Adam Weisblatt's Five Rules for Opening a Neighborhood Restaurant

Adam Weissblatt, co-founder of Last Word Hospitality and author of For the Love of Restaurants, joins me to share his Five Rules for Opening a Neighborhood Restaurant. We talk about trusting your gut, treating your landlord like a true business partner, and making sure you can deliver on what you promise. After opening seven restaurants of his own, Adam offers an honest and practical look at what it takes to turn the dream of a restaurant into a place that can become part of its community.

What I find most inspiring about Adam is his willingness to openly share knowledge that took him years—and plenty of hard lessons—to earn. For more people to succeed in this industry, we need more people willing to follow his example and let go of the gatekeeping that has kept so much valuable information out of reach. Sharing what you know does not diminish your own accomplishments; it gives someone else a better chance to build something meaningful of their own

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I’m chatting with Adam Weissblatt, the co-founder of Last Word Hospitality and the author of For the Love of Restaurants, An Insider’s Guide from Daydreams to Opening Night, which comes out tomorrow on August 11th.

He’s here to share his five rules for opening a neighborhood restaurant. He talks about the importance of trusting your gut, how by building the right team sets you up for the right success, and that by being honest with yourself and those you’re working with allows for a long existence in any community. It’s a great conversation for anyone who’s ever dreamed of opening up their own space from someone who has walked the walk and opened up seven of his own spaces.

The Neighborhood Restaurant

So let’s get into the rules here on HRN. Adam, always great to see your smiling face. Thank you for taking a break from your restaurants and hospitality group and congrats on the book, The Love of Restaurants, which comes out tomorrow.

Yes, sir. Tomorrow. It used to be that a neighborhood restaurant was a bit of a backhanded compliment.

Rise of the Neighborhood Restaurant

How has that perception and term shifted over the last few years? As the economy struggles, people are looking for familiarity and they’re looking for comfort. A restaurant is the ultimate form of being able to go out, have a big night out, but then maybe not spend as much, including just on the simple realities of getting to and from. What it costs to get in an Uber or gas or everything like that.

It all factors into how people make decisions about where they’re going to eat. Now, maybe more than ever, people are looking for that neighborhood comforting place and want a place they can call their own. That’s really good.

The Search

Your group, Last Word Hospitality, has specialized in neighborhood restaurants and has seven different spots in your portfolio. What is the through line that ties them all together and makes them a part of their individual communities? We’re always just looking for beautiful spaces that represent a cool aesthetic of that neighborhood. When you take an old building that’s been there since the 20s or 30s and it’s been uncared for and you put love into it, that already starts to show people that you really genuinely have pride in what you’re doing and that matters.

For us, we partner with people on each one of these projects. I love that. Every time you walk into the restaurant and you ask, who is the owner, the chef and the GM are going to be part of that team of owners.

You’re going to have that constant connection through the people in the space to ownership. I think that really matters and draws a connection between community. Being able to be a authentic and literal part of the community from the space to the people in it has been something that’s defined your career and approach to building these different spaces.

For the Love of Restaurants

The book, The Love of Restaurants, I remember you telling me about it four or five years ago at a one-on-one event. Why was now the right moment to share it with the world? Three years ago, when I really started to take it seriously, I lost two of my best friends in the same year. One to cancer, one to unnatural causes, unfortunately.

So sorry. Thank you. It motivated me to do something really difficult and to do it in their honor.

I did always feel like there was a gap in the book market of just a book that you could pick up if you were waiting tables or cooking or managing or being a chef and find a path that shows you what it means to become an owner of a restaurant. You’re going to touch in real estate and you’re going to touch in permitting and you’re going to touch the city and all these things that you won’t necessarily learn in your day-to-day managing a restaurant even as a general manager. That’s the information I wanted to really share and I wanted to do it in a way that restaurant people could read and find enjoyable.

Rule One: Trust Your Gut

I’m so happy that the era of gatekeeping is done and I’m seeing it more and more across different creative industries, which is why I’m so excited for you to share your five rules for opening a neighborhood restaurant. Anyone’s ever walked into a hot restaurant on a Friday night, you immediately feel the energy the second you walk through the door. What’s harder than that is walking into that same space months, if not years, before a big night can happen, but it ties directly into your rule number one.

Rule number one is you do have to have this feeling in your gut. There has to be a natural attraction to what it is you’re going to do. Considering you’re committing years of your life to this, and I always think work in years and live in the present, try to enjoy every moment, but know that if you’re going to do big things, it’s going to take amounts of time and so be patient with yourself.

The first feeling is do you truly love it? When you look at that space, do you envision a restaurant there and can you play in your mind how people are going to interact with it? You need to be able to fully visualize whatever restaurant in your head is there in that physical space and how people will truly react to it and be as honest with yourself as one can be when talking about your own emotions. That honesty and having that trust with your own emotions is key because at some point you are the one who knows what you’re really going to like, but to build any business in anything, especially a restaurant, you do need to have good partnerships and having a good relationship with this person is your rule number two. Landlord is your first business partner in these deals a lot of the time.

