How a Chicago Restaurant Has Stayed Open For Nearly Three Decades

Introduction to the food service economy

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1:49Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, we are back in Chicago. I love Chicago. It's a beautiful city. I used to live here. It's always kind of surreal coming back because it reminds me of middle school, basically. We're actually here for a live show, but I thought we would squeeze in one additional episode. It's one of the kind of favorite types of episodes that we like to do. Totally. It's a food service episode, one of our favorite genres of episodes. One of our favorite episodes we ever did was a Chicago-based

2:25food service entity, The Baker. Remember him? Absolutely. And one of the reasons these episodes are so interesting to do is, you know, we have a lot of economists on the show. We have a lot of investors, whoever, and they kind of talk about business in this conceptual way. But it's always interesting talking to actual practitioners in the space. And the thing about food is it touches on so many different aspects of the macro economy. You know, you have labor, you have supply chain issues, you have general, I guess, entrepreneurial issues as well. And so I thought we would talk to

2:58someone a little bit different to the Chicago-based baker. We would talk to someone who not only comes from, I guess, sort of a finance background, but someone who actually left finance at an undergraduate level in order, he made the conscious decision to become a practitioner in the restaurant and catering space. You know, the Big Mac index, right? Yeah. The economist is. The reason why that works as a concept is because embedded within the Big Mac is labor, commodity costs,

3:29and rent. And that's everything, right? And so like, here you get like the reason why these particular businesses are so fascinating to us is because, as you said, like every input goes into it. Every input in the economy goes into it in some way. And then, of course, the chance to someone who sort of knows business both from a theoretical background and also a entrepreneurial background, that's a good guest. And someone who's had experience running different types of food businesses. So this will be really interesting. I'm very happy to say we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with

4:00Richard Mott. He is the owner of North Pond here in Chicago. He is also the owner of the Spark Shared Kitchen, which we'll get into exactly what that is. And he studied finance at the University of Chicago. So truly the perfect guest. Richard, thank you so much for coming on. Oh, thank you for

Transition from finance to entrepreneurship

4:18having me. I'm glad to be here. So I mentioned finance was your undergraduate expertise, but I also said you made a decision that you didn't want to stay in finance. Talk to us about how you actually got into the restaurant business. Well, actually, I was a history, urban studies, political science major as an undergrad at the University of Buffalo. But I attended Booth, the graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I was a finance major. And I did my internship. I did in the finance

4:49department of progressive insurance, which at the time was sort of a young, fast moving upstart. I mean, it was a great company to work for and everything. But I left that summer with just the realization I really didn't want to work for anyone else. And I wanted to start a venture on my own. So three months in a corporate office was enough to kick me out of that field for the rest of my life. These days, if you were to like go to Stanford Business School or Wharton, for sure, you would find tons of people who are there because they want to be entrepreneurs and maybe or maybe

5:22they want to be VCs or they want to have a so-called like search fund where they gather a couple million dollars from their friends and buy some local pool repair companies or whatever. But I guess like that's sort of novel. And I guess like in the past, like someone who was at these schools, it was just purely a pipeline for working at a big firm. Yeah, it's very complete 180 degree sea change on this. When I was at school, there was no such thing as entrepreneurial studies. There were no seminars on small business financing. There was

5:54absolutely nothing paid attention to any of those fields. You were being trained to work for Continental Bank, for Citicorp, for McKinsey, those types of companies. And my decision to go off on my own and start a business, which I had started my second year of business school, was sort of met with a lot of bewilderment by some of my classmates. And even to the point where some were like kind of derisively asking questions like, oh, what's the matter, Rich? Didn't you get a real job offer? That

6:24kind of thing. And the really ironic thing is that now at Booth, the largest single concentration, larger than marketing or finance, the largest single concentration at the school right now is entrepreneurial studies. And it is a huge part of the business. And they've also spun off from that the Polsky Center, which is the university-wide center for entrepreneurship and monetizing advances in their physics labs and things like that. But it is a very big and very successful part of the

6:58university now. And if you go to all the top business schools, you go to the Whartons, the Harvards, the, you know, Stanford, Berkeley, they all have very, very dynamic spaces, entrepreneurial spaces, and labs, classes. It's an incredibly supportive environment right now. That's such an interesting shift. But when you were at grad school, I think I read that you bid on a school project to actually start a coffee shop.

