13 minute read
Helping Restaurants Find a New Way to Serve
Rouses Had No Reservations About Helping Restaurants Find a New Way to Serve
James Breuhl was seated at the kitchen table with his wife and kids, scrolling idly through Facebook, when he noticed an alarming pattern in posts by friends in the restaurant business: Only a day or two into the shelter-in-place order, they were already struggling. Restaurants operate on notoriously thin margins. With their doors closed, it was only a matter of time before the best places to eat across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — the local restaurants that give our communities color and flair — would run out of money, and possibly close forever.
“I told my wife, there’s got to be something I can do,” he says. James, the vice president of fresh for Rouses Markets, had an idea: What if we found a way to let restaurants sell their dishes right there in our stores, and let them keep all the profit from it? The epiphany came around nine o’clock at night, but he immediately called Donny Rouse, the company CEO. “I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ And he said, ‘I had the same thought — I was just about to call you. Let’s do it. Pull it together.’”
Soon the entire company was mobilized on the project. “I’ll tell you the best thing about being here at Rouses,” says James. “I’ve been here for 13 years, and when we want to do something, we make it happen. There’s not a lot of red tape. You don’t have to run through a lot of processes or a lot of decision makers. And we’re usually on the same page — that phone call to Donny and his blessing made it easy to get everybody on board.” The company’s creative director soon joined the effort, as well as the food service director, accountants and the company’s chief financial officer — everyone, really, right down to the store level. The idea would be to reach out to as many restaurants as possible, and to make sure every penny of every item sold went back to those restaurants.
“The most important thing for restaurants right now is cash flow,” says James. “There are not a lot of dollars coming into the restaurants, so we didn’t want to have our normal system, where you would typically pay someone within 30 days, or something like that. We wanted to be able to give them the money they earned so that they could pay their servers, their waiters, their kitchen staff. We are really trying to keep these people employed. Because it’s not just the restaurant you’re helping. It’s the people that you’re helping.”
Within 48 hours of James and Donny’s phone call, the first restaurant, Big Mike’s BBQ Smokehouse, had some of its most famous dishes in the Rouses Thibodaux store.
“Big Mike’s is a small barbecue joint here in town — literally less than a football field away from one of our stores — and it’s very popular,” says James. “I’d go to his restaurant during the week after work to eat something with the family, and he’d always be there working, so we had a relationship with him.”
Mike Lewis, the owner of Big Mike’s, jumped in with both feet, smoking the meats at his restaurants and prepping the products he normally serves. He portioned out his plates and brought them to the store to sell. Because Rouses had discontinued use of the warm deli shelves at its stores, those shelves were available to display the plated-up meals. So not only could you get a plate from Big Mike’s, but you could get it as it was meant to be eaten: hot off the grill.
Big Mike's BBQ Smokehouse was the first of many partnerships between Rouses Markets and local restaurants.
Family Meals, Family Fun
Since setting the restaurant plan in motion, Rouses has expanded its partnerships with local dining establishments from Thibodaux to New Orleans, Baton Rouge to Lafayette.
“We’re seeing more and more restaurants come on board with us,” says James. “And I can tell you, every day, through our info line, that we’re getting more and more requests from certain restaurants. And we’re trying to help as many as possible.”
The way it works is this: Restaurants prepare their best dishes in their own kitchens. The food is transported to Rouses locations using refrigerated trucks when necessary. Stores have designated areas to display the restaurants’ offerings (locations vary depending on the layout of the local Rouses). With the temporary closure of Rouses salad bars, those units can be used to maintain cold temperatures for foods that require that. Big Mike’s, on the other hand, uses the available heated displays to keep their meals warm and ready to go. The needs of the restaurant determine where the food is positioned.
“We designate certain stores for each restaurant we are working with — local places that they are comfortable delivering to,” says James. “So what would happen is that they would go to the store in the morning, they would make their deliveries, they would look at how much sold from the previous day, and then they would kind of plan that day’s production. We told them: Sell as much as you possibly want. Get after this. And once we designated the store, we designated space to them, and they managed it from that point forward, and that’s worked very well for those guys.”
