Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Isaac Becker and Nancy St. Pierre
Isaac Becker and Nancy St. Pierre at Snack Bar just after it opened.
After yesterday's news that Burch Steak & Pizza would not be re-opening, there were so many questions. Why did they stay closed all year? Why didn't they do takeout to survive? Are Bar La Grassa, 112 Eatery, and Snack Bar destined for the same fate? Can we have the recipe for the sea bean salad? Well, I actually got Isaac Becker on the phone this morning and he answered some of those very questions.
SM: First of all, sorry for your loss yesterday. That must have sucked.
IB: Yeah. But you know, we've known this was coming for quite some time. In a way, it's a relief to have it finalized.
SM: The big question that most people ask, is why haven't you opened at all this year?
IB: I don't pass judgement on anyone else, for how they did things this year, but for us it was about health and our families. Nancy and I have to be in our restaurants if they are going to be open and we didn't want to risk our family. And then, I can't expect that of my staff.
SM: People think you must be sitting on a million dollars.
IB: Yeah right. Well it's not free to be closed. We are fortunate that we didn't have the kind of struggle that would force us to be open, but we have our own struggles staying closed. We are facing a mountain of debt. It's not going to be easy going forward and we're going to have to be really careful. We're lucky that we have a good relationship with our banks and landlords, and we're hoping that people are going to be really eager to go out again once this is all over.
SM: But why close Burch?
IB: Ok, so Burch was really expensive to operate, even before the pandemic. It was big and busy, but it wasn't that profitable. It had a tricky sales/costs mix and the pandemic just made that worse. Burch had debt we just couldn't get around. The size of the restaurant, maybe that's my one regret with it. You know during summer we'd get a huge slowdown, school ended and our guests would leave town, weekend sales plummeted. But you still had to have the same amount of cooks on. We would make all our money in the winter and just use it to survive the summer.
SM: So pizza takeout probably wasn't going to help.
IB: And, our pizza oven was in the basement! We tried to figure it out, six cooks on, to do twelve pizzas? The math just wouldn't work. But don't think that we haven't been second guessing ourselves. We drive by Red Cow and that place is always busy, and we question everything. Or, I do ... Nancy is pretty set on staying safe. But there's a lot of pressure, we are constantly thinking about how to do this. We thought about Snack Bar, but we didn't want to invest $20K on plexiglass and dividers we'd just have to rip out later. And it's so small, how would we keep enough people six feet apart? We did get the PPP and we're using it pay our landlords, who have been really fair to us. But because we didn't open, none of those funds are forgivable, we'll have to pay that back.
SM: So how are your other restaurants? Are they coming back? I think people might need some hope that BLG is safe.
IB: It is safe. Each of the spots are their own entities, so the problems with Burch didn't affect them. And while BLG is big too, it's just different. And the other two are smaller and easier to operate. So they'll all be back, probably early summer.
SM: And can we get that sea bean salad from Burch on one of the other menus? Maybe the kinkhali dumplings too?
IB: Ha! Yeah, probably! That's a good thing, we have all these recipes from Burch that can now show up in the other restaurants.
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So, something to look forward to while we mourn the loss of a truly unique steak house. I did ask Becker about the rumors of lawsuits that are swirling in the industry chatter, and he said he had nothing to say about that. If all goes well and the numbers continue to look good, you could be snacking on BLG gnocchi sooner than you think.
