Farewell, Russet: Why ‘farmers’ decided to close their Center City restaurant
"We’re in a comfortable place," says chef and coowner Andrew Wood. "We can see the writing on the wall."
On June 30, chefs Andrew and Kristin Wood ended their seven-year run at Russet, their farm-to-table American BYOB in the shadow of the Kimmel Center in Center City.
The decision to close, of course, was not taken lightly. And it was not — they emphasize — because Russet was losing money. By the Woods’ measure, Russet was a success, but they decided it wasn’t sustainable in the longer run. They say they saw writing on the wall: flattening year-over-year sales and a need to substantially reinvest in their leased walk-up space at 1521 Spruce St. Also, as a couple in their early 40s, they want to spend more time with their two sons.
Andrew Wood, whose family ran the popular Williamson’s restaurants for decades, sat down to recap.
What’s the story here?
One of the best metaphors I’ve come up with is it’s kind of a farming metaphor. Kristin and I are essentially farmers, and we planted this seed of a restaurant, and we watered it, we tended it, fertilized it. We did all the things that farmers can do, but the reality is there’s only so much intervention that you can have. You don’t know what’s under the ground. You can change the top layer of the soil, but you can’t change what’s underneath that. You can’t change the weather. You can’t control how the climate is going to affect everything, so it’s just a wide, nuanced system, and even if your plants grow, and our plants grew for a long time, there’s no guarantee that they grow forever.
To boil that down, we’ve seen a lot of growth over the years, and we’re looking at things and seeing a plateau. It brings us to the point where we have to make a decision as to what we want from our lives, what we think our business is capable of doing, and where we want to be five years from now.
If we pushed it beyond a point, then everything we had would be invalidated. We’d keep going and things would start to turn sour.
Right now, the wolves aren’t at our door. We’re in a comfortable place. We can see the writing on the wall.
As first-time restaurateurs, what was your biggest challenge?
Systems of tracking how the money goes through the business and good systems of tracking and analyzing sales data in a way that we could then turn it around into making the business more profitable. The analytics side of all the data that we had wasn’t as intuitive as I thought it was going to be, especially the way we operate. Everything is about growth.
To use my farming metaphor, we’re watering every day and we’re weeding every day, and everything is well-fertilized in a way that if the conditions are good, the plants will continue to grow, but there’s other factors, like we don’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not just our labors that go into it. I can’t even honestly predict the reasons why sales would plateau.
Do you think being a BYOB is a detriment to the bottom line?
Actually, I think it was on the whole beneficial. The only regret I have on that front is some childish naivete from seven years ago, because the place originally came with a liquor license, and then through myriad complications, it wasn’t able to happen. I talked to everybody in the city and I compare food sales, and our food sales are pretty triumphant. It’s in no small part because everybody works together to get it done — the way we create the menu, how our servers sell the menu, how our servers deal with customers and our presentations of everything. To me, it seems like there’s a sea change of things, an undercurrent of things that I can’t control.
You’ve got to work as hard as you can to control all the controllables, but you can’t know everything. You can’t know the market. I think there is a conceit that goes around where people say, “Well, if you weren’t BYOB, then you’d have a broader appeal,” but I don’t know that the finances make sense for us to not be BYOB. There’s no space in here for a bar. Let’s say I got a liquor license tomorrow. I’d have to put out, if you include the inventory, the license, the insurance, everything else, $500,000 at least, and I’d have to recoup that on selling bottles of wine, and I think that would probably take me 25 years.
Are there too many restaurants?
Maybe. I don’t know, though. I don’t necessarily buy that the market is flooded. Being at a restaurant that was open one year and having that flurry of voyeuristic, new-restaurant clientele was very beneficial because they tend to be mavens to other people, but our bread and butter were people who didn’t materialize until two years down the road.
What do you want to say to your customers?
How appreciative we are. We’ve had so many die-hard patrons, so many people that have been invested in our own little nook of the woods here, and not just the patrons, but people that have worked here, our suppliers. I more or less don’t use middlemen. I buy pretty much straight from farms, and so many people whose work and efforts have come to us and come through us in a way. We’ve had four actual wedding ceremonies here on our patio. We’ve had an incredible amount of rehearsal dinners. So many people have trusted and invested in us, and we’ve tried to give back.
What do you want to do?
I don’t know. I really don’t. That’s the big question. I have some speculations to what I would like to do, and Kristin and I talk about it a lot. I feel like for every action in seven years, you have to counteract it to take it down, so it’s a lot of tent-rigging and tent spikes that we’re pulling up. It’s very busy. I know there’s somewhere that we’re going to kind of relax a bit, but I’m not sure. I would like to open something again because we have learned a lot of lessons. I think that how we would negotiate things going forward would be a lot smarter. When we came into this seven years ago, we were young and ready to take on everything, all of these responsibilities You end up two years in, and you realize you’ve created for yourself five full-time jobs, and it’s hard — not that I personally shy away from any amount of work. If you want to move forward, you have to do the work to move forward, but at the same time, it was very hard to strike an amount of balance in our lives. I think “younger me” imagined himself spending 80 hours in the kitchen and laser-focused on the food and wiping the plates and really trying to dazzle and impress, but that was a fanciful delusion. ... I ended up becoming more of a teacher. I’m less hands, more mind.
If you were to open another restaurant, do you have any wild idea of what it would be like?
I have like a hundred wild ideas.