was like wines and burgers and I was, like, maybe I do something really simple, and I was like, man, I could do a sushi bar without a hood. And so this is pretty crazy in the Florida Panhandle. A wine bar, a sushi bar, rock ‘n’ roll bar was way crazy in 1995. But I was like, oh, what the heck, and it worked. We did 100 wines by the glass, live music seven nights a week, and we did sushi until three in the morning.

SSR: Wow, and it was popular?

KB: It was popular, and it was fun. And it was really good memories. I really liked that place. And then, once again, a guy came to me and was like, ‘I’d really like to buy your bar.’ I was having so much fun, I was like, ‘I’m not selling this bar,’ and he was like, ‘Well, what if I offered you this?’ And I’d be like, ‘The answer is yes.’ But my idea at that point was sort of like, I wanted to a certain extent flip restaurants because I knew the ultimate goal was New York, San Francisco, Chicago. It was one of those three cities that I wanted to get to eventually. I knew that I was playing Double-A baseball, and I was like, I’m pretty good in Double-A baseball. I’m hitting 305 in Double-A baseball, but let’s see if I can hit a major league curve ball. It took me a few more cities to figure that out. I would come up to Chicago, honestly, and I would have dinner. I remember going up there and having dinner at Gordon and having dinner at this place called Gypsy and then being like, okay, I am nowhere near ready for this. This is so much more refined, and so much smarter than what I’m doing right now. The one thing that I knew at that point, I go, okay, I’m good at hospitality. I can make people feel good, and I try really hard and I’m nice. I like people. And I think it resonates with people, the kind of hospitality I give. But all the other stuff, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I was basically getting my bachelor’s degree. Those first four restaurants to me is always like me getting my bachelor’s and my master’s.

SSR: Trial by fire. You said four. So you had the one in Seaside and then you had the sushi [restaurant].

KB: Yeah, two in Seaside, and then I went back to my hometown. I had gone up to Chicago, and I’d looked and a) I can’t afford this yet and b) I’m not smart enough. So I go, I’m going to open in my hometown and I’m going to do a full-size restaurant. My first restaurant was 24 seats, and the sushi bar/wine bar was 70 seats. I did 140 seat fine dining restaurant in Springfield, Illinois with a staff of 40. There are so many things that I hadn’t done before, and it worked. It’s still open actually. I just went to the 20th anniversary of it.

SSR: That’s pretty amazing.

KB: It turned 20 in April of 2018.

SSR: Well, in a lifetime of a restaurant, that doesn’t always happen.

KB: It does not. It’s like dog years, that restaurant is 140 years old. So we went in there and we tried to do something that kind of felt like the big city in Springfield, and it was nice to go back to my hometown and do something, and it worked. And once again, somebody came to me and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to open up more of these?’ And I said, ‘Not really. I don’t know if that’s interesting to me.’ And they go, ‘Well, would you sell this one to me?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and [he] made me an offer and I took it, and I was off again.

SSR: And then you landed in?

KB: Then I went to Chicago again. And I was looking in Chicago and these developers knew me in Nashville through someone else, actually through the singer Kim Carnes who sang “Bette Davis Eyes.” I had met Kim in Seaside. She used to go down there to write songs, and her and this songwriter Greg Barnhill was her co-writer and we became close friends, and she actually came up and sang at my opening in Springfield. Her son had worked for this development company, and they go, ‘We know this guy, and he’s really good,’ and they were doing the Gulch at that point, which has now exploded. I was the first person to open in the Gulch. Of all of the 26 restaurants that I’ve done, this is the one that did not work out well.

SSR: What was it? Was it just timing or concept?

KB: You know what, it’s a long story. But a lot of it was timing. [It was] too early, and probably too big for me at that point. It was a 10,000-square-foot restaurant. So from the time I opened my first to the time I opened up this restaurant was just six years, and all of a sudden, it was only seven and a half years or eight years before that I landed in Panama City in my Samurai and didn’t know anything. I had moved really, really fast, and I think this business can make you humble very quickly. I think I had my feathers a little too high in the air, and I think I lost my middle class sensibility a bit. And it wasn’t all my fault, but looking back on it, I can look at myself in the mirror and say, you know what, ‘You cut a bad deal, you did this wrong, you should have done a smaller restaurant,’ and all that sort of stuff. And even though we did some good things there, I’m not a regret guy because if that restaurant works, I don’t meet my wife, I don’t have my three beautiful kids, and I never go to Chicago, and I don’t think I could have grown like I did. So I’m happy it all happened, but it was painful.

