Waiter, There?s a Buzz in my Soup

Jody Thornton and Matt “Grub” Christie were ready for a soft opening of their new restaurant on Aug. 31.

The Arkansas Razorbacks’ first football game of the season was in Little Rock the night before, so they figured most of the students would be out of town.

Thornton, 28, and Christie, 27, had spent the previous 67 days converting a 5,500-SF warehouse into their first restaurant, Grub’s Bar & Grille at 220 West Ave., a block south of Fayetteville’s Dickson Street entertainment district.

But the buzz had gotten around town. People were waiting for opening night. When it came, Grub’s was slammed. A crowd of about 1,000 showed up. The line of people waiting to get in trailed out the front door and down the street. The restaurant ran out of food and several varieties of beer.

Every weekend for about three months, Grub’s was almost as crowded as that first night. Too many customers is usually a good thing, but the young restaurateurs soon discovered that could be a problem in itself.

“We were so busy, we were overwhelmed,” Thornton said, adding that he was averaging 500 to 1,000 customers on weekend nights. “There was a lot happening. Some of the details got missed.”

In the first month of business, Grub’s did $150,700 in food sales alone, according to city tax records, which don’t include alcohol sales.

But food sales at Grub’s had dropped by 40 percent to $90,000 by January. The general belief in the restaurant business is that the “honeymoon period” should last for about 18 months, although the first month will likely be the best.

Was the honeymoon over for Grub’s already? Had the buzz gone bad?

Busted-nose Buzz

Thornton said things began to change on Nov. 27.

That night, Fred Talley, a 22-year-old starting tailback for the Razorbacks’ football team, got into a fight outside Grub’s.

According to a Nov. 30 article in The Morning News, Laurence Coker, a former Razorbacks walk-on, told police Talley punched and kicked him after he tried to break up a fight between Talley and “others.” The article said Coker suffered a broken nose and fractured cheekbone.

But no charges were filed.

“No victim ever came forward,” said Casey Jones, the city prosecutor.

“The altercation started inside, but no punches were thrown inside,” Thornton said. After Talley and another man were thrown out of Grub’s, they took their argument to the parking lot across West Avenue.

“We got them out and called the cops,” Thornton said. “Fights are two minutes, max, and it’s over.”

Thornton believes the fight brought Grub’s to the attention of the Fayetteville Police Department. Undercover officers began to frequent the restaurant. Grub’s was cited for patrons possessing alcohol after hours and for serving alcohol to minors on three occasions in December and January.

Thornton said each of the minor-in-possession citations occurred on a Monday night after 10 p.m., when Grub’s stops serving food and morphs into bar mode. Some college kids were buying beer for their friends who were under 21, he said.

“What killed us was — I don’t care how old you are, you don’t want to drink where 20 cops are,” Thornton said. “I admit we dropped the ball. Underaged kids were in here drinking.”

Jones said he doesn’t believe Fayetteville police targeted Grub’s. He said police stopped by Grub’s on their usual rounds of bars to check for underaged drinking.

Either way, the fight and arrests meant Grub’s was mentioned in area newspapers 14 times during a 30-day period, Thornton said.

The state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board put Grub’s on probation for one year beginning April 9. Grub’s liquor license was suspended for one week, but that order was held in abeyance for two months to see if things were running smoothly at Grub’s. If not, the one-week suspension would kick in.

A local television station, however, apparently missed the abeyance clause. KHBS/KHOG, Channels 40/29, based in Fayetteville and Fort Smith, reported incorrectly in March that the ABC had pulled Grub’s liquor license. Sales dropped by $40,000 within the next month, Thornton said.

With all the problems, Grub’s owners have had to cut their work force by 25 percent to 45 employees, and they eliminated a couple of management positions.

“In the beginning, we were understaffed,” he said. “We had three good months. The volume was here … The bar business is great, but it’s just so fickle. There are new bars opening all the time.”

Family Buzz

The building that houses Grub’s was previously home to Friday’s Flower Shop. The building is owned by the city of Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas, but it’s leased to the Walton Arts Center for the next 30 years.