Building early campus coffee shops

7:24They had a coffee shop in the basement of the business school, and they would let a couple students run it every year. And I bid on it and turned it from a coffee shop into, you know, let's get bagels, let's get sandwiches. Pretty soon, we got a whole little lunchroom there. Turned out to be quite a successful little venture. I got approached by a couple other departments of the school. So one thing led to another. And by the time I graduated, we had four locations on campus and started this as a full-time business. And by, you know, eight, nine years later, we had a

7:59chain of 20 of these. And they were all coffee slash sandwich shops, but they were all in the academic buildings. So we didn't do the main board plans, you know, what Compass and Aramark typically do. We were just doing the small, little, almost bespoke operations within the academic buildings. Did you get to keep the profit from the coffee shop? Yes, yes. That was a complete P&L. We paid them, we paid them a rent. And it worked out very well for us because we'd reached an agreement on the rent based on basically just being a coffee shop

8:32and then kind of quadrupling the revenue and turning it into a real sort of lunchroom made it, I mean, for an undergrad, I paid more money than I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, that wasn't a lot of money, but still. You know, it's funny because we're like talking about the evolution of business schools. And that's maybe a lens through which to understand the history of the American economy. You could tell probably the history of the American economy through coffee shops themselves. And you think about like first generation coffee shops and then the Starbucks's and then now like the

9:05explosion of like, oh, you have to have matcha with pistachio syrup and all these things. It's like I had a pumpkin matcha cream latte this morning. Don't judge me. I don't normally get this. There's about two, there's about two, too many ingredients. Well, I never drink that stuff. But the other day I was walking home and I saw this, I was like a banana pudding flavored latte with cardamom. And those are like, I was so tempted. I wish I could say that sounds bad to me, but it sounds fantastic. I know I was so tempted, but it's like, I can't do it. But actually,

9:35I am curious, like, what years were this and what were you serving? What was the coffee shop expected to have in those years? Coffee was a very, very different industry. I mean, we served coffee, soda. We didn't serve water. There wasn't any bottled water back then. It was coffee and soda, sandwiches, soup, a lot of pastries and baked goods. And by coffee, there's just like... This was the old one you would have gotten in the, you know, what you would have gotten in a marine barracks with the big bun, three-gallon pour-over thing. And I'm not a real coffee drinker, but if

10:10you were to go back and taste it now, I'm sure it would be just wretched. No, I love that stuff. I'm fine with industrial-grade coffee. Well, the other thing that's kind of funny is we served coffee. We had two sizes of coffees. We had a seven-ounce, that was our small, and a 10-ounce, which was a large coffee. And now, if you go to a coffee shop, most smalls are larger than the large that we had at that time. And don't claim any great foresight, you know, back then in the coffee market. I remember my wife came back. Starbucks, Chicago was the first city outside of the Northwest that they'd opened in. And my wife, who's a coffee,

10:45you know, addict, came back and said she went to this great store. They had coffee, and that was pretty much all they served, but it was great coffee and great service and everything. And I just poo-pooed the whole thing. I was like, oh, a store that just serves coffee? Yeah, how long is that going to last? And then I end up opening 20 coffee shops. What was the most challenging aspect of running that type of coffee shop business at the time? By the way, what years are we talking about? Oh, I graduated in 82, so I started this in 1981. So yeah, the very, I think Starbucks might have

11:18come to Chicago mid-80s, 86, maybe 87, somewhere around in there. So this was still, you bought the coffee, you bought it in five-pound bags, and you scooped it out, and that coffee could be sitting around. If you didn't use it at the end of June when classes closed, you just put it in a container and use it in September. I mean, the kind of things that would get you shot by a coffee lover these days. So it was just, it was a hot brown beverage, is what it was. And the biggest challenge at that time, what was hardest?

11:50Well, the hardest for me is that I had started this business with absolutely no idea what I was doing. If I were to ever, you know, to counsel someone about this, I'd go work for someone else, learn the business, and have them pay for your mistakes. I was a little too insistent on working for myself at that time, open the business, and literally made every mistake you possibly could. Because there was, you know, I had no reference set. I had no peers to go to, no, I was just making everything up as I let. Let's hear some mistakes. Oh, I got into bad leases. I mean, oh boy. Hiring people, I think that was probably the biggest thing

12:27with hiring people. It took a long time to really figure out, really figure out how to hire people for the business, not hire them because you like them, that kind of thing. So personnel was probably the biggest problem I overcame. And now you go to business school and hiring and interviewing skills and things, they're taught in the school, and these things were never taught. Ours, going back to the school question and, you know, the differences between now and then, back then the MBA program,

12:58and I only speak from the University of Chicago's viewpoint, it was a very rigorous program, very, very academic focused. There was little, or there was no emphasis on any of the sort of soft skills of business, public speaking, interviewing people, things like this. It was all, it was just a large classroom exercise. And they have completely gotten off of that. Their program now, you know,

