We caught up with the brilliant and insightful HARRY KILMER a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi HARRY, thanks for joining us today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?
I have always put quality above profit. The old saying that to create a great product you need to begin with the best ingredients. We only use the best ingredients when we prepare menu items. There are plenty of frozen hamburger patties available some with a lot of filler, I chose to only use the finest ground beef I could source. It’s a custom blend of Short Rib, Prime Rib and Brisket. In almost 10 years of serving this we have not had a bad comment on any of our burgers!! We have added a Bison Burger to the menu that made it to the front cover of the Ft. Wayne Monthly magazine and on the most current menu we added Wagyu Sliders to the mix. I make a Mac and Cheese that’s become one of our mainstays as well, so Quality over Profitability is our motto. Wabash IN is a small community, so word of mouth is key to our survival. We treat every customer with respect and greet them as family.
HARRY, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a classically trained chef with many years of Country club and Hotel experience. I began my cooking career while in high school and pursued industry jobs in Indiana, Florida, North Carolina mad West Virgina before making the move back to Indiana to take over the Honeywell center in Wabash Indiana. After 10 years i was offered the opportunity to purchase a local bar and after some deliberation made the choice to go into the bar business. The existing bar did not have a functioning kitchen, so equipment was purchased from a local restaurant that had closed. while this process was ongoing the town of Wabash was chosen my Deluxe Corporation to be the first town selected to their Small Business Revolution web series. We were one of six businesses chosen for an overhaul to our businesses. Robert Herjavec was the Business professional who offered his expertise in running our businesses. The Small Business Revolution team came in helped design our new logo, helped with the initial menu layout, designed our website and a marketing strategy. Our episode can be seen on Hulu (pretty cool)
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
I utilize a lot of social media mainly Facebook and Instagram. We offer a Group page ” Friends of Harry’s Old Kettle Pub & Grill” as well as a regular Facebook page. We have learned that the group page posts gets seen by more people than our regular page. I try to ask new groups how they learned of us if they are out of town, Google seems the best source for that. I have shirts and sweatshirts printed with different designs an offer those for sale. we give away free can cozies with our logo on them as well.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
Well i have to say it was in 2020 when i got a letter from the health dept saying everyone had to shut down due to Covid restrictions. after the initial 2 weeks of shuttered doors, we had to shut the bar area down and only offer food togo. This was problematic as our distributors only allowed us to purchase the same amount of togo products that we had previous history of purchasing. Once the public found out we were serving food they overwhelmed us with orders and this led to food outages. Luckly we were able to ride out the Covid storm and have been surviving since.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.harrysoldkettle.com
- Instagram: harrysoldkettle
- Facebook: harry’s old kettle pub & grill