We caught up with the brilliant and insightful BJ Lieberman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, BJ thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
I think people see a busy restaurant and assume that we are making tons of money. It just isn’t true. Restaurants are an interesting study in peoples’ perception of value and an exercise in WHAT people value. By this, I mean that everyone has a point of reference for what they think a food item should cost. On occasion we will add a cheeseburger to our menu, and when we do, we make our own brioche buns, grind and form our patties, make our sauces, pickles, etc. We only use the best ingredients. We pay our staff well. Our burger costs $18. Now, without any other information, folks have a preconceived notion of what a burger is and what it should cost and we are competing with McDonalds that can do their “burger” and I put that in quotes because I would argue that McDonalds is barely food, and because they can figure out how to charge $3 for a burger, that is now a data point that we need to compete with.
So, the question becomes, do our guests value the fact that we use good ingredients in our burger? Do they value that we take care of our staff? Do they value the atmosphere and experience we are providing? That’s why, to me, our burger is worth what we charge for it, but some guests think that we are somehow price gouging and getting rich off of these items. “I can get burger meat at the grocery store for $4/lb”. It’s tough to give someone that perceived value when they are so familiar with all of the parts of a thing.
Anyway, it’s important to know that a restaurant in good financial shape might be making a maximum of 10% profits on their sales. Cost of goods, labor, incidentals are ALL getting more expensive and the consumer appetite to pay more has not caught up with the changing landscape. The general public is going to have to get used to paying a bit more for things in restaurants going forward. We really can’t control that part of the model, but what we can do is make sure that everyone has an amazing experience at our establishment. We’ve concentrated a lot on upping the value of our food by showing people an awesome time. We have to charge more for the same food, so we have to give people the extra value, and this is how we’ve chosen to do it.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am currently the chef and owner of 3 establishments in Columbus, OH, but I actually started my career as a graphic designer. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, then moved to Charleston, SC for college, and that’s where I fell in love with restaurants. I worked my way up to the marketing director of a large, local restaurant group in Charleston before I realized that I actually enjoyed working in the kitchen more than I enjoyed working at a desk. After a few years of doing design, I decided to go to CIA in Hyde Park, NY for Culinary School. I was 25 at the time and definitely on the older side as a student and career-changer. I had never done well in school to that point and decided before I went that I would get straight A’s and have perfect attendance.
I ended up graduating first in my class, and was lucky enough to land an externship at my favorite restaurant in Charleston, McCrady’s Restaurant, at the time run by chef Sean Brock. I worked there for 6 months on my externship before I graduated and was luckily offered my first job post-graduation at chef Brock’s Husk, as a part of the opening team. I graduated in September of 2010 and the restaurant opened in October. It was the first and hardest restaurant opening I’ve ever been a part of. Our cooking style was improvisational: the menu changed every day and sometimes we didn’t know the entirety of a new dish until service started. We got all of our produce from local farms and sometimes things just would or would not show up out of the blue. We had to think on our feet every minute of every day and I loved it. After 8 months of operating, Bon Appetit Magazine named Husk the “Best New Restaurant” in America, and then stuff got real bonkers. Our reservations booked out for 2 years almost over night. We were at 100% capacity every day, lunch and dinner. I became a good butcher and an amazing line cook during my time at Husk.
In 2013 I was offered a sous chef position at my good friend Aaron Silverman’s new restaurant, Rose’s Luxury in Washington, DC. It was a good opportunity to move closer to home, and my girlfriend at the time, Bronwyn and I were kind of looking for a change of venue as we’d both been living in Charleston for more than a decade. I promised Aaron that we would stay in DC for one year to help him get off the ground and then Bronwyn and I would figure out where we wanted to move permanently.
Building Rose’s Luxury from the ground up is one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. We had no rules with the menu, just that everything had to give people joy. Our entire ethos was that we were there to take care of people. Take care of the guests, the team and anyone else who had an occasion to step into the restaurant. As a part of management from the beginning, I really got to see the entire process of opening a restaurant, from the construction phase, to managing those budgets and that time, to creating and executing a menu from scratch and troubleshooting opening a brand new kitchen.
