by Kristen Wile

Longtime Birkdale Village mainstay Dressler’s Restaurant will close this fall and undergo a transformation into a second location of fellow Rare Roots Hospitality restaurant Fin & Fino. This fall will also mark 20 years in business for the first restaurant from Jon and Kim Dressler. The restaurant will close in late September, followed by four months of construction, before reopening with the same staff but a new interior and menu. The second location of Dressler’s will remain in business at Metropolitan.

We spoke with Jon Dressler about the decision to rebrand the restaurant after recently announcing that Dogwood Southern Table & Bar in SouthPark was sold and would close this summer.

Dressler’s in Birkdale Village will become a Fin & Fino. Photo by LunaZhon Photography.

Unpretentious Palate: How did you make the decision to change Dressler’s Birkdale into a Fin & Fino?
Jon Dressler: We have been open 20 years. We do the same sales now that we did 20 years ago, but the check average is $15 higher per person, which is 20%. So if 20 years ago we were feeding 40,000 people, we’re now feeding 32,000 people. Though the revenue is the same, the business is shrinking. I measure restaurant growth not by dollars, but by how many people come to visit you, because that’s your true growth. I can massage the check average any way I want to create revenue, but that doesn’t really create growth. People create growth. So it makes sense.

UP: You made the decision recently to sell Dogwood. Why did you make a different decision with Birkdale?
JD: Selling Birkdale was never a consideration. Initially, we had three five-year terms, so it was a five year lease with two five-year options, both of which were my options. When we got to year 15, we signed another five years with our old landlord. A new landlord came in, much more tenant-friendly and they immediately said, “Hey, we’re sorry for this last five year-thing signed. It’s very disrespectful. We’d like for you to stay, and we’d like to make you a better offer than what you currently have in your lease.”.

Right away, I was intrigued. I’ve always loved Birkdale Village. I’ve always loved the location, and I love the spot we have on the circle. It’s just an A location. So to me, the options were very limited. Economically, I couldn’t keep it as Birkdale Dressler’s. There was no reason to give up the location. So really the only option I had was keep the location and change the concept, which is what we wanted to do. Early on in the discussions, the landlord said, “Hey, if you’re really hell bent on keeping it Dressler’s, it’s fine. You guys are an institution, you’re the fine dining, sit down white tablecloth place here, but we’d really love to have one of your other three concepts. We talked about it internally and discussed Porter’s House and then ultimately decided that we really loved what we do at Fin and we could come as close to replicating it as possible. So that’s the direction we went.

UP: What were the things that were disrespectful or unfavorable in the previous lease?
JD: When you sign a lease with a landlord, there’s typically a tenant improvement package. We were offered zero. But in turn for that they were going to increase rent slightly. I don’t mind they increased the rent. Right. Time moves on. I was fine with them increasing the rent, but in my last request, I asked for $5 a square foot. $25,000 as a token of appreciation. $25,000 honestly, wasn’t going to pay for a whole lot. But I just thought, we have been here for 15 years. I’ve paid you, I don’t know, $3 million in rent. I mean, $25,000 as just like a thank you? I mean, it literally is like, you’re my best friend, and we’ve known each other for years and years and years and I give you cocktail napkins for your wedding gift. You’re like, “That’s nice, but what the f*** is he giving me cocktail napkins for?” That should just come from a stranger. That’s what it felt like, I didn’t even get a set of cocktail napkins. They literally said, “No, we’ll give you nothing.” So I signed it and I called and I told them exactly what I thought about what I signed.

UP: What does construction look like to turn Dressler’s into a Fin & Fino?
JD: We will add six feet of hood. We’ll turn what was kind of a hand sink/service area into an oyster bar, add a few pieces, and take out the broiler that we have, add a plancha, add a chargrill, and another six sauté eyes.

UP: What about the dining room?
JD: We’re ripping everything out. Full demo. The bar will double in size and the dining room will shrink slightly. And the private space goes away. Private dining was only 7% in Birkdale. With a smaller dining room, you’re able to occupy it fuller. If you’re doubling the size of the bar, you’re taking space out of the dining room, and I didn’t want to take more space out of the dining room.

UP: How long do you think you have to close in order to rebrand and remodel?
JD: Probably three weeks for demo and 13 weeks for construction, so call it four months.