13:28it's a very holistic approach to educating someone to run a business. And they have this entire environment to support people who are doing the search funds, are doing the entrepreneurship through acquisition. So it's a very, very different atmosphere. And if you were to ask me 15 years ago, before I started working a lot with these entrepreneurial startup companies, you know, my take would be, oh, it's the success, it's 80%, it's the business idea. And I would flip that on the head now, and I would say

13:59it's 20% and the idea is it's the team, and it's your environment, and it's your support network. Those are the things that make it successful, you know, not the business idea. I'd rather, and a great example, you know, if we get back, we talk about Home Chef. When I was approached by Pat, I thought it was a horrible idea. You know, a meal kit, you're going to buy food online, and they're going to ship it. It's ridiculous. But I absolutely love this young man. And it worked out. I mean, he had an incredibly successful run, you know, starting that company.

14:45There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

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18:59Your portfolio of businesses over time that we can talk about.

Expanding into park concessions and fine dining

19:03So I started the coffee shop business and grew that over the years. And we're dealing exclusively with academic locations for small coffee shops. And we had a portfolio of 23 shops and we had five universities that we worked for. Unfortunately, we were sort of swimming upstream in terms of the, you know, the food service market. That was about the beginning of the sort of comprehensive contract model with the universities. So they were going to companies like Aramark and Compass

19:35and not signing them just to do the, you know, coffee shop. They're signing them, you're going to run our laundry program. You're going to run our cafeterias. You're going to run our bus program. You're going to run our- Stadium concessions. Yeah, you're going to run everything. And we were just a tiny little, you know, niche company. So eventually we sort of got swallowed up by that. But started with the coffee shop company. That's a very seasonal business. So we were looking for something to balance the, you know, September to May season. Started doing work with the Chicago Park District and ran a bunch of

20:10concessions and things like that. And just through weird set of circumstances, had the opportunity to bid on a facility. It was the old warming house out in Lincoln Park by the Nature Museum. And I mean, I've had friends ask me now, like, oh, how'd you get that contract? You know someone in City Hall? And so I was like, no, at the time, now it's one of the most beautiful places in Lincoln Park. But at the time, it was a very neglected corner of the park. It was a homeless hangout. There was a lot of

20:42prostitution going on in the area. They had not redone the, the pond actually looked like a drain, a suburban drainage ditch at the point. So it really wasn't much of a, we got the contract basically because no one else bid on it. So opened up a fine dining restaurant and that helped balance, that's a very seasonal business too, but the opposite season from the coffee shop. So there was a nice like a synergy on there. And then also with the coffee shops to sort of broaden our reach

21:12and take advantage of some of our facilities, we opened a catering company and a vending company and ran those. And then just as a hobby, I invested in, you know, over the year or the 20 years or so invested in eight or nine other startup businesses, just, you know, friends or an associate starting a business and I'd invest or, you know, be a partner or whatever. But it really was just a, just a hobby. What are the difference in economics between running, you know, a bunch of student coffee shops, university coffee shops versus a fine dining restaurant like North Pond?

21:45Oh, completely different. Might as well be completely different industries too.

Economics of running a fine dining restaurant

21:50The fine dining, a couple of things. The first, it's very chef driven. We've been there 30 years. We've had four chefs. Our newest chef just started. The last three chefs have all been on the cover of Food and Wine, won James Beard awards, et cetera, have all, a lot of it is sort of a celebrity chef culture. Nobody would see my picture or my name in the, in the paper and go to the restaurant because of that. And if you look at our PR, you know, you, you Google me in the restaurant and you're hard pressed to find any connection between the two. The idea was always to promote

22:22the restaurant, you know, the restaurant and the, and the chef. The only one who was ever going to go to the restaurant because I owned it was my mom and she already knew I owned it. So there was no sense putting that out in the, in the PR. So it's a very publicity based and there's a lot of sort of vagaries in the, the popularity of restaurants, the analogy and knock on wood, we've been 30, they've been there 30 years, but in restaurants, you, you measure restaurant lifespans and dog years, not, you know, people years. We've been there. Oh yeah. Close to 30 years. And that's so,

22:57so unusual for a restaurant, most particularly fine dining independent restaurants. You really have to look at them as like a Broadway play. You know, they're there for three years and they're, you know, then they're gone. Every now and then there's a cat that's there for 20 years, but that, that is very, very unusual. So the popularity is very different. We would get a good review in Chicago Magazine and the place would be booked solid for a month. Now the coffee shop business, it's really just a matter of, of traffic. There's 400 students in the building on Tuesday and we get 300 visits and

