A highlight reel of the most frightening things we’ve faced over the past 21 years:
2002 Mitch, Cyn and Steve started Hell's Kitchen on a wing and a prayer. Within 2 weeks of opening, Mitch’s knee was crushed in a vehicle accident, so Steve, Mitch’s co-pilot, had to run the entire kitchen almost single-handedly. The pressure was indescribable; Steve lost 20% of his body weight in 3 months, but saved Hell’s Kitchen from imploding.
2003 Cyn (aka bookkeeper, CEO, marketing, jack of all trades except cooking) couldn’t figure out why we were always so cash strapped. Going over every line item on the Profit and Loss statement, she cut out superfluous spends such as a fresh ORCHID on every plate. ($3k/year). Mitch howled; Cyn prevailed, so Mitch sold his beloved Jeep to get our bank account back on track.
2007 "Hell yeah! Here we come, Duluth!” Experienced restauratuers know the best practice is to take over a space that already has restaurant-specific infrastructure in place (hoods, venting, etc). Instead, we took over the old Antique Mall on Canal Park Drive…gas lines and water lines had to be trenched into cement; hoods had to go up through 4 floors, and a host of unexpected spends we should have discovered during our due diligence before signing a 3-year lease decimated our $530,000 budget. We peed our pants and took on a massive loan of almost a million dollars.
2008 Cyn, Steve and Mitch were exhausted, working double duty at both locations, and hanging on by a thread. So imagine their terror when the landlords from our Minneapolis location sent a Certified letter asking them to leave the 10th St location because they wanted to redevelop the entire city block even though we had 2 more years on our lease. The iron-clad lease was good for another 2 years, but seeing the writing on the wall, we threw in the towel and moved to our current 9th St location when the landlords agreed to pay for the move.
2009 "What the fk were we thinking?" Although our downtown Minneapolis restaurant was profitable, our high buildout costs in Duluth continued to drain our funds. When our CPA suggested we rebrand the concept into a more casual restaurant with better margins, HellBurgers was born. Did we think it was smart to spend $72,000 for the rebrand? Yep. Did it work? Ahh, nope. After a bloodbath of further losses, we closed in 2010, still owing the bank over $800,000.
2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Even though our Mpls restaurant would have been protected (separate corporations), we refused to declare bankruptcy for the Duluth operation, and spent 6 years paying off the Duluth debt with profits from downtown Minneapolis as fast as we could (which is why Vision Bank still loves us to this day). Mitch repeatedly asked "If downtown's doing so well, how come we never seem to have money?" Cyn repeatedly showed him the loan statements, and he'd walk away with slumped shoulders.
2017 With Minneapolis' cash reserves at an all time low, we were so busy running the biz that we completely missed the fact that our downtown margins slipped from a healthy profit to a dwindling, almost-negative number. In September, we had a "hair on fire" meeting with our staff, who quickly came up with a remarkable list of ways to cut costs without hurting our food quality. KJ Granberg, our current company President, turned the ship around in 4 short months (!!!) and brought the downtown restaurant back to profitability. Mind you, we still weren't laughing all the way to the bank, but she and her team managed to squirrel away some savings each month, which ended up being a godsend that got us through the first year of our covid closure.
2019 Mitch, as you might already know, fell ill and suddenly passed away in 2015, leaving Cyn and Steve, now in their 60’s, to explore exit plans so they could retire. Rather than sell to private investors, which would yield the highest price, the founders bucked everyone’s sage advice and instead turned Hell’s Kitchen over to its employees via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) on Jan 1, 2020 so everyone, from dishwashers to managers, servers, hosts, cooks, expos, and bartenders, could own the company. The best part? They didn’t have to pay a penny out of their pockets because payments to the founders would come from future profits. Since the restaurant was solidly profitable, they thought “What could possibly go wrong?” Well, ummm, COVID. Closed restaurant, no profits, no ESOP payments ...the founders watched their future retirement funds vanish into thin air.
2021 Having already spent a big portion of our savings to add the Hell’s Cafeteria concept on the street level, our management team decided to forge ahead, even though we were still reeling from Covid. What the hell were we thinking? Easy answer: “Covid’s almost over, and when downtown offices bounce back to life, folks will love our easy, lightning-fast “old school” cafeteria concept." But with offices coming back at a snail’s pace, it's still a bit of a dance to get traction, so we're thrilled that downtown visitors from conventions and events are keeping the concept alive.
These are just a few examples of why we’ve often said it’s a miracle we've survived 20 years. Welcome to restaurant life in the fast lanes!
Pssst: Want all the other True Stories from Hell as soon as they’re published? Click here to sign up for our Behind The Scenes newsletters.