SSR: Yeah, I’m sure. It’s always easier looking back.

KB: It was painful. But what happened out of it is, my mom is one of those people who doesn’t say a lot of things but when she does, she has some gems of advice. And she had said to me, she goes, ‘Don’t go backwards.’ I could have done something else in Nashville. I could have gone back to Seaside. I could have done something in Springfield. She goes, ‘You’ve always wanted to go to Chicago, and you’ve always been able to make things work, so go up to Chicago and make it work.’ So I go up to Chicago, and I meet Rob Katz.

SSR: How did you two meet?

KB: We have a very good mutual friend. Rob had four very successful nightclubs in Chicago. I was looking to get into Chicago, and he was looking to get out of nightclubs and get into restaurants. So our friend was just like, ‘You guys should at the very least have a cup of coffee.’ So we were slated to have a 15-minute cup of coffee just to chat and we sat there for four hours, and at the end of those four hours we were like, ‘What’s the worst that could happen? Let’s open up one restaurant,’ and that restaurant is Boka.

SSR: That’s amazing. And what’s the name behind it?

KB: It’s my last name and his last name shoved together. It’s Boehm and Katz. Seventeen years ago we sat and had a cup of coffee and we kind of sketched it out. It took us a while to get it opened. It was long. We had three deals fall apart. We finally find a building, get the deal done, and we opened 15 years ago, and it’s been a heck of a journey since then. 

SSR: What has it been now: 25 restaurants or 20 restaurants.

KB: Yeah, we’ve done 20 or 21 together in 16 years.

SSR: That’s pretty intense, pretty crazy.

KB: It’s been intense. It’s been intense. But you know what’s great about is this is so hard, and so rare in partnerships, Rob and I are really close friends, we’re like family. And honestly, we’ve had like three fights in 17 years. One of them was over fantasy football, one of them was over a game of darts, and I think one of them was restaurant related. Our rule is nobody digs their heels in. If you feel really passionate about something, you state your case, and if you’re more passionate than the other one, then the other one lets you have it. It’s served us well.

SSR:  That’s easier said than done though.

KB: It is. It’s because you get really emotional. I’m not saying we don’t have spirited conversations. Both of us stating our passionate case can get a little courtroom-ish sometimes.

SSR: But it’s kept you going.

KB: It has.

SSR: Did you guys have a plan for Boka or was it let’s try one and see where we go?

KB: In the beginning, there was no plan. The plan was, here’s Lincoln Park. And Lincoln Park is Charlie Trotter’s and Umbria, and on the other side, it’s Gamekeepers and more bar-like things. There wasn’t a lot of dining in between that. We said, what if we do a contemporary American restaurant that’s a la carte and has some sensibility to it but is still chef driven? It’s a pocket that is missing. Nobody knew who we were, and nobody knew who our original chef was. We just found a chef through doing tastings. We were these under-the-radar guys, and we opened, and Chicago magazine came and really liked it and wrote this great story and that kind of gave us a little bit of a jump start.

But there was no plan, though. The plan came after that. We would close the restaurant. Six nights a week, Rob and I would open to close. At the end of the night, we’d sit at the bar and pull cocktail napkins out and we started to sketch this architecture. It would start with a conversation: ‘Are we just going to be this company that is Giuseppe Scurato, who was the chef at the time, or is this going to be a company where we’re going to do a bunch of restaurants with Giuseppe, or are we going to be a company that has several different chefs and we’re looking for talent all the time?’ And I go, ‘Why can’t we be that?’ Because we were looking at all these other companies, you know the John-Georges of the world and the Wolfgang Pucks of the world and these guys their companies were based around the identity of one chef. And we go, ‘Why can’t we be the identity of multiple chefs?’ And we said, ‘We can, but how are we going to get that talent to come work for us,’ and so we have to prove something.