23:32there's 200 students on, on Friday and we get 120 visits. I mean, you can really kind of just take a look at the class schedule and I can tell you almost exactly what our sales are going to be. Um, because it's, it's more of a utility where the fine dining, that, that's, that's a luxury. You're going out for your birthday. You're going out, you're, you're going out for an event, whereas the coffee shops, you're going to feed yourself. Since we talked about the difference between coffee shops in the 1980s versus the, uh, monstrosities that exist in coffee shops today. Another thing that just strikes

24:07me about a fine dining restaurant that lasts as long as yours is like tastes change and so forth what people want. If we had the menu from the opening day versus now, what stayed the same and what's different and how do you evolve a menu and how do you maintain, stay on trend? I'm trying to think of like a classic 1980s dish, like chicken Marbella or something, chicken Kiev, something like that. Well, the, when we, we opened the restaurant in 1997. Okay. So you probably had pesto. No, that's what,

24:39that's what I think of when I think of mid nineties food. When we first opened it up, we were leasing the building from the Chicago park district. Now the Chicago park district, their paradigm was working with concessionaires who run crappy hot dog carts that steal from us. So to go to them with this whole plan of, Hey, we want to do a fine dining restaurant in your, in the park and we want to get a liquor license just completely over their heads. It took a total of about two and a half years just to get the permission. Then about another year to build the

25:11place out. Cause like I said, we, we had the first liquor license that was in the, in the park. And even then they looked at us with quite a deal of skepticism. Uh, we were not allowed to have a bar. We had to have a takeout window. I mean, things that were just absolutely incompatible with doing a fine dining restaurant. So when we first opened it up, we called it North pond cafe and it was a little more casual after a couple of years with the park district. And they also had the new superintendent and the president of the park board were two very forward thinking individuals and

25:43they kind of recognize what we're doing. So they gave us permission to remodel the building, add the front room, add a bar and, and started treating us like a, like a fine dining restaurant. And that was about the time our second chef started and our second chef, absolutely brilliant young man. He had been, ironically enough, he had been a finance major at Wharton and decided not to go into, into, into finance. Kindred spirit. Yeah. And one of the smartest, most talented chefs you're ever going to, you're ever going to run into. And back then we decided that the focus for the

26:19restaurant was going to be on what now we would, would call farm to table. I mean, that phrase didn't exist. I had been in California and had visited Alice Waters restaurant, absolutely loved the place. And it just seemed to resonate that a menu and an approach to food like that in Lincoln Park, you know, just given the park-like setting. And we had built the building out. It had been a very workmanlike, just shed almost. We had built it out in the arts and craft prairie style. Seemed to be,

26:50you know, to fit with sort of our idea of the craft approach to food and also the vintage heritage and location of the building. So we really started what we called a sustainable dining, but we started what you'd call farm to table now. And at the time it was, most people didn't kind of know what to do with it. I mean, we would get our sign, the tagline in our sign was North Pond, seasonal American dining. And we would get people that would call like, you know, oh, what season are you open? We started doing, on the menu, we started listing farmers and people were

27:22like, who's this Mickey Kluge guy? And what's a Mickey Kluge pair? You know, that kind of thing. So it's actually, it's really warming to see, you know, how that whole movement has taken off. Oh, yeah. And at the time, I mean, our chef was, he really embraced this even more so than I had originally proposed, really embraced it, became very involved in this movement. He was on the, you know, the slow food board. He was one of the founders of the green city market, really helped because now

27:55we have, we have a network now of close to a hundred small local craft farmers and producers, you know, fishers and cheesemongers and stuff like that. And at the time that supply network didn't exist. And these are not the 1200 acres of corn, third generation farmer in Iowa. This is the, the guy who got kicked out of the PhD program at North with sociology department at Northwestern and now is farming organic beets in upstate, you know, upstate Wisconsin. So it's a really interesting

28:29movement, you know, in the whole, just shift in the whole agricultural industry too. I mean, it's, it's still a very tiny part of it, but these farmers pretty much didn't exist. And our, and our chef had, he had trained in France. So the theme originally was a very classic French preparation with this theme of sustainable dining. And he was with us for 20 something years, left, talk about, you know, good timing. He left in December of 19. And when there was one guy coughing

29:04into his egg drop soup, you know, and two months later, the whole world shuts down. The third chef we hired is much more of a, as a younger guy, much more of an international approach. And the menu for the last four or five years has been much more eclectic, much more international and not as sort of classically French. So fine dining, but a very, a very different take on it.

Profit margins and shifting drink preferences

29:30I'm going to ask a very direct question, but what are the profit margins actually like for a higher end restaurant? I think the, I think the weather's going to be really good this week.