Restaurants really adopted their areas, too — decorating them, installing signs, handling the deliveries personally, stocking their cases according to their own wishes.
Rouses, meanwhile, has done its part to promote the restaurants on social media. One particular success story has been the Italian restaurant Rotolo’s, based out of Baton Rouge. Because the company is spread across the same geographical areas as Rouses stores in general, Rotolo’s has been able to get its cuisine into 35 different locations. They even had their own spin on the restaurant-in-Rouses concept, where they produced pizza kits for kids.
“It’s really great,” says James. “It’s an activity for your kids to do at home, making their own personal pizza. Rotolo’s has been doing a tremendous job, and we are actually selling a tremendous amount of pizza for them.”
When Rotolo’s pizza kits arrived in stores, Rouses blew it up on social media, and shoppers really responded. One replied to the post: “I can tell you personally, for me, I had my son and daughter, and we picked up the pizza kit because that’s our favorite pizza place. And when we brought the kit home, it gave them a little bit of normalcy in their life, which was awesome.”
Baton Rouge based restaurant Rotolo's had great success selling pizza kits at 35 Rouses Markets locations.
The Place in Your Home
“I think it was March 16 when we had our last service in New Orleans,” says Tory McPhail, executive chef of Commander’s Palace, perhaps the most celebrated restaurant in the city, if not the entire country. “We started to pivot into trying to do more to-go food, more delivery food. And Marcy Nathan, the creative director of Rouses Markets, calls me and says, ‘Hey, look, let’s jump on a quick conference call. We’ve got some cool stuff to talk about.’”
Within one day, Commander’s Palace had the finest turtle soup in the world available at what were once salad bars at the Rouses location on Baronne Street. Hours later, Commander’s had soup in the Tchoupitoulas Street store as well and, the following day, they were also supplying the Carrollton Avenue and Power Boulevard locations.
They were the second restaurant to offer dishes in Rouses locations, and they were ready. “We’ve got this production room in the back of Commander’s, and we just keep that room sanitary, prepped and ready. As we were dealing with other projects around the restaurant, and doing things like taking delivery from the front, we produced turtle soup for Rouses in the sanitary room.” Tory kept an open line with all the store managers so that he could get inventory updates to help him prepare enough food. He and his team ended up making multiple deliveries a day to the four stores they were servicing.
With every delivery, the city’s love of the restaurant, and the memories built up over a century, spilled out to Tory and the restaurant staff. “We were very proud,” he says. “Every time we would walk into a store, we’d have our gloves and masks on, and a delivery of fresh turtle soup. And I’d be cruising through the Rouses stores and so many people would just, like, stop me in the cereal aisle and say, ‘Oh, man, this is Commander’s Palace! I gotta tell you my story. I took my grandparents there for their wedding anniversary. We did that two weeks before this mayhem started happening — and I can’t wait to get back!’”
He adds, “People see this as a little piece of normalcy — ‘man, I want to sit down and have this unbelievable turtle soup’ that took us three days to make. People jump at that opportunity, and we are proud to be able to help them do that.”
Presently, the restaurant is laying the groundwork for its inevitable reopening.
“This partnership between Commander’s Palace and the Rouses family has just been amazing and enduring,” says Tory, “and it just gives me such great pride to produce amazing, legendary New Orleans food and feed the people of New Orleans. Even though Commander’s is closed, we’re working hard behind the scenes to really get our brand of good Creole food out there again.”
Historic Commander's Palace partnered with Rouses Markets to make their coveted offerings available at locations across New Orleans.
Storybook Bread
A character in a Hemingway novel once described the two ways he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” For most of us, that’s a fair reading of how the pandemic has changed our lives.
It was no different for Chaya Conrad, the owner of Bywater Bakery on the corner of Dauphine and Independence streets in New Orleans. “Before anybody really thought it was a big deal, I started putting handwashing signs up, and people were telling me I was being paranoid,” she says. “I really drilled sanitation into my team. Something was happening.” Sales slacked off, but she and her team planned to push on until things cleared. Soon, though, it became obvious that this would not be like hurricane season — a few days down, maybe a week, then you’re back to full strength.
