A Look Inside Acclaimed Atlanta Chef Kevin Gillespie’s New Restaurant Slabtown Public House

Transcription:

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Kevin Gillespie, thank you so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule right here in the restaurant, in your new restaurant I might add. Thanks so much for joining us on the show.

Kevin Gillespie:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Tell us about your new restaurant.

Kevin Gillespie:
This new one is called Slabtown Public House. We wanted to build something on the Beltline, but something that we felt was indicative of where this area was historically. The name Slabtown is paying homage to the old Atlanta neighborhood, Slabtown, that was in the same general vicinity back in the 1800s.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Okay. Gotcha.

Kevin Gillespie:
My history books say that Slabtown was the first dining-bar area of Atlanta, and so it seemed very apropos to name it after that, and just to do something, as the name implies, the Public House, something very casual, down to earth, honestly, something that is a balancing act for my restaurant group in general, because we have a lot of more high-end places, and we wanted something that said, “You know what? We know how to do relaxed as well,” and so that’s what this place is all about.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
It is beautiful. Congratulations. We’re showing it right now on the screen, and I know a lot of people are going to want to come in here and check it out. You’ve got such a great reputation, but take us back and tell us a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. I know there’s a lot of people that are familiar with your name and some know your story. I think it’s a great one, so take us back and tell us a little bit about how you got started.

Kevin Gillespie:
Sure. It’s been a very weird path to this, I suppose you’d say. My initial plan post high school was a very traditional collegiate path. I went to MIT for nuclear engineering and quickly realized I was the stupidest person at MIT, felt like I needed to make a bit of a change. In all reality, it was just that my heart had always been in this idea of food and the connection that food provided for people. I wasn’t back then. As a teenager, I didn’t fully have that concept baked out in my mind, but I knew there was something to it, and I just said I’m going to try my hand at this, see what this restaurant thing is all about, so I went into the restaurant world promptly as a teenager and then have just never surfaced from it.

Kevin Gillespie:
My path to business ownership came in many respects through somebody really doing me a favor. My former mentor, Michael Tuohy, who owned Woodfire Grill, provided me with an opportunity in my mid-20s to take an ownership in that business, which was a huge step for me.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Wow, that’s great. Sure.

Kevin Gillespie:
I think he felt like I was ready. I wanted to, but didn’t have the money to be able to do something like that at such an age.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
It’s a little sweat equity.

Kevin Gillespie:
Yeah, for sure, it started as a very small piece of sweat equity developed, eventually, into an equal partnership. That’s really what started it, so from Woodfire Grill came Gunshow, from Gunshow, came Revival, from Revival came… let’s see… came Communion and then Gamechanger and then Ole Reliable and then, now, here we are in Slabtown.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That is fantastic. So many of the people that are watching us have this discussion right now are at that point where they’re just ready to make the jump and the leap and to be in their own business. Many of them are watching and saying, “I want to be a restaurateur just like Kevin.” What’s your advice to them that you’ve gotten this far?

Kevin Gillespie:
Well, I would say my biggest piece of advice is to recognize that regardless of your own personal talent level, that the real path to success comes with assembling a team of people who are going to help with this focused mission. You have to get a lot of like-minded people together inevitably especially if it’s in the restaurant world.

Kevin Gillespie:
These are not one-man shows, one-woman shows. They take quite the committed team, and so I would tell you to start first by focusing on what foundationally it takes to build a singular great business, and that means talented people, constantly promoting those people into positions of leadership and allowing them to leverage to be able to make decisions on their own, reinvestment in your business, and then a recognition of understanding your own personal limitations and having the humility to be able to admit that.

Kevin Gillespie:
I think that when you put all those pieces together, it allows you then to start a single thing and then, once that starts, if you can follow this general notion that growth comes with the pace of talent, I believe that’s how you move into others. When your team is ready and it’ll be abundantly clear, then it’s time to do the next thing, but not until then.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah, not until then. A lot of people grow too fast, don’t they, and then they find themselves in hot water.

Kevin Gillespie:
Right. I think people mistake a surplus of capital for meaning that it’s time to do the next thing and, in reality, especially in the world that we live in today, human capital is much, much more valuable than just money in the bank. At the end of the day, a surplus of ideas and a surplus of talent is what you should be looking for for the next step in my opinion.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Sure, so let me take you back to March, 2020, when the world seemed to come to an end especially for the restaurant people out there. Everyone, even if they weren’t in the restaurant, they thought about restaurant people and they said, “Oh, my gosh, what are these poor people going to do?” Talk to us a little bit about the impact that COVID had on your businesses. Here you are with four or five restaurants with one in the planning stage and, all of a sudden, the world just says, “Nobody can go in the restaurants.”