29:41No, but like, I get these different senses. So a lot of people will say like, oh, never start a restaurant because it never makes money. But then you see these restaurants that are incredibly popular in New York and people are paying insane prices and they're all full every night. And you think they must be making money. Otherwise no one would do this. On an economic basis, the restaurant business is one of the worst businesses to ever get in. I mean, just the base economic, I'm talking about the independent, prettily fine dining. It's one of the worst industries to ever, ever get into. And a couple of things. The first is it's, it's hyper

30:13competitive. There's, there's no barriers to entry. Anybody can get into it. It's also, there's a lot of entry into the restaurant business from people who don't have access, a lot, you know, talented, hardworking people, but who don't have access to the finance world or the banking world. You know, someone who's really smart, who's a first generation immigrant, did not go to, you know, Wharton and, you know, they're smart, talented, hardworking guy. You can go start a restaurant. So it's very, very competitive, no barriers to entry. It's very difficult to build a moat around

30:46your business. There's nothing you can do that's proprietary. You come up with the, you know, the latest croissant donut mashup and everyone has it around. Everyone has it down. And then the last thing is that if you were intent on obeying the law, you're going to operate at a five, 10% deficit to all your competitors. So if you're going to pay attention to labor laws, immigration laws, overtime laws, things like that, you are operating at a serious deficit, you know, the

31:17rest of the field. And there, there has been a little bit of a reckoning in the industry, but it was an industry that, uh, wage theft, overtime abuse, things like that, which is absolutely rampant. There has been, if you're looking at sort of changes in this business in the last four or five years, there has been, and some of it started with sort of the me too movement. You talk to any woman who's ever been in the restaurant business, and I don't care whether she's a front of the house, back of the house, cook, waitress, bartender, whatever. I guarantee you that if she's been in the

31:51business for six months, she's got horror stories to tell you about, you know, harassment in the industry. And that is finally, I would never say it's eliminated, but people are starting to get, you know, held to account for that. And you see a lot of high profile chefs who are getting bounced out of their jobs. And so that's a good thing. And the same thing with the abuse of all the labor laws. And a lot of it was, uh, predicated on, it was an industry that was filled with a lot of illegal immigrants. And these are people that you can abuse and not get called for it because

32:25they're not going to go to the labor board and complain. Oh, and then the final thing about why the restaurant business is tough. You never want to be in a business for economic reasons when you are competing with people who are in there for non-economic reasons. It's the same, it would be the equivalent of a sports franchises. You don't spend $12 billion to buy the Dodgers because you think they have great cash flow. You're spending that money because you've, you're a billionaire and you've got huge ego and it's a game of like hot potato. In five years, you want to sell that

32:58franchise to someone else and the value has gone up. But there's a lot of people who made money in other fields. And because you, like, if you're, if you're a doctor and you've, you're, you've made millions of dollars and you're looking for something fun to do, you would never think like, oh, I'm going to go buy an, an auto towing business. No, because you don't know anything about towing. Right. But everyone, everyone thinks that one, you know, just because they dine out and have preferences when they

33:30dine out, they think they can run a restaurant. Hey, or, or start up a food business. My, my mother's got the greatest, you know, chocolate chip cookie recipe. Therefore I should have a chocolate chip cookie company. So it's very different. And also people have this idea. I talk to friends and their, their idea is that I go in and Saturday night, I hang out at the bar, greet friends, buy people drinks, have a drink at the end of the bar myself, and then go home. And that's the exact opposite. Running in the restaurant business is six o'clock on a Sunday morning, unclogging the drain.

34:05That's the restaurant business. So there's a lot of sort of ideas that it is somehow, you know, glamorous and cool and fun. And yeah, there can be parts to that, but that's a pretty small part of the business. It's sort of the lack of everyone's thinking they could run a restaurant. It's like everyone thinks they could do a podcast because they have opinions. They're like, I have takes, I can do that. That's a good analogy. Everyone can do a podcast. It's just, they might not be very good. Right, right. They're like, oh, that seems easy. I can run my mouse. And the proof of all this is, and there's very good statistics on it. Wharton has great statistics.

34:38The SBA has great statistics. The failure rate for restaurants is abysmal. And the figures that I have seen are for the independent fine dining restaurant that as a whole, that industry has a negative return. So yes, there are people who hit it big, make lots of money. And for every rich Melman that's out there that's making, you know, boatloads of money in the restaurant business, there's 40 other guys. You don't know their names because their restaurant closed. And now they're back to being a dentist or whatever they did before. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Masser. Getting hired at

35:29SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs. And hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence.