UP: Given that this restaurant’s about to celebrate 20 years, it’s obviously been a big part of your life. Was it a hard decision to make, and how do you feel about saying goodbye after 20 years?
JD: I’m very prideful of the 20 years in the community and the respect that the restaurant has gained through the hard work of guys like Kevin McNamara and John Glenn and Chef Scott and Chef Gabino, all the guys that were there pretty much from the start. For me, for the restaurant of 20 years as Dressler’s, it’s so much engrained in what you do and who you are. And the people that are loyal to the restaurant, both the guests and the staff, come there because they love that restaurant. And then all of a sudden to change it is a difficult process for everyone because as I like to say, change is okay as long as it’s not different. We say that tongue in cheek, you know, that’s half a joke. But people by and large don’t like change.

When I looked at it from an economic standpoint, I really had no choice, right? It was either watch it continue to decline in sales — which is declining profit. I felt I had a fiduciary responsibility to the kids that work there to keep that restaurant viable. If you look at the p-and-ls for the last seven years, nobody who’s rational financially would argue with needing to change it. You can’t have a restaurant make 2% profit then and think that’s not precarious.

Profit was so low that just a sudden turn of three or four people a night not coming around would have made the place insolvent. In that sense, it was a very easy decision. But it’s your child, it’s your first born. It’s hard to just say, okay, you go away. I don’t need you anymore.

UP: Will you shift employees at Birkdale while the restaurant is closed and then bring everybody back once it’s Fin?
JD: Yes. We’ve been talking about this for months with the kids. My manager up there compiled everyone’s name and everyone’s wishes. “I want to go here; I want to work four days a week, and then I want to come back when we reopen.” My plan is that everyone who wants to continue working will continue working at their place of choice, and then everyone will return and we’ll reopen as Fin. And as you know, that’s a big deal to me. 

That’s a bigger deal than changing the restaurant because we have a new menu and we have a new look, but we don’t really worry about that. We always worry about the people, which is why that whole Dogwood thing of having it for a couple of months after we sold it so that we could segue everyone over to Chapter Six.

UP: How are you feeling about Dogwood’s last service this weekend?
JD: That’s its own set of emotions. I’m starting to come to grips with it. The last couple of weeks I’ve been hanging out there, a night here, and a night there. And it’s like, “Man. This is going away.” It’s just odd. But it also is seeing slightly declining sales and declining profits. We had X in the bank and we could sell it for X, that gave me 2X. And the decision was how long is it going to take to make 2X. The answer was too long.

I am a very rational person and it’s all very practical and a lot of times you’ve got to take the emotion out of it, though it’s difficult to because it’s not how we go. The whole premise for me is, you know, Max’s Alley, I held that restaurant and we lost it and wound up losing a bunch of money.

UP:: Can you share the history of Max’s Alley?
JD:  In September 2003, we opened Dressler’s Birkdale and I had only planned on having one restaurant. It went along fine for about three years. And I looked at my wife one day and I said, “What else?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I don’t know. I mean, this is great. It makes a nice nickel. It’s comfortable. It runs itself. What else? Don’t you want to try something else?”

We started a restaurant called Max’s Alley, which is obviously named after our kids [Max and Ally]. It was in Concord, and it was still really good food, but at a slightly lower price point. It wasn’t big steaks, but it still had fish, and there were a couple of sandwiches on there. It was a little bit more casual fare, because I felt Concord was more of a family oriented place. We did good business cover wise, but no one drank. It just wasn’t a place where you went and drank, and the check average reflected that. It was food only. It was it was like 85% food and 15% booze. You’ve got to have a better mix. You’ve got to be 70/30.

It lost money and I kept putting money into it and putting money into it. Finally, after 30 months, we killed it. I wound up losing several hundred thousand dollars, and I could have lost far less. And I could have declared bankruptcy. But I didn’t want someone to tell me where I could go on vacation and where my kids could go to school and what I could spend my money on. So I said, f*** it. I’m not going to declare bankruptcy and I’ll pay it off.

We opened Max’s Alley in 2007 and closed July of 2010. We opened Metro in February of 2010. My wife kept saying to me, “How in good conscience can you negotiate a new restaurant when you know you have one that’s dying?” I said, “They’re mutually exclusive events. One has nothing to do with the other. I felt good about this location, but I was wrong. I feel really good about the Metropolitan, and I feel really good about the Dressler’s brand. And I feel really good about what we do from a food service, ambiance, and hospitality standpoint.” … I don’t want to spend the next ten years trying to pay this thing off. I want to figure it out and keep growing. My wife thought I was crazy, but that’s fine, it all turned out fine. The important lesson is don’t keep spending money when you’re flailing. Especially in the restaurant business.

UP: Dressler’s Met will be the oldest restaurant in the group. Do you anticipate having to make any changes over there?
JD: No, we did a full remodel three years ago. I like where Dressler’s Met is, I like its sales, I like its lease, its business terms. It does a great job.