Thornton and Christie had heard the Arts Center wouldn’t rent the warehouse to be used as a bar. So they drew up plans for a family-style restaurant that would also contain a bar area.

But Anita Scism, president and CEO of the Arts Center, said the Arts Center Council was never concerned with the bar aspect of Grub’s.

“We knew it was called Grub’s Bar & Grille and that it would have a liquor license,” Scism said. “We didn’t discuss what would come first, bar or restaurant.”

After a negotiation period, the lease was signed in June.

The new owners immediately knocked down walls and turned the three rooms into one large restaurant and another 1,800 SF of space upstairs with a couple of pool tables.

The idea was to have a restaurant by day that is converted into a bar after 10 p.m. with live music on the weekends. Now, Thornton said he has to fight the perception that some people consider Grub’s a “hoodlum place.”

“We want to be a restaurant No. 1,” Thornton said. “But with all the bad publicity, we got typecast as more of a bar. We want to be a restaurant more than anything. That’s why kids under 12 eat free all the time.”

Thornton said he wanted Grub’s to be like Jose’s, the Mexican restaurant on Dickson Street owned by Joe Fennel. Jose’s is primarily a restaurant but also serves liquor and is well known for its margaritas. The concept has worked for Fennel for more than 20 years. With $3.2 million in sales last year, Jose’s traditionally ranks as Fayetteville’s No. 2 restaurant in gross sales behind Red Lobster.

“It’s all perception,” Thornton said. “It’s all what people see. Our food was good [when we opened], but it wasn’t as good as it is now. We want the bar to be good, but we want the perception here to be on the food. Come eat here.”

Scism said she is concerned with anything that reflects on the Arts Center, but she thinks the initial problems at Grub’s have been ironed out.

“It’s part of our property, and anytime you have publicity like that, you don’t like to see it,” she said. “But I think it was just part of their growing pains. We want them to succeed also.”

Bar Buzz

Thornton may have inadvertently brought part of that perception problem on himself.

After managing Hickory Street Bar & Grill in Austin during the 1990s, Thornton moved to Fayetteville and is generally credited with the turnaround of Hoffbrau Steaks, a restaurant and bar he managed from from August 1999 to February 2001.

Hoffbrau was a bastion for middle-aged lawyers and businessmen who liked to eat lunch there and pontificate about trials and local scandals. Shooting for a different demographic and higher sales volume, Thornton slashed the beer prices to 99 cents a bottle, and the college kids stampeded through the door at night.

He did a similar thing at Grub’s but with more upscale beers. All draft beers are $2 per glass at Grub’s, including high-dollar brews like Guinness, which sells for about twice that price at other Dickson Street establishments.

“That’s the deal,” Thornton said. “We’re the home of the $2 beer. If we’ve got it, it’s $2, except for Busch Light in a can. It’s $1.”

In retrospect, Thornton said, he wishes he had been better prepared for opening night.

“And I wish I would have been more prepared to react to the problems that come along,” he said. “We didn’t react fast enough.”

Thornton said he should have cut his labor force sooner, when he first realized sales were declining.

Thornton and Christie went to Little Rock on March 12 for a meeting with ABC.

Milton Lueken, a staff attorney with ABC, said the two restaurateurs had made several changes to keep from violating liquor laws in the future:

• They met with Fayetteville police to learn how to carefully check identification cards and spot the fake ones.

• They vowed to check IDs more closely and to require anyone under the age of 21 to leave at 10 p.m.

• They installed a cameras at the door.

• They canceled a special $2 price for a pitcher of beer on Monday nights (the nights when most of the problems occurred).

• They demoted an employee who apparently instructed underaged drinkers to “hide your beer” when the police arrived during the Dec. 17 bust.

“They didn’t contest the violations,” Lueken said. “They came down here, and they said, ‘We’ve had some problems and we’ve had some growing pains, but we’ve changed all that.’ I thought they were perfectly sincere about what they were telling us.”