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38:49Without going into exactly what your profit margins are, but maybe you could talk about theory of menu design. Because there are these things that people say, oh, you only make your money on wine or something like that. No, there's a better truth to that. What is this sort of like, you construct a menu. What are the principles of menu constructing, and where do the profits come from on that menu? Well, a step back just one second is the profit margin for restaurants post-pandemic is probably

39:24seriously negative. You had three years where pretty much everybody lost money, and even the recovery hasn't been very good. But in terms of profitability, menu mix, and things like that, there's one of the biggest sea changes in the last like 23, 20, 30 years is happening right now. And your statement about restaurants making money on wine is absolutely true. We do a prefix menu, and it's $130, five courses. And I've got on a Saturday night, I've got nine

39:55to 10 guys in the kitchen in the pastry department who are preparing that meal. And we've got waiters, back waiters, and busboys serving the table. And that's for that $130 dinner. If you're sitting at that dinner, now you order our average bottle of wine is about 110. You order a bottle of wine from us, it takes the waiter two minutes to walk over to the wine cellar, bring it back, open it, and put it on your table. And the profitability margin on that wine is about the same as the food with almost none of the associated costs. Now, the thing that has kind of got every

40:29restaurateur nervous as hell, and I'll use our figures as an example. We've been in business almost 30 years. For the first 28 years, our liquor wine sales, and we're almost exclusively wine. Our wine sales were just a hair over 33%. So between 33% to 34% every year like clockwork. In the last 18 months, that has dropped to 24%. That is a huge deal because that 8% was the most

41:01profitable sales that we did. And people just are not drinking like they used to, particularly our younger guests. I was going to ask, is this the generational shift that we hear about? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, some of it is just people, you know, for health, they're not drinking. A lot of it also is that people are, you know, there's an entire industry, you know, the cannabis CBD industry out there. And you're just starting to see that work into menus with Lollapalooza this year for the first year had THC margaritas. So you're starting to see,

41:32you know, things like this show up on menus. We've got a proposal with the Park District to add them to our menu. We haven't been approved for it yet. We just put in a non-alcoholic cocktail menu. But the fact that people aren't drinking is a really big problem for most restaurants. Do you see any impact from GLP-1s? Not specifically, because it's hard to identify that versus more, you know, global, you know, other sort of mega trends. I'm sure it is affecting. I mean, what is it, like 20% of the

42:06countries on GLP? I don't remember the number now, but it's a pretty significant amount. And I just can't imagine that you're on a GLP and you want to come in and have five courses and then finish that with these incredible desserts we make and then also have a, you know, a glass of port that seems a little... Maybe there's still room for a CBD-infused pastry of some sort. I'd be interested. Well, the THC-infused... Margaritas, yeah. Well, that gets people eating more. Yeah, that's true. It might create a positive flywheel. All right. It's October 2026 right now. What do you give

Labor inflation and rising food costs

42:43us like a little snapshot of what you're seeing in terms of labor availability, food costs, like the sort of like basic, like economic measures that would go into it? The restaurant business and those two particular items have been hit with inflation and scarcity, probably more than any other industry. Labor has gotten crazy. We pay about 30% more for starting cooks than we did, you know, three, four years ago. And food costs have just gone through

43:13the roof. You know, it's one of the highest, you know, highest inflation sectors in the economy. Although we have not had as much of an effect as some other restaurants have had because we have a whole network of suppliers and farmers that to some extent are isolated from the global economy. So when we're dealing with Joe's organic artichokes from Wisconsin, this man's, his cost basis is not

43:43being affected by tariffs or... Straight of Hormuz. Yeah, straight of Hormuz or generally, you know, not as affected by things like diesel costs and things like that. But the inflation in this industry has been, has been incredible. And there's no sort of lag between our sales and our costs, you know, everything that we put on the plate, we bought that week. So when there's inflation, we see it immediately. We've raised prices four times in the last two years, about every six months, which we used to sort of balance it out and do it once, you know,

44:17once a year, unless there was a specific item that might have, particularly wine that was on allocation or something like that. But generally the prices would, like once a year, we'd review it. And, you know, one, two percent inflation economy, that's not a big deal. But when you have a three percent, 3.5 percent inflation, and then seven percent inflation in the food business, you really had to stay on top of that. And it's, it's tough. I mean, going out, if you and your partner come out to North Pond for dinner and you have the wine pairing, it's going to be $400 for the two of you.