Rose’s was a huge success pretty much from the beginning. We got 3 stars from the Washington Post (which is VERY good) after only 6 weeks of being open and later the first year we were also awarded “Best New Restaurant” from Bon Appetit, as well as GQ a few month later. After a year of operations, I was promoted to head chef, just as we decided to expand to a second location, which ended up being right next door. We opened Pineapple and Pearls (P&P) in 2014. A fine dining restaurant through and through. I helped design the kitchen and hire staff, but didn’t take part in day-to-day operations as fine dining on that level has never really been my thing. I was very happy to run the kitchen at Rose’s in those days. A few months after opening P&P, Rose’s was re-review by the Washington Post and we received four stars. One of only a handful of restaurants to ever achieve that.
In 2015 the Michelin guide decided to add Washington, DC as only its 4th guide in America (New York, Chicago and California were the others). Rose’s Luxury was awarded one star while Pineapple and Pearls was awarded two in the inaugural guide, accolades that both establishments have retained to this day. That same year, Bronwyn and I got married.
In 2017 Aaron and I decided to do an offshoot of what was a small cafe that operated during the day at P&P at a historic site on Pennsylvania Ave, a few blocks from the other restaurants that we named Little Pearl (LP). I coordinated every facet of opening LP, helped with the architects, managed construction budgets and hired for all positions in the kitchen. We opened as a cafe during the day and a wine bar at night and it was an immediate hit.
After a year of operating LP, I had an epiphany that I was ready to do my own restaurant. I literally woke up in the middle of the night and shook Bronwyn awake to tell her that we were leaving DC. Although we had considered may cities, Columbus was a pretty natural choice for us. Bronwyn is from here and her family still lives locally. I spent 6 months scouting locations for a restaurant before settling on what became our first restaurant in Columbus, Chapman’s Eat Market.
We moved here in September of 2019 and officially signed the lease to Chapman’s in March of 2020, literally two weeks before the pandemic started. We did construction and put the team together over the next 5 months and opened a very different restaurant than we had been planning in August of 2020. Instead of a packed dining room, we could only do takeout at that time. Instead of beautiful plates with garnishes and a chef’s kiss we were putting burgers (albeit the best burger you’ve ever had) in to go boxes. We limped through the pandemic, hardly lost any staff and when dining restrictions were lifted in 2021, we finally got to launch the restaurant we had set out to do two years prior. Like Rose’s, there are no rules for the menu at Chapman’s. If it’s delicious and it makes people happy, it goes on the menu. Also, everyone in the kitchen gets to participate in the menu creation. Dishes from our cook’s and chef’s childhood, or family favorites are fair game, and as we have a diverse staff, that has manifested itself in a diverse menu. I like to say that it’s as if we’re holding a mirror up to the kitchen and the menu is our reflection.
In 2021 the New York Times named Chapman’s one of the “50 most exciting restaurants in America.”
In 2022 we decided to expand with two new projects, a Jazz Lounge called Ginger Rabbit which we opened last April and features live jazz five nights a week, an extensive cocktail menu and a small menu of snacks. We were named Best New Bar in Columbus earlier this year.
Concurrently, we have been working on our most ambitious project to date, a live fire restaurant called Hiraeth that will open in the Short North this summer. The menu at Hiraeth is akin to a steakhouse, with larger cuts of meat and a choose your own sides and small plates vibe. However, the same logic that applies to Chapman’s menu applies at Hiraeth. Dishes will be a reflection of our staff and nothing goes on the menu if it does not bring joy.
Have you ever had to pivot?
This one is easy. We opened Chapman’s during the lockdown period of the pandemic. We had planned on doing a full service restaurant from the beginning but had to pivot to a to go only model. Instead of cooking the food we had set out to do from the beginning, we decided to do the best version of what we would like to take as to go food. We got branded pints to do our homemade ice creams, came up with what I still think is the best burger I’ve ever had and a host of other food that does not degrade in a to go setting. It forced us to be creative within a box and sometimes I think when you have the most parameters put on you, you do the best work to break free of the box you’re in.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
We lost $200k during the first year of operations. I had to go back to my investor three different times for more cash to get us through the next few months, which is the most demoralizing thing I’ve ever had to do. My rational was to think of this money as a construction overage, except instead of constructing our physical space, we were constructing a team. We knew the restrictions would end at some point and if we could keep our team together and happy, we knew we could hit the ground running once the pandemic was “over”. I’m happy they saw it the way I did and kept us afloat. I will probably never be out of debt for Chapman’s but keeping the dream going was absolutely the right decision.
Contact Info:
- Website: eatchapmans.com gingerrabbitjazz.com hiraeth614.com
- Instagram: @bjlieberman @eatchapmans @gingerrabbitjazz @hiraeth_614
Image Credits
by Bronwyn Haines and Justin Singer