Rule Two: Your Landlord Is Your First Business Partner

Big time. In order to raise money, Holly, my partner since 2014, we had to put in money at least to get the lease assigned. Then we could prove to people that we were serious and that we could then go out and raise capital against it.

First person to convince that you’re serious is a landlord. In our experience, you really want to like that person as much as you can. That is a real relationship that will be ongoing.

It will be a very serious relationship. If you’re going through things like the fires or COVID or all the stuff we’ve done for years, that’s the person you’re going to be turning to and working with, but no guests can show up. The only person you can really try to figure shit out with is your landlord.

Rule Three: Choose the Right Partners

You being on the front lines with your landlord and being able to take on the outwardly problems for your team is really important, but to run the restaurant day to day, you got to look inside the four walls and put together these types of people, which are rule number three. Partners, I don’t think I would ever do a restaurant without knowing that there was going to be a number of extra people there to partner with me and to help carry that person. People say it’s like a marathon, but marathons have a start and finish and restaurants don’t end, especially if you’re doing well.

I won’t even consider a project unless we can really visualize who those people are going to be. It’s at least a chef and at least a general manager and not only them running that place and being part of that community, but also working with each other. A lot of our partners who’ve now developed into great friends didn’t necessarily know each other before.

Some of the magic of what I think we’ve been able to do over the years is find like-minded people who often have really different backgrounds, but you just think will be great together. And if it turns out to be true, Mike and Melissa from Barra Santos didn’t know each other. That’s crazy.

Their friendship is so real and genuine. It’s the reason why that restaurant feels the way it does. You make friends fast when you’re working in the trenches to say.

When you’re cramming in 10, 12, 14 hour days, those friendships and those relationships really develop. Even when you have great relationships, even if you have a good landlord, even if you have a space you love, you still need runway. And without this resource, that’s not going to happen.

Rule Four: You Need Enough Money

What’s your rule number four? You need enough money. The M word. Restaurants are very expensive.

Every locale is different. And so I was very careful in the book to never name dollar amounts. Doing a restaurant in all different municipalities across the country is going to cost very different amounts.

But that doesn’t mean that that amount isn’t a lot of money in each one of those municipalities. I don’t think they’re ever really affordable. It’s going to be expensive to whomever’s doing it in whatever community they’re doing it from.

There is a reality to this where some restaurants don’t open. They dig in and they’re not able to get to the opening day. And that is maybe the greatest tragedy I’ve witnessed in my many years doing this.

A hundred percent. They’ve got a big dream and they put in real money, especially their own money, and they don’t get a chance to show anything. You need enough capital to do what it is that you want to do.

And you want to have a plan of how you’re going to get that money back out. A lot of the times people can have a dream. People want to be something that maybe they’re not.

I would always give advice to chefs who wanted to get in TV. You wouldn’t open up a restaurant that isn’t an extension of who you are. So why would you do that for a TV show? Your fifth and final rule follows this advice when you’re looking at opening up a restaurant and creating the space that you want.

Rule Five: Deliver What You Promise

What’s your rule number five? You have to be able to deliver what you promise. Yeah. You need to be able to execute what it is you’re going to tell people you’re going to execute.

If you put up a sign on your front door that says shitty pizza, cheap beer in the game, you’ll do great. 99 cent slices crushes in New York. Yeah.

Slices are honest and honesty sells. Deliver value and deliver what you were saying you will is I think very refreshing for people. And restaurants are expensive.

So there’s no getting around that either, which means being honest with yourself about who you are, what your team is, what the physical capacity is of your actual kitchen and your bar, and how many people you’re going to be serving realistically. And once you can tell that many people with real certainty, I know I can do this, you’ll do well. Because I think that same place with the sign that says shitty pizza and cheap beer, if it says great pizza and craft beer, and then you go in and it’s shitty beer and shitty pizza, that will fail.

Closing

You can just tell people what it is you’re about and then really nail it. I do think that’s one of the absolute keys. Thank you for sharing the keys.

It’s great for anyone who’s always wanted to just understand the machinations of opening a restaurant. And for people who actually want to do it themselves, if those types of people want to get the book, or people are just interested in peeking behind the curtain, where can they see what you’re up to with your restaurants? Books should be available everywhere. Come by any of the last restaurants, we’ll have books there too.

Go independent, shop at Now Serving, shop at your local bookstore, shop for books, read books. That’s my best message. Learn stuff that doesn’t have an intermediary and that’s not on the internet.

If there’s one thing I’ve been doing more of this summer, it’s been reading books. Adam, congratulations. I can’t wait to swing in and have a bite with you.

Thanks, Darin. Appreciate you, man.

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