44:51And it's, you have to do a lot to justify someone to spend $400 with you. So it really has forced us to kind of up our game in terms of the things that we do and how we treat our guests. And what it has become is, you know, people don't go, don't dine at North Pond because they're hungry. They dine because they want the experience. But we have seen a little bit of a trend where we're getting more and a higher percentage of our guests are coming in for very special events in their lives. The

45:2225th anniversary, the 50th birthday, the graduated from college, that kind of thing. We don't get as many, hey, it's Thursday night, let's treat ourselves to a really nice meal. It's becoming much more of an event. So I wanted to ask about your other venture now, which is the Spark Shared

The spark shared kitchen model

45:40Kitchen. What's the difference between a shared kitchen and a ghost kitchen? Okay. This is rebranding. It's some subtle changes. The similarity is that they're both kitchen facilities that are used by multiple vendors and typically owned by a third party. Ghost kitchens are typically thought of as someone has a brand, whether it's Popeye's Chicken or Joe's Italian Subs, and you open a small takeout only location and it's in a central facility. It's all set up for

46:11very easy delivery to the DoorDash's and the Uber Eats of the world. So it's really for food delivery companies. Now the shared kitchen model is a little different. In there, we build out kitchens that people can use for food businesses. The biggest use of them we have is by caterers. So you have a small catering company, you can come in and you can run a kitchen. And we have two types of rentals too. We have a couple fully equipped kitchens you can come in and rent by the hour. So if you have a, you know, you have Tracy's granola and... No, not granola. It'd be something

46:49else. What would you make? What would be your thing, Tracy? To Richard's point earlier, I'd probably make cookies because my husband does have the best cookie recipe in the world. You want to start a cookie business, you come in, you rent our kitchen. You only need a kitchen maybe five hours a week. You come in, you rent our kitchen, you make your production, you can rent some storage space to us, but you're only paying us for those five hours. We also have kitchens where you can come in and you can rent this kitchen. And we've got some small ones that are 400 feet and they go up to 1600 feet. You can rent that kitchen. You have access to it 24-7. You've got your own key. Everything in there is yours. And we

47:23provide you with a kitchen and the kitchen has the very basics, the hood, the sinks, the flooring, the floor drains, all that stuff. You just have to bring in all your equipment. Now, the advantage of that is if you were to go out and open a cookie store, you'd have to go rent a licensed facility. And you could spend months looking for that. Landlords typically want a three to five year minimum rent. Then you're going to have to put a deposit down. You're going to have to go through the whole licensing process. Minimum, it's going to take you six months to do it. The great thing about

47:56shared kitchens is you can come in and you can open basically for the price of your ingredients and the license. And the license, you can go down to City Hall, you get a shared kitchen user license and you get that on Monday and you can come because we have a shared kitchen operator license. You get the license on Monday and on Tuesday you can be in business. So it is a great way to encourage entrepreneurship. It's one of the better things that City has done over the last like five, 10 years. You know what it reminds me of, Tracy? The shared child care space in Mount

48:29Airy. Because if you think of like a child care entrepreneur and like, okay, they want to take care of children, but do they want to spend their time thinking about licensing and like the building codes, et cetera. So let another entity just sort of do all this sort of blocking and tackling with like all of that and then just like do the actual business that you like. So talk to us a little bit of, I guess like the economics of that business or like scaling that up or how easy has it been to get tenants into the kitchen? It has been very easy getting tenants. The biggest problem with it,

49:04it's a very capital intensive business. Building restaurant kitchens, you know, short of building hospital rooms, they're about the most expensive on a square foot basis thing you can do. But the economics are so compelling on the other end. I'll give you one example. We have a small 800 square foot facility and we just got it licensed and it doesn't have a hood on it. It was made for, I had three people approach me. They were going to start ice cream businesses. We went out,

49:36built this facility out and again, it doesn't have a hood. So it wasn't as expensive as most kitchens. And we just ordered a $26,000 five gallon industrial ice cream machine for it. Now, these people who are, you know, doing it, one's doing a specialty Hispanic themed ice cream, another's doing one with Asian, you know, flavored ice creams. You can come in in a day and you can make, you know, 200 gallons of ice cream, put them in the deep freeze, plus your ingredients, you spend a thousand dollars with us or something along those lines, where it would be almost impossible to do that on your own without a complete facility. And you'd

50:12have to go buy that $20,000 ice cream machine, or you'd buy a $5,000 ice cream machine that has one gallon capacity and you can make 10 gallons in a day versus making 50 or a hundred gallons in a day. So the economics are very compelling. Anytime you've got a lot of capital costs and an individual would use them, you know, two, four, six, eight hours a week, and you can get the scale of having three, four, whatever number of people using them, it's incredibly efficient. And all the associated