Kevin Gillespie:
It was very, very challenging. I mean, that’s the understatement of the century. It was confusing. More than anything, it was not understanding what kind of timeframe we were looking at here. I remember March very, very clearly, and I remember the conversations we were all having where we were discussing this notion of being closed for a month. That was the idea first. How in the world are we going to possibly be able to afford to be closed for a month, much less two years?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Sure. I know. Oh, my gosh. Wow.

Kevin Gillespie:
I think that what we were able to do very, very quickly, and perhaps this is because, although we have multiple restaurants, we’re not a large company by any stretch. This is still a fairly small thing with a group of decision-makers that’s whittled down.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
You need that daily cash flow, right?

Kevin Gillespie:
Correct. Exactly, but we were able to quickly pivot, and we didn’t have to run it up some enormous chain of command. We all looked at each other and said, “Let’s do this later today,” and then so we moved to that. Embracing things like carry out, which I will admit I was one of the loudest people saying absolutely not, never, ever, ever. I’ll never cheapen what we do. That, we quickly changed our opinions on that.

Kevin Gillespie:
I think the second was recognizing a lot of the built-in financial inefficiencies of a restaurant itself and finding ways to turn dead time into, perhaps, some financial generator, and so, for us, that became taking on side projects in the off times of our businesses. This is the model that ghost kitchens follow. It’s how can we use the space that just sits dormant for 6, 8, 10 hours a day. We certainly did the same thing.

Kevin Gillespie:
The other thing that we did which really goes against what everybody was doing at this time, because everyone was saying, “Save your money. Don’t spend it at all,” we, instead, started our own nonprofit. We started our own foundation called the Defend Southern Food Foundation.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah. We were going to get into that, but let’s jump right in because I think it’s unbelievable that you guys did this.

Kevin Gillespie:
It was driven in part by the COVID closure. It was a desire to keep people working. It was, literally, staring at thousands of pounds of food that had nowhere to go. If people will take a step back and remember from a date perspective, this closure coincided with the Final Four being hosted in Atlanta.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Kevin Gillespie:
Our restaurant, Gamechanger, in the stadium is the largest restaurant in the stadium. We had 30,000 pounds of food on hand to serve the Final Four, and so we asked ourselves, “What in the world are we going to do with this?” Well, we quickly said, “We got to get it out to people. We’re going to give it to people. We don’t know who these people are, but we’re going to give it to them.”

Kevin Gillespie:
After making a few phone calls, we quickly realized that the public school system was in a similar problem, which was we have a bunch of people who need food, but we only know how to feed them when they’re in the building. We only know how to feed students when they’re at school, and so we said, “If we can figure out how to get the food to them, can we use our food? Can we create this mesh?” and red tape immediately got cut in a time of desperation perhaps, and it allowed us to start this venture that has now grown to be even more focused, whether it’s about purchasing locally grown product, transforming that into super nutritious, wholesome food and then delivering that food to families who are what’s considered above need, so families who, even with free breakfast and free lunch for their children, they still need help with food insecurity.

Kevin Gillespie:
We have been able to work with the public school system, a lot of really generous donors and then my wife and I as well donating a substantial amount of money in order to make this project happen.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Wow, that is fantastic. Kudos to you and your group and your wife.

Kevin Gillespie:
Thank you.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s just great work that you’re doing. I’ve spoken to some business owners that say, “Jim, out of all respect of the people that we lost during COVID, we look back at our business, and because we pivoted and because we became much more efficient, it might have been… We might look back and say, ‘That was the best thing that we could have gone through.'” Have you experienced a little bit of that?

Kevin Gillespie:
I would agree with that statement a hundred percent. I think that it is very hard for someone on the outside looking into to wrap their head around how the most devastating thing that has happened to this industry since perhaps the Spanish Flu of 1918, how that could be viewed as something that was net successful, but it did make you take a very real look in the mirror and ask yourself whether we’re doing things smartly, whether we’re wasting time and money, this one is overlooked a lot, but whether we want to be doing this thing we’re doing in the first place.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s a good point.

Kevin Gillespie:
A lot of times people grow especially at pace because momentum builds momentum. It’s like a train. It keeps going down the tracks and it just keeps getting a little faster because you keep you shoveling coal in and nobody bothered to stop shoveling coal long enough to ask, “Is this a safe speed we’re traveling?” or, “We have we even gone past where we said we were going to stop from the first place?”