And when Giuseppe Scurato left and Giuseppe Tentori came in, when he won Food & Wine‘s Best New Chef. and that’s over 10 years ago now, I think people looked at us a little bit differently. They were, like, ‘Wait a second.’ We were the nice kids. ‘Oh, I like those kids. Those are nice kids.’ Then it was a little more legitimate.Then we started to work with bigger chefs. First, it was Giuseppe and then, it was Ryan Poli, then it was Stephanie Izard, and then it was Paul Virant, and then it was Chris Pandel, Mark Hellyar, Jimmy Papadopoulos, and Lee Wolen. It just went from there, and it worked because every time we did a restaurant, we didn’t have to say, ‘Oh, do we think this person can do this concept?’ It was more like, ‘Let’s do a tasting with somebody and say, what would be perfect for them?’ And [that has led us to have a] diverse portfolio of restaurants.

SSR: Most of your restaurants are in Chicago, or all of them in Chicago.

KB: All of them right now.

SSR: So it’s hard to not compete with yourself, so this might have been a solution to some of that?

KB: We started out poorly. We opened Boka, Landmark, and Perennial, three contemporary American restaurants all within a mile of each other. And so it was like, okay, maybe we’re doing this wrong. Not that they didn’t work, they did, but they only worked to a certain level. And so we were just, like, we need to differentiate ourselves a little bit more, and not just food-wise but neighborhood-wise. Now you look at it, and we have restaurants in Gold Coast, Old Town, River North, and West Loop—a lot in West Loop. But some of the differentiation is that people don’t even know that Girl and the Goat, Duck Duck Goat, and Little Goat are part of Boka Restaurant Group. They just think, ‘Let’s go to Stephanie’s restaurant,’ and that’s okay. I’m totally okay with that. So that chef identity, putting that out there, out front, putting that out further than the Boka Restaurant Group identity allows people to think it’s not part of this … I hate the word corporate because to put it in musical terms, R.E.M was on I.R.S. Records in the beginning. I still want to be I.R.S Records. I don’t want to be R.E.M when they went to Warner Bros. I want to be an indie label still. When people think that the restaurant is just about that chef, I think we’re doing our job. I think that’s very I.R.S. of us.

SSR: It’s a smart mentality. It must be hard too because you guys are the ones growing this non-corporate identity so trying to be in the background and trying to push everything forward, I mean, it takes somebody without ego I guess is what I’m saying. It takes a more humble approach.

KB: Boka Restaurant Group has gotten a lot of press too, so I don’t want to act like we’re hiding in the woods or anything like that, but so far it’s worked. But you’ve got to be careful to not turn into the big bad monster. You don’t want to be a Jerry Bruckheimer film.

SSR: Is there a limit? Do you guys think you will keep growing as you have? You had a very intense year.

KB: We had an incredibly intense year and a half, two years. And to be completely honest, it was way too intense.

SSR: It was seven in 20 months.

KB: Seven in 20 months, which we’ll never do again. We kind of plot our own course, and next year we’re doing Girl and the Goat in Los Angeles, and we’re doing a project with the Hoxton hotels out of London, where we’re doing a couple concepts. It’s right across from Momotaro in the West Loop. It was actually slated for last year, but got pushed to this year, so next year’s kind of stacked, but I don’t see us after that ever doing more than one in a year, because we don’t have to. Boka Restaurant Group is a living, breathing thing. There are 2,200 employees. There are 30 people that work in our corporate office so this is all these people’s lives and careers, and they want to have growth. It’s not always about [our] ambition level. It’s about six chef partners ambition level. And all these people that work on our team, they want to see growth too. So sometimes you feel that pressure on your shoulders, but I think after this last stretch, and everybody wants us to slow it down a little bit.

SSR: You were already saying that you kind of get caught up in your own current.

KB: [You] get caught up in your own current. You built it. We had this little tiny pool when we were a kid. It was like this metal pool that you put together over ground. It was more than a kiddie pool but not a regular pool. But [my sister and I] would run around in it and try to make our own whirlpool, and after a while, it would just catch you and that’s what we’ve done. Last year, it was going so fast, I couldn’t stop it. It was like I was on this moving ride and I couldn’t get off, and I was like, ‘I want off. I’m getting sick. I’m nauseous.’

SSR: Well, now you’re through it. Has there been one restaurant of the portfolio—I know it’s hard to pick one, or maybe two—that you really learned something from or that was a story and a half, something that you had to put a little extra passion and love into that you came away knowing it was [worth it]?

