We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jon Bonnell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jon below.
Jon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
As a passionate culinary student, eager to learn every technique, sauce, and new ingredient in the world from our Chef Instructors, we were tasked in our second year of study with creating an imaginary restaurant. The exercise was meant to show us how to create a concept, write a menu, price out ingredients, and write a monthly statement of expenses, labor, and expected revenues. Most students created something either comical or mimicked an existing restaurant in some manor, but I took this opportunity to actually begin my business plan for my first restaurant. I researched farms and ranches near Ft Worth that I could utilize for the finest ingredients and wrote the first draft of what would one day become Bonnell’s, Fine Texas Cuisine back in 1998 at The New England Culinary Institute in Vermont.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1994 and from the New England Culinary Institute in 1998, then “Cheffed around” until I felt like I had enough experience to actually start my first restaurant in 2001. I didn’t, but my wife and I took the plunge and dived right in on October 12th of 2001, after getting married in February of that same year. We got many things right, and many things wrong, but here we are 25 years later operating 7 businesses and are still happily married with two kids! All of our restaurants are independently family-owned and operated and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have one business partner who has been an integral part of the Bonnell’s Restaurant Group since day one named Ed McOwen.
Have you ever had to pivot?
In March of 2020, the entire world shifted gears. All of our reservations for the week cancelled, and we were on a crash course with bankruptcy very quickly, along with every other small restaurant in Ft Worth. Without sales, nothing else counts in business, and when the news told everyone to stay home to avoid Covid, they did. Then the City was forced to shut us down, actually quite a relief. I drove to each of my restaurant locations for an emergency meeting that morning with the entire staff and told them all basically the same thing: “I’m sorry, but I have to let you all go. You all deserve better, but there’s really nothing I can do because they are shutting us down. Please get on the website to apply for unemployment. You all deserve it, and the site will crash today at some point, but keep at it and keep calling as well. I’m so sorry, and hope that I can hire you all back as soon as possible.” By noon I had fired roughly 250 people who had done absolutely nothing wrong. We kept roughly 28 people to try and salvage 4 previously-successful restaurants, a skeleton crew at best. By pivoting from fine dining in two or our locations to family meal value packs to-go, we were able to get through the worst of times and eventually open back up 80 days later.
How’d you meet your business partner?
Ed McOwen and I met while both working at the same restaurant in downtown Ft Worth called Randall’s (cafe, wine bar, and cheesecakery). It was a fine dining bistro, very intimate in setting, only 45 seats, and only 2 employees in the kitchen at the time. We were both culinary grads and felt like we knew what we were doing, but put 80 hungry customers through a dining room in one night with only 2 people working a tiny kitchen, and we found ourselves in a seriously fast-paced environment before we knew it, struggling to keep up with everything from cooking, plating, making homemade breads, and even doing the dishes. Most weekdays were a little more quiet, but weekends were as difficult as possible for such a small facility with no exhaust fan in the kitchen. It was one of the best experiences of my life, but as I eventually told the owner about my future plans, he decided to replace me after I trained the next hire so that I had time to work on my own place. Eventually I convinced Ed to join me and we opened Bonnell’s together in 2001.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bonnellsrestaurantgroup.com/
- Instagram: chefjonbonnell
- Facebook: Jon Bonnell
- Twitter: @jonbonnell