Kevin Gillespie:
So, for us, it allowed us a very rare opportunity for a pause and, in that pause, we were able to do something that we hadn’t done for about five years, which was to take a true corporate inventory of people, materials, capital and future vision and ask ourselves, “Are we still trajecting the way we wanted to?” and in some, we were, and in others, we were doing a very bad job, and so we were able to fix those things in a time when the demand of consumer wasn’t so high that we could actually truly focus on them. I do think we’re running better restaurants today in all aspects, not just in… not financially, but also in the quality of service and the quality of product we’re producing.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Sure. A lot of the business owners here in Atlanta that I speak with said, “Man, if it wasn’t for the PPP money, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Kevin Gillespie:
A hundred percent.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Are you one of those as well that says, hey, that was a huge helping hand?

Kevin Gillespie:
Absolutely. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think we maybe could have kicked and screamed and dragged ourself through it, maybe, but where we would be is on the precipice of any one singular other thing not being right.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Right in the threshold of that. Yeah.

Kevin Gillespie:
Right, then the lights would all get turned off. What the PPP funding did for us certainly was that it provided us with just enough security to know that, if this thing just kept going the wrong direction, there was just a little bit more left behind. We were very fortunate as a company to be pretty financially secure when all of this took place. However, we did have this project in its infancy. We’d already put, gosh, several million dollars into this project at that point when, all of a sudden-

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Covid hits.

Kevin Gillespie:
… the plan to recoup that money isn’t a possibility anymore. This was really the thing that was probably the most dangerous for us, the building we’re sitting in right now, but certainly, the PPP funding, it helped us tremendously. I think that it was, aside from just the financial security, I believe it was a form of hope, and a lot of people had lost hope at that point.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah, of course, of course. Did you find that landlords and such kicked in and helped some?

Kevin Gillespie:
It was a mixed bag.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Kevin Gillespie:
What you realize through going through this, and this is part of that inventory process as well, is that you will, in your life as a business person, you will work with people of varying degrees of what I would call business ethics, people who recognize when you have to ignore the terms on the sheet of paper and do what’s just ethically right and people who will say, no, the contract says this and that’s what we go with. Because we have so many businesses, we had one of everybody. We had the incredibly altruistic landlord who just said, “You don’t have to pay us anything. Just don’t go away,” all the way to the person who said, “No, the contract says this. We expect this. That’s what we’re going to do.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure, so it brings down your average anyway. You got one that’s got to pay and one that-

Kevin Gillespie:
Yeah, exactly, and most in the middle who said, “We can help, but, hey, we have bills, too, and we’re in the same boat. We also need some financial solvency as well.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Sure. Sure. Was there ever that time as an entrepreneur, as I’m sure there was, that you just said I don’t know if I can make it to this next level? So many people that are watching us right now might be sitting there and saying, “I’ve got this business, but I don’t know if I’ve got the next payroll. I don’t know if I have the next client. I don’t know if I’m going to make it another month or two.” What’s your advice to them, or I should say what did you experience?

Kevin Gillespie:
I will say that, to every entrepreneur, every business person out there, I think all of us, including people who have been net successful in this game, still have those days, weeks and months when it isn’t successful. You have to have those really hard wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night moments where you go like, “I just don’t know.”

Kevin Gillespie:
What I would say is that I like to think that that emotion that comes along with that is just a built-in safety mechanism so that we don’t take this train off the tracks. What I would tell people though is that, and this sounds very corny, but it is not closed until it is closed.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s the attitude.

Kevin Gillespie:
If you can keep it open one more day, that day might be the day that you turn the corner, and so we talk about this a lot. We’ve talked about this historically many times when we’ve had a business that perhaps was trending in the wrong direction and emotionally we threw our hands up in the air and said, “We probably just need to close this thing,” and then, in a moment of clarity, you step back and you go, “We’ll let it close itself if it has to, but we’ll also let it thrive if it can get to that point, too,” because I believe that if it’s still a good idea with good people right and positive energy behind it, the corner is always a little bit further ahead, and it’s just about pushing to that point.

Kevin Gillespie:
I think that, more often than not, business people give up on the business before it’s truly done. It’s like they tell you that when you’re playing a sport or you’re exercising that, when your body tells you I can’t do one more rep of this or I can’t run one more mile, that you’re really only about 40% of your capacity, I think it probably works the same in business.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
It does, yes. It’s good advice and that’s certainly noted by a lot of people