CEO Roundtable: Restaurants

Each month, we gather around the table with a different group of Springfield business leaders to discuss industry trends, workforce and company operations. Join us as we get a behind-the-scenes look into our business community from the C-suite.

Springfield Business Journal Executive Editor Christine Temple sits down with veteran restaurateurs Shawn Kraft, owner of Nonna’s Italian Cafe, Casper’s and Meals by Monica; and James Martin, owner of Gilardi’s Ristorante.

Christine Temple: Tell me about Springfield’s restaurant scene.
Shawn Kraft: I look at Springfield’s diners as the restaurant scene and with that diner, I see a mix of people that like a lot of home cooking goodness, a lot of the old grandma’s cooking or mother’s cooking and then they also like to treat themselves to what they like in fine dining. Now with that, they’re pretty educated on both spectrums, so you can’t really fool too many of them, so you got to be on your ball with the Springfield diners and they’ll let you know if you’re not.
James Martin: I couldn’t agree more. Springfield does have a discerning dining scene in the sense that we have some wonderful restaurants here, legacy restaurants that have been around for a long time, owners and operators that have been around for a long time that have survived. I’d like to see a little more variety. When you go to Kansas City or St. Louis, there’s Afghani this and there’s Ethiopian and this and all kinds of different. We don’t have necessarily that, but I think that’s starting to change, hopefully. Overall, I think we have a really good strong healthy dining scene. What is to come is going to be the interesting part in the next few years.
Temple: Billy Dove with 417foodist recently described the dining scene as everything having a Midwestern flair, kind of curated to this palette. Do you see that as kind of a softening of the more ethnic cuisines that you were mentioning, James?
Martin: I believe so. For example, in our restaurant, one of our most popular raviolis is a smoked brisket ravioli. And yes, we make the ravioli and we smoke off the brisket and everything else, but like Shawn was alluding to, it’s that comfort food with a little bit of a twist. When we do that, we just have people piling in for a smoked brisket ravioli because it’s comforting, it’s recognizable even though it is a little off the beaten path for what you would find in Italy for certain.
Kraft: Approachable.
Martin: We’ve been pretty successful by taking things that people are familiar with and comfortable with and twisting it just a little bit to put our flair on it.
Kraft: To bring the home into your restaurant yet still do the themed restaurant that you want to have, whether it be Italian or Chinese. I go to a lot of different cities, and I think the bigger the population, the bigger infrastructure you have to bring outside product. Springfield, I’d say, has an issue with getting product because your two main sources for restaurants are either what you can source out locally, which naturally only has so many things locally you can get. And then also what you can get from the food vendors, and the food vendors since COVID have really cut down their number of items they offer. So it has taken off the table a lot of exotic things. So, you could have the Euro place, you could have the Chinese place, but you’re still functioning with the same chicken, the same spices, the same stuff, and you got to figure out how to create it from there. So if you want to call it Springfield Mexican, Springfield Chinese, Springfield Italian, there’s a reason for that.
Martin: It makes our job a lot harder when we’re wanting to do something different or potentially a new owner operator coming in and saying, I want to do an Afghani place. Well, where are you going to source all this stuff? Amazon only delivers so many boxes.
Kraft: There’s only so much goat meat you can get here, and what kind of format can you get it in?
Temple: Cost is probably playing into that quite a bit. This is from the National Restaurant Association talking about wholesale food costs: Since the pandemic, it’s up about 29% kind of across the board. Some items are down this year and some are up more, but they’re rising again this year after being more steady in 2023. That’s looking at a national level. What are you guys seeing within your businesses and how are you addressing that?
Kraft: I think that number is way off base.
Martin: Much higher.
Kraft: Take your core products of dairy, beef, those are your highest type things that you’re going to have, bread even. Dairy is up over 200%. I closed Casper’s down for the move and I left Casper’s at $1.59 a pound of ground beef. When I reopened 13 months later, it’s now $3.49. That’s not 29% and that’s just ground beef. My bread more than doubled, just for buns. So everything of my core doubled. At Nonna’s, I see tomato products and some of that stuff has really kind of stayed the same even when you get up to the artisan level, but at the same time, flour has doubled. It’s pretty wild. I don’t know about this 29%. I’d put a one in front of that number easily.
Temple: Wow. And you’re talking about from pre-COVID to now?
Kraft: Even after COVID. So pre-COVID to now has meant a lot less available product and then an increase in prices too.
Martin: My bread, cream, beef, all that stuff has certainly doubled. Once inflation sets in, it doesn’t go back. It’s not like beef is ever going to be $1.59 a pound again.
Kraft: Chicken.
Martin: Chicken, oh my gosh.
Kraft: Wow.
Martin: I know. I almost want to take it off my menu.
Kraft: It went from like 80 cents a pound to $4 a pound.
Martin: I know Shawn, he doesn’t skimp on quality. He’s going to get good quality beef, he’s going to get good quality chicken, just like I will. Even for that top tier, that stuff is not going to come down. That plays into if we source locally or we source from a food truck. Either way it’s still an issue of they have so much an increased cost, too, whether it’s gas or labor or if anyone listening to this podcast owns a business who has had to renew their insurance – oh my gosh. So now, if you’re paying $13 or $14 for a good burger, well that’s what you’re paying for. But the owner/operator is still sitting there going, “OK, I still have to pay my insurance. I still have to pay my staff.” I don’t argue against the increased costs when it comes to labor. In my opinion, people should be paid more. But right now all of us owner/operators are dealing with the trifecta. In my case, alcohol costs have just gone through the roof too. I’m looking at bottles of wine now where they would cost me maybe $9, $10, $11 for a house pour. Now I’m looking at $15, $16, $17. That’s 50%. If my cost goes up $1, I have to go $3. There has to be profit in there somewhere. My fire/casualty doubled in one year. It’s the realization that people want to go out and they want to have good food prepared in a healthy and safe manner by the Health Department code, you’re not having raw chicken stored above your salad greens, so you’re going to have to have well-paid informed staff.
Kraft: Experienced.
Martin: There’s nobody getting rich here in the food business at all.