Business

RESTAURANT ROUNDUP: What does it take?

Two close, one reopens: Mother Butters on Fifth Avenue East and Mrs. G & Me on Main Street closed. Renzo's Italian restaurant is opening on the corner.

By Bill Moss, Published: July 22, 2014

'Get people to come back'

Specializing in pizza and ribs, Two Guys has established itself after moving from Sixth Avenue at Oak Street three years ago.
Melody Crawford"A lot of people don't really understand what it does take to get situated where you are comfortable," said Melody Crawford, who runs Two Guys Pizza with her husband, John. "Everything from covering your payroll to covering your food cost. But I truly love it and John does too. The staying power is to get people to come back. Even though prices on food are going up, we're not able to raise our menu costs because people are going to notice that."
Like Styles at the Inn on Church, Crawford says she wouldn't switch places with her peers on Main Street.
"I had Cat Daddy's forever and I sold it. There's only so much parking, for one thing," she said.
And there's the Internet chatter that has turned everyone into a critic.
"You've got Urban Spoon," the mobile app that contains restaurant reviews. Because diners expect a good meal, they don't bother to say so when the food is fine. "The ones that are negative, they have like a page-long review," she said.

Restaurant work 'chooses you'
Away from downtown, Season's restaurant at Highland Lake Inn has set a high standard for fresh food, service and atmosphere.
Restaurant manager Kathy Horton said there is practically no accounting for why chefs continue to work over sizzling sautee pans and hot ovens.
"I don't know if he coined it, but (the late Expressions chef) Tom Young used to say 'You don't choose this business, it chooses you,'" she said. "There's no rational reason that any of us are in this business. It is a crazy business. But for people that do it they can't imagine doing anything else. And when they get out of it, they come back."
Another key to success, Horton said, is a camaraderie and mutual respect between the kitchen and wait staff, which are not usually under the same boss.
"If that door isn't swinging, it's a nightmare," she said. "You can walk in and feel that — if there is a tension in the staff. You've walked into a restaurant where the servers are standing in a corner complaining. You can just tell — there's a poison at the top and it's running right through it."
In a kitchen that's cooking well, turning out plates and satisfying the diners beyond the swinging doors, there's an adrenalin rush almost like running a marathon, night after night.
"You gotta have a team," says Crawford, of Two Guys. "If you ain't got a team, you ain't got nothing."