Tired of the day-to-day grind of running a restaurant and barely breaking even, chef-owner Sharon Deitz of Bees Knees in Morrisville, Vt., was about to call it quits on her five-year-old restaurant when loyal fans of her comfort food decided to take matters into their own hands.
Through the issuance of coupons good for future meals, otherwise known as Community Sponsored Restaurant Certificates, or CSRs, entitling holders to $90 worth of meals every quarter for three years, fans of Bees Knees raised more than $20,000 to keep the business going.
“We’re not rich people by any means,” says Alan Church, a local fiddler and music teacher who along with his wife paid $1,000 for a Bees Knees certificate. “But we love Bees Knees and figured out that we’d spend more than that over three years, so why not help Sharon.”
Historically, when a beloved neighborhood restaurant or bar closed its doors, there was little faithful patrons could do but lament in silence. Increasingly, however, dedicated customers are joining ranks and contributing their money, talents and professional expertise to keep establishments they love afloat. And as the economy stalls further, more operators are likely to find themselves in need of such assistance.
Steve Butcher became the recipient of his patrons’ largesse after a fire early in the morning of Jan. 2, 2005, gutted the Pataskala, Ohio-restaurant his family had owned for 40 years.
A policeman discovered smoke emanating from the eatery, which had been closed for the holidays. By the time firefighters from three towns arrived minutes later, the Nutcracker was in a swirl of angry flame. The restaurant, which had been filled with model cars and other artifacts from the 1950s, was destroyed. Damage was estimated at $1 million.
In the weeks and months that followed, customers helped raze the Nutcracker under the guidance of a contractor and later helped to rebuild it. Some customers put in 12- to 14-hour days during construction.
In addition, grade schools, middle schools and compassionate citizens held community fundraisers, including huge spaghetti dinners, to assist the Nutcracker’s employees with housing and utility costs, medical and educational bills, and other day-to-day expenses until the establishment could reopen, which it did 11 months later.
“We had insurance, and the insurance settlement was more than enough to rebuild or walk away,” Butcher recalls. “My wife and I even talked about keeping it closed. But when people come forward to give you this much assistance, when the newspapers wrote about how important our business was to this community, it was like being at your own funeral, except you are here to appreciate all the nice things people are saying and writing.”
Butcher would later learn from insurance investigators that faulty wiring had led to the fire. And in 2006, he would successfully run for public office, becoming mayor of Pataskala as a way to repay the community for their aid.
“I told my wife, it’s not our restaurant to close,” he says. “It’s the community’s restaurant. We’re just caretakers. My run for mayor was my way of saying thanks and giving back to a place that I love so much but never knew how much they loved us.”
A painful divorce after 23 years of marriage to her husband and business partner forced Diane Warren to reach out for help from a local small-business group. Warren, who is also president of
“I was just at [my] wits’ end when the divorce and the break-up of the business came down, and then to have to buy him out,” Warren says, sighing. “It was just emotional and painful on a lot of levels. But this board has been unbelievable—invaluable for me.”
Their recommendations ran from big ideas like hiring a general manager, which Katzinger’s had never had before, to creating customer comment cards, which yielded a customer request to replace the front door of the restaurant. Apparently, the door slammed with the loudness of a firecracker and upset guests during their meals, Warren says.
For their advice on business matters, menu updates, budget and marketing issues, and customer service improvements, members of Katzinger’s advisory board receive free meals whenever they want during their tenure on the board.
The board used to meet once every six weeks, but now that the restaurant is on firmer footing, the board convenes once every 10 weeks, Warren notes.
It’s been “a wonderful working experience, and it has improved my business from money management to customer issues to food ideas,” Warren says. “You know, they are honest and said things that I needed to hear and had to hear, but they did it in a supportive environment in which the only goal was not just my best interest, but the survival of Katzinger’s.”
Deitz, the owner of Bees Knees, says she had grown weary of running her establishment when neighbors told her about CSRs and how the coupons had helped other restaurants and farms in Vermont.
“Even though we had become a popular meeting place and the residents had come to depend on us, I was getting tired of the grind and I knew I had to do more than just coffee and pastries,” she says. “So we started a food menu, but the problem was I lived upstairs and was using my home kitchen to cook restaurant meals, which meant climbing up and down stairs all day.”
When her partner suddenly died, Deitz says she had had enough.
“So I decided it was just not sustainable, the business or the life I was living,” she says. “And here I am 27, and never been on vacation.”
In talking to potential buyers and in sharing her unhappiness with regulars, the CSR certificate idea re-emerged as a way to keep the business open and even to help it grow.
Bees Knees is located in a building that is both brick and wood. The wooden part was constructed in the 1850s and a brick wing was added in the 1920s. Deitz’s deceased grandfather owned the original mortgage on the place. He passed it on to her father, and today they co-own the real estate.
Deitz says it would cost about $150,000 to finish the installation of a new kitchen and do some remodeling that would double the number of seats—currently about 25 indoors and 20 outdoors in good weather.
Church, the local music teacher, says his investment was a good one. He says all of the food served at Bees Knees is high-quality organic, much of it sourced from local farmers. The menu ranges from classic New England dishes like clam chowder to burritos.
In addition, Church, his son and other musicians regularly play in the establishment, including an annual St. Patrick’s Day concert.
“I admire her a lot as a businesswoman and a chef and a steward of the arts, especially music,” Church says. “It’s just a fulfilling and rewarding relationship all the way around, and it’s great to see a young woman who has a plan to get rid of her mortgage.”
The outpouring of money and labor from people nationwide to New Orleans’ famed restaurant community after hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005 has prompted the city’s tourism officials to create an ongoing program they call “voluntourism.” Through the program, visitors to the Big Easy are encouraged to spend an extra day out of their travel schedules to lend muscle or money to small businesses and homeowners still trying to get on their feet.
Mary Beth Romig, director of communications for the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau, says the voluntourism program has played a pivotal role in the resurrection of several restaurants people thought would never rebound.
One of the most prominent beneficiaries, she reports, was Scotch House, a local favorite and tourist destination known for its fried chicken and classic regional dishes and operated by 91-year-old Willie Mae Sutton.
Key to the Scotch House’s resurrection from both crushing wind and water damage were tens of thousands of dollars worth of building materials and volunteer labor donated by the Southern Foodways Alliance. The SFA is part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and many of the researchers and students who worked on the Scotch House project had been visiting the restaurant years before Katrina hit.
Another famed New Orleans restaurant that was the beneficiary of money and muscle supplied by local fans and out-of-town admirers was Dooky Chase, owned by Leah Chase. It took the fine-dining Creole and soul food restaurant nearly a year and a half to reopen after the hurricanes, despite several fundraisers and tasting dinners often orchestrated by fellow chefs.
But not all customers’ financial efforts to save favorite restaurants have happy endings.
Take the short run of JRG’s Restaurant Bar and Fashion Café near downtown Brooklyn, N.Y.
Despite playing to an affluent black customer base who loved the hip, late-night dining spot’s Caribbean and soul food fare, JRG’s was condemned through eminent domain and bulldozed last year after just three years in operation to make way for the colossal 6.36-million-square-foot, $4 billion mixed-use lifestyle project dubbed Atlantic Yards.
A federal appeals court early last month rejected a lawsuit—funded in part with contributions from JRG’s regulars, other retail patrons who lost favorite stores and local residents who have been evicted—to stop evictions and condemnations of the last of the residents and buildings in the project site. Plaintiffs said they would appeal the decision.
Considered the largest privately financed construction project in New York City’s history, the Forest City Ratner project will also include a $345 million new basketball arena for the NBA’s Nets, currently of New Jersey.