KB: There’s a story like that with every restaurant that we opened. The other thing is we’ve never opened the same restaurant twice, so every time we’re learning something different. At my very first restaurant, on the third day we were open, I reached down to put a piece of bread in the oven, and the pilot light had gone out and the oven exploded in my face and caught my hair on fire. So we had to stop lunch, kick everybody out of the restaurant, and I went to the hospital.

I have a picture of me at Balena when we were opening and I’m on the stairs and my vice president just happened to catch it: to take a picture of me at that moment as I was crying on the stairs because the guy who was doing all of our glass installation … the frames had failed, and he didn’t want to tell us. We were waiting on him to open and he went radio silent, and we couldn’t find him for a week. I didn’t know what to do, and I just was sitting on the stairs and I was crying.

There are all these moments like that, and you hear that and you’re like, ‘Why would anybody do this business? It sounds terrible.’ But there’s something to it because it’s so hard and you’re in this foxhole with a lot people, it creates a couple things: On one side, it creates all this redemption when it’s good on the other side of it. You’re like ‘Oh my God, I worked so hard,’and then something good happens and you get to celebrate together. And it creates this really deep intense love with the people that you’ve worked really hard with. There are certain people in the world, obviously Rob, Abby Kritzler who has worked with us for over a decade, Ian Goldberg is the first employee we ever hired. He’s the vice president and partner of our company. I’ve been through so many wars with Ian, it’s unbelievable. So I love that feeling, and I don’t know that there are that many jobs that can create something like that.

You look at all these people that work in restaurants on a daily basis, it’s hard work. It’s physical, it’s mental. I’ve been talking a lot about mental health these last few months. It was in my speech at the Welcome Conference and my own dive into depression and anxiety. And these people on a daily basis give so much of themselves at the restaurants, and it’s hard. It can suck the life out of you sometimes, no matter how you feel. Imagine you’re a captain, and you work six days a week or five days a week, and it doesn’t matter how you feel, it doesn’t matter what happened in your life. You know, break ups are the worst. Somebody you love just broke up with you, and you still [have] to go to work and put on that game face. It’s hard. But at the end of the day, restaurant people are my favorite people on planet Earth. They’re emotional and they’re generous and they’re my favorite people. So working with those people and getting to the other side is always the goal. I tell everybody when we do the big opening speech, choosing to work with us, this is the hard road. There are so many places you can go, and you can work at which are so much easier, and you could still make great money, and if that’s what you want to do, go for it. This is the hard road, but I promise you on the other side, it will be worth it. The pay-in process will pay you back.

SSR: That’s pretty awesome. And the great people you’ve worked with. I mean, designers have been a key component to many of your restaurants. You’ve worked with AvroKO, Karen Herold of Studio K. What have you learned from them, and what have you learned to make it a successful collaboration with designers because I know there’s a lot of give and take?

KB: People are always like, ‘What’s the secret to your success?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s very simply an equal concentration on food, hospitality, and design.’ And design is one where people are, like, ‘Really? You think the design is as important as the food and the hospitality?’ And [it is], especially in this day and age where you’re creating layers to the food and layers to the service. [And] creating layers in design, keeps people interested. And we know how hard it is to keep people’s attention these days. People don’t watch [hour] shows, they watch minute-and-a-half clips. So if the 17th time you go into Momataro, you go downstairs and you pick the phone up and you realize there’s somebody talking in Japanese to you on the other line, you’re, like, ‘That’s cool. Somebody’s thought about details here.’ So Karen Herold and all the kids at AvroKO, they’re detail people and they think way out of the box. So I think we always took this blank canvas approach with the way we did business with restaurants, and they both take the blank canvas approach with design, like ‘We can do something nobody’s ever seen before.’

When you sit around drink a scotch with Adam Farmerie [of AvroKO] at 1:30 in the morning, some weird ideas are going to come out. A lot of time, some of them are really brilliant, and some of them, you wake up the next morning and go, that’s a terrible idea. But Adam and his partners are geniuses, and to me it’s like if you can be around geniuses enough times, maybe some of that will rub off on you. Karen too. I just learn about creativity every time I’m with them. Rob and I are really into design, and we love being a part of every layer of it, and every time Rob and I walk into a space we instantly, you know, it’s not like we just turn it over and say ‘Hey, here you go.’ Rob and I will walk in and we’ll say, ‘Okay, this is why I love this space. Maybe we take this back and so there’s more height and it’s dramatic when you walk in and the bar probably goes here, and I think the kitchen goes here.’ I mean, we think of that stuff before we even get there. Sometimes we even think, here’s what we want the general mood to be inside the space before we have that first meeting with them. But we love those collaborations. And AvroKO and Karen are incredibly collaborative, and we love that part.

