Photo by Engle//Olson
Alex Warren working one of his A Bird in Hand pop-ups
Alex Warren working one of his A Bird in Hand pop-ups, which is all in the plan.
Sitting in the shiny new Northeast Minneapolis edition of The Buttered Tin on its opening day, I waved at owner Alicia Hinze, who had just arrived. Yes, this was the first official morning, and no, she wasn’t able to be at her brand-new store the moment the doors opened, because she was stuck in the original St. Paul location due to unforeseen circumstances. And that’s reality. Granted, her team was here, and the place was humming after just a few days of mock service. She didn’t miss much; nothing was on fire. But I was struck by the difference between opening your first restaurant and your second restaurant and by the romance versus the realities of owning.
This was especially interesting to consider since, at the time, I was sitting across from Alex Warren, who hopes someday to open his own first restaurant. He’s a Duluth guy who was a climber until he broke his wrist, which forced him to get serious about his job in a kitchen—the New Scenic Café kitchen at that. He found himself switching between dishwasher and line cook and working with Chef Scott Graden, learning everything he could. Later, he moved to the Cities and eventually became a sous-chef with Lucas Almendinger at the ill-fated Elephant Bar. He’s currently pulling shifts at St. Genevieve and Tilia.
He has an idea and a four-year plan.
I had met Warren at a pop-up for his A Bird in Hand, the name of his eventual restaurant. “The pop-ups are like practice, and I think we’ve got it down. The whole idea is that we can do 60 covers a night, and it’s a good workload for nine people. I want to bring nine people in and salary them.”
So that’s what his restaurant will do: Cap it at 60 customers each night, no more. “This is where my degree in forestry comes in, which is about analyzing data and forecasting. All of this is about learning a little bit as we go and creating confidence in our business model, figuring out and proving numbers so that I can take it to an investor and show them that we will be able to make it work. I want to create something sustainable.”
He then told me a story about how his published research paper in college was garbage and how, even though it had been proven wrong, they had to print it anyway as an example of something that was proven wrong. This is important, I think, because life is never all wins.
I guess what struck me about Warren is his blinders are off. Normally, when a young chef talks to me about their dream restaurant, it’s all wins and perfection, what this town needs and how they are the genius to fill that hole. No one ever talks to me about their failures first. And yet, especially after this last year, Warren knows what a toll this industry can take, and he still wants in. It’s not the romance of the Guy Savoy video that sets restaurant life to orchestral tones; it’s the reality of the nuts and bolts that still hooks him.
He makes beautiful and delicious food aiming to be “Minnesota serious, but also a little feminine,” and that creativity drives him, but he’s not centered on it. “I’m learning to know what I can afford,” he says. “I know what’s a tolerable workload for me and three other cooks and five front-of-house staff. I want to teach the front of house how to do some prep projects; then we can just approach the workload as an entire system.”
Warren’s timeline? “I’m giving myself four years to try to hit these forecasted numbers to a point where I can pay people a salary, afford my rent, and pay for everything I need to have the restaurant I want. I could then approach an investor and say, ‘You don’t have to buy just for the romance of it, right? This should be something that you support because we might have to lean into that romance sometimes, but I can also back it up. Which I think is the way to do business.’”
So it’s a romance of numbers as well as food and a vision of concept as well as livelihood for his team. You can be part of the testing process. Find A Bird in Hand’s casual $30 dinners alternating Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the Driftwood Char Bar. Or sign up for one of the tasting menu pop-ups. It might be a taste into the future.