Before the city banned all in-restaurant dining, the famed bakery began taking to-go orders only (to protect its workers) but, right away, it was clear that dark days were ahead. “Once we put the chairs up and just went to to-go only, our sales just plummeted,” says Chaya. “It became really obvious that I was not going to be able to sustain my staff on the money coming in.” Only a few days into the pandemic, she made the hard decision to shut the doors, and possibly for good.
But we are a community, and three days after she locked the doors, her phone rang.
“It was Rouses. They wanted to know if I would bake bread for them.”
It was, she says, a lifeline for Bywater Bakery, and allowed her to hire back four full-time employees and one part-time person. “We just turned on a dime. We went from a full-service — where we have a million different items — and overnight we became a big bread-baking production that only did two items.”
It was a neighborhood effort. “We had enough bread pans to do maybe 16 loaves a day, but not the kind of volume we would need to turn out.” No bread pans of the proper size could be found locally and, she soon learned, it would take too long to get them shipped. Help, however, was just down the road. “We have a wonderful neighbor who is able to create just about everything — he’s done a lot of stuff for the bakery, and so we went to him and said, ‘Hey, can you make a pan that’s this size?’” He got to work, she says, and by the next day he had made 18 pans for Bywater Bakery. Every day that followed, he had more and more coming in. “We were able to bake as much bread as we needed. It was pretty amazing — it was a whole community effort to get this going!”
For the next couple of weeks, Bywater Bakery focused only on what Chaya describes as a classic sandwich bread in multigrain and farmhouse white versions. “I just wanted something that was comfortable and utilitarian, but still delicious for people. They’re storybook loaves, big and puffy. You look at them and they make you happy. You just feel nourished looking at them.”
At its peak, Chaya and her team were turning out 250 loaves a day for Rouses, and once they had it down to an art, the bakery reopened its community window for guests to pick up orders on special. “Once we felt confident that we could keep up with the demand and service everybody properly, we opened the window for a couple of hours a day, just selling a few items. And people really appreciated that.”
Bywater Bakery is now open from 10 to one every day but Wednesday. Their most popular days are Friday — bagel day — and Sunday, which is beignet day.
“It’s going super well,” says Chaya. “You know, it’s not what it was. But nothing’s going to be what it was. We’re all re-creating ourselves again.”
She’s still baking between 150 and 200 loaves of bread four or five times a week for Rouses. “They’ve been so generous with us,” she says, “and it’s given us an opportunity to be generous. For every loaf that we sell, we are donating a loaf to charity: to the New Orleans Mission or to the Second Harvest Food Bank, which has a drive-up food bank on Thursdays and Saturdays. We are so happy to be able to support our community.”
She adds: “It’s just…we’ll be forever grateful to Rouses for this. Without that call, I probably wouldn’t be reopened right now, and then I don’t know if we would have ever reopened. Right when I was feeling the most defeated, that phone rang. I’m just forever grateful for that.”
Bywater Baker supplied 250 loaves a day for sale in Rouses Markets, and continues to generously donate a loaf to charity for every loaf sold.
Keep On Keeping On
Such successes, from Big Mike’s to Bywater Bakery, have gone beyond James Breuhl’s and Donny Rouse’s wildest dreams. “You know, for us it was just about doing the right thing. Local culture is so strong here, and we wanted to keep those local restaurants going. I’ve been with Rouses for a long time, and what we’re famous for is asking: Can you buy it locally? That’s usually the first question that I ask anytime we’re buying something, because if I can buy it local first, that’s what I’m doing," said James.
“How can we use our stores to help keep restaurants and their people afloat?” he thought to himself after perusing posts on Facebook. And now Rouses has the answer. So far, the company has raised nearly $200,000 for restaurants and, as the pandemic continues, that number — a rare, good one — continues to grow.