SSR: Well, it’s really important to get to the final result as you said. And so how involved are you guys? Are you picking details with them?

KB: The processes are a little bit different. With AvroKO, it’s usually we find a building, they fly out, they look at it with us, we discuss it, we talk about it. We sit in a room for two or three hours, we might even sketch some stuff, and then the next time we meet with them, they’ve usually got four or five floorplans. Then we look over those, ‘I like this. I don’t like this. Can we do this? Can we pull this over here?’ And out of that, we get a floorplan. AvroKO always has three historical moments that everything goes back to. Like Momataro is the economic miracle in Japan after World War II, and the obsessed Japanese salaryman, and the back streets of Tokyo. So you can find all those things; everything has to go back to those things in some way, so it keeps it cohesive and keeps it original. But the first pass of doing that might not always be the one we go with. Sometimes they hit it right away, and sometimes it’s like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t the direction.’ They’re like, ‘Okay. Great. Let’s try again.’

SSR: And you guys know how the operations and how the floorplan should work. I mean, the things that you and Rob can deliver that they might not know.

KB: One hundred percent. And the two things the designers might not always look at, and I’m not saying it’s specifically with these guys, is functionality and sound.

SSR: Sound is a huge thing.

KB: Sound is a massive thing, and I think the designers are getting better at it. I think 10 years ago, you basically built the place, and we’re going to build it and we’re going to make it look as good as possible and we’re like, ‘This sounds terrible. Now, what are we going to do about it?’ We don’t take those chances anymore. Every place we do, [we think] ‘What are we going to do about the sound?’ We’ve gotten so much better at it. God, we were bad at it before. There are a few things that I give us an F on early on in our careers, and sound is one of them.

SSR: How’s lighting?

KB: We were always good at lights. Rob is the lighting ninja. Lighting and sound are his huge pet peeves. So as soon as Rob walks into any restaurant, he immediately is either on the iPad now with the restaurant or he’s at the lighting panel getting it right. It’s better now because everything is pre-set, so he doesn’t have to run in and do that. But in the old days, when you had 17 dimmers on the wall, he would be there moving them down. When we first met, Rob liked it darker and he liked it louder. He was a little more to the rowdy side, and I was a little more to the fine dining side. We’re the same guys now, but the original bartenders still laugh because Rob would walk in and he would make it darker, and he would turn the music up. And I would come back over and turn it down.

SSR: You met in the middle?

KB: It took us six months to figure that all out.

SSR: One of the things that I loved hearing, I think you mentioned at the Welcome Conference in June, was you said one of your greatest service experience was at a Wendy’s. Can you kind of elaborate on that?

KB: So I tell the story at every opening we do. Every time we open up a restaurant, day one, a hundred people that are going to work at the restaurant, I’m usually the first speaker, and I tell the story. So in 1997, I was at my restaurant in Springfield, Illinois, and I was thinking about opening a second place in St. Louis. So we’re driving to St. Louis with a chef friend of mine, and we pulled over at Carlinville, Illinois, and we walked into a Wendy’s to have a quick lunch before we got there. There was a woman who was perched at the front of the restaurant just to greet. So I walked in and she was like, ‘Gentlemen, welcome to Wendy’s restaurant.’ I was trying to figure out: Is this your only purpose? She was a maître d at the Wendy’s. I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ So we walked up, and they had just come out with Dave’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich, and [the casher says] ‘Gentlemen, have you tried Dave’s Spicy Chicken sandwich?’ He went into this long speech like he was working at Michelin 3-Star restaurant. [We] have not said anything to each other yet. Wendy’s had a Superbar back in the day. He had ordered the Superbar, and I had ordered the sandwich. We both got water. We both sit down. The woman who was the greeter was also going back and forth keeping this Superbar immaculate. And at one point, she came by and she refilled our waters with a pitcher.

