The 590 KLBJ Roundtables

I had the opportunity to fill in for Jeff Ward over the holiday season on 590 KLBJ. And I hope you had the opportunity to catch our restaurant roundtable on Dec 29th at 3pm. We had Shane Street from the Grille at Rough Hollow, James Ramsey from Georgetown’s Silver and Stone, and Michael Flume from the Gruene Door in Gruene, Texas. What these gentlemen all had in common was the fact that they had all opened restaurants within the past year.

We discussed the financial difficulties of opening a restaurant in this economy, the challenge of establishing a base of regular customers, and dealing with personnel and vendor issues. The conversation was candid and far reaching. And I hope you came away with a sense of just how difficult the restaurant business can be. But my hat is off to these guys: each one brings a unique set of credentials to the table. What I was particularly impressed with was the unbridled passion that each one of them has for the business itself. That passion characterizes most of the successful operators I’ve run across and should help each of them in the daily adventure that is the restaurant business.

I was also able to have on the irrepressible Beau Theriot, owner of the Oasis. He joined us on Wednesday, the 6th. Beau’s life reads like something you’d find in a Tom Wolfe novel. But I’m most impressed with his rebound from almost total disaster when the Oasis burned to the ground on June 1, 2005. Many entrepreneurs would have been tempted to take the insurance money and simply retire into the sunset. But not Beau. His first thought was for his 180 employees. He had the only part of the restaurant that was not destroyed working as a temporary kitchen within 3 days of the fire. And now, 4 1/2 years later, the building that this renaissance man designed himself, has been rebuilt bigger and better than ever. (And that includes the food as well, which I had not been a fan of in the early years, but which I am now quite happy to recommend.)