50:46costs with it, the licensing, the, you know, the property taxes, the search costs to find a facility. So the shared kitchens are, it's a great little engine for the city's economy. Just real quickly, could they theoretically be used as ghost kitchens? Like could someone do live deliveries? Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. The other difference between ghost and shared kitchens, ghost kitchens typically tend to be smaller and in much more desirable real estate because they need to be within five, like there's

51:17one, I live in the South Loop, there's one about three minutes south of us, 22nd and Wabash. Now they can get to the whole South Loop in, you know, in five minutes and there's 80,000 people living in the South Loop. Our facility is in Brighton Park. It's a 60,000 square foot warehouse and we're, you know, two thirds of the way to Midway Airport. And unless you were on the way to the, got lost on the way to the airport, you'd never realize we're an industrial area. You could never run a ghost kitchen. There's just not the density of apartments and residents. So that's,

51:52that's another one, just the location. Our building is on a square foot basis is probably a third of the value of what their buildings are. You mentioned licensing for the shared kitchen. And I feel like whenever we talk to restauranteurs dealing with the city and regulations always seems to be some form of complaint. Has it changed over the, yeah, trauma, shared trauma. Has it changed over the years? Has it gotten better? The sort of red tape? Absolutely. I noticed some real changes when Rahm was mayor. I mean, the joke was that eighth floor,

52:27which is where all the licensing is, eighth floor was the department of no. I mean, they would just go out of their way to find out, find reasons to tell you, you know, no. And it was just an ungodly burdensome task getting a license. It is much, much better now, but it is still not a real efficient process. So it went from a D minus. Now it's a, now it's a B minus. But generally when you go to city hall now, they are trying to help you, you know, open that business. So there's still a lot of little vagaries in the licensing and things like that. But the tone, when you talk to people and you

53:03work with them, they're generally much more supportive and they are trying to help get your business open. All right, Richard, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Really appreciate getting, getting your perspective. Oh, glad to be here. Glad to. It was very enjoyable. Thank you.

Reflections on business school and restaurants

53:29Joe, that was really enjoyable. That was so fun. I thought the comments about restaurants being a competitive industry, I mean, kind of obvious, but this idea that it's very hard to draw a moat around your business, especially when popularity tends to be fleeting for a lot of the new hotspots. Right. Yeah. And the fact, and I guess it's obvious, but I hadn't thought of it, that there are just a lot of people in it, I guess, quote, for the love of the game, unquote, who are not in it because you're not competing in the same game. Right. Because they don't care about me. Yes. You figure like some, you know, athlete or something like that, for example, and people

54:04want to have their, it's kind of like their clubhouse or something like that, or some of these vanity, vanity endeavors where it's like, oh, I'm okay losing money. That's really hard to compete against. And then, of course, the idea and, you know, that it's hard to be competitive if you want to follow the law, which I think is a really big deal. And the fact that like, if you're like serious about like, you know, immigration law and all of these things and proper overtime and all of these things that like, if you take these serious, if you want to do it well, you're really putting, you're really worsening your economics.

54:36Yeah. Also, the shared kitchen idea is an interesting one because you basically, I guess you pull together all the capital for that initial investment and the cost of the lease and stuff like that. And then everyone can benefit from it rather than having to go out and purchase their own kitchen. Like you said, it's very similar to the Mount Airy example. Totally. Like if you wanted to start your cookie empire. I would probably do something better than cookies for the record, but my husband's cookie recipe is phenomenal and also a source of great drama in our community.

55:09And if you have a great cookie recipe, why do you want to spend your time on random things like licenses and the health inspectors and all that stuff that has nothing to do with whether your cookie recipe is good. That's right. Just focus on the cookies. For real. No, I think these, those types of businesses where you like identify, I mean, some common constraint. The other thing is like to Richard's point earlier about, you know, like a Wharton grad versus a non-Wharton grad, one person's competitive advantage might be they're just a really good chef or they just have a really good feel for flavors. And actually they suck at maybe identifying residential

55:44real estate, signing leases, sourcing capital and all those other things like they suck at Excel, basically. And so if you can divide some of that up. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like an interesting proposition. No, there's so much in there. Now that I think about it, we should do an episode on what you learn in business school. Yeah. Because actually I have no idea like really what you learn in business school and hearing about what you learn and how that's evolved over time. That's super interesting right there. We could have talked for a long time just about the emergence of all these places that they teach you how to be an entrepreneur rather than just sort of, you know,

56:18go into middle office at Citigroup or something. There was just a lot in there. Like I said, we could talk for hours with him. Absolutely. Shall we leave it there for now? Let's leave it there. Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashpot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24 seven in our discord, discord.gg slash

56:54OddLots. And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk to practitioners of actual business, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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