At that point I looked up at Scott and I go, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. This is the most spectacular fast food restaurant in the entire world.’ I go, ‘Are we being punked right now? What is happening?’ We got in this discussion about how great this manager must be. And we said, he’s been given the same grid, the same floorplan, the same menu, and he actually figured out how to do something unique with it. We walked up, and I said, ‘Could I see the manager, please?’ And the manager came out, and he’s, like, ‘Gentlemen, is everything okay?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah,  everything’s fine. This is an incredibly well-run restaurant, and you should be really proud of it.’ He goes, ‘Well, as you can see, we are really proud of it.’ And on the wall, Wendy’s gives away a Golden Wendy’s Award to the highest rated Wendy’s in the company, and they had won it. We walk out and parked next to the spot closest to the Wendy’s was a Camaro and on the license plate it said Wendy’s 25, which must have been the manager’s car. And we were like, ‘He’s so into it. He’s so committed. I love it.’

I immediately went back and told that story to everybody. At the time we were in Springfield, I go ‘We’re the best restaurant in Springfield, Illinois. You have this great chef who’s working for you, and you guys have trouble getting motivated on a daily basis. Look at this guy.’ Basically the opening speech always is like, ‘AvroKO designed this restaurant, Stephanie Izard is the chef, you’re in Chicago, Illinois, one of the greatest restaurant cities in the world. If you’re not motivated to work here, you’re in the wrong business or you should go have a hamburger in Carlinville, Illinois.’ I love that story. I never tire of telling it. I love that guy who runs that restaurant. I don’t know where he is today. If you’re out there, I’d love to work with you.

SSR: That’s amazing. I must go into your whole service and hospitality culture. How do you motivate these people and how do you keep everyone happy if you have 2,200 employees? It must be a great speech to start off with.

KB: Well, it’s so important to hire the right people and [finding the] right person is two questions basically: Do you like them and do you think they’re smart? That’s the direction we always give. I don’t care about technical [skills] in the beginning. I don’t. You do need some really technical people when you open up a restaurant, but for the most part we can teach you how to hold a plate, we can teach you about the finer points of food and wine, but are you a compelling personality and do you want to take care of people and are you likable? And so my interviews are pretty weird, actually. I throw people off all the time. So, pretend we’re interviewing right now. I’m like, ‘Hi, Stacy, how are you?’

SSR: Hi Kevin.

KB: What did you have for breakfast today, Stacy?

SSR: I haven’t had breakfast yet, Kevin.

KB: Don’t you realize that’s the most important meal of the day.

SSR: I have three children, Kevin.

KB: There you go. All I want to do is get you talking and see if you can riff on a conversation because the restaurant business is going to throw you stuff all the time. People get so scripted in their interviews. I know they’re going to ask me this, and then they’re going to ask me about my last job, and this is what I’m going to say. I don’t want your script. I want to know what makes you happy. I’ll ask stuff like that, or why are you here today? I just want to get people talking. And do I like them? Do they seem like a good person?

SSR: And you get the on the same level as you because I feel like sometimes in interviews people are nervous.

KB: But sometimes my questioning makes them more nervous.

SSR: Maybe somebody has even faked a résumé.

KB: Yeah, God bless them. What am I going to say on that? I’d be a hypocrite.

SSR: Looking back at all the success and all that you guys have done and where you continue to head, did you ever dream [this would happen]. You always knew you wanted to open up a restaurant, but did you ever think you’d be where you are?

KB: No chance. In the beginning, I was just so excited that I owned something, that I owned a restaurant. I was so happy just to have one. And then at a certain point I remember writing down that in a perfect world, if everything goes amazing, I’m going to have nine restaurants. I kept a journal for a few years, and I wrote down these nine restaurants that I was going to have. It was like, I’m going to have a steakhouse, and I’m going go to have a sushi bar, and I’m going to have an American contemporary restaurant, and I’m going to have a bar, and I wrote it all down. Nine was like the dream of all dreams. There’s this great part in Broadcast News, where William Hurt says to Albert Brooks, he says, ‘What do you do when your [real life] exceeds your dreams?’ And Albert Brooks says, ‘You keep it to yourself.’ And so that’s where I think I’m at. I never thought that I would get this far. Nine was the dream of dreams, so now that we’re this big company with 20 restaurants, it’s like, I just shrug my shoulders and look to the heavens and say, ‘Thanks. I’ll try not to screw it up.’

SSR: I think that’s a perfect place to end. Kevin, I can’t thank you enough for coming to New York from Chicago to sit down with us.

KB: My pleasure.

SSR: And thanks everyone for listening. We’ll talk soon.

KB: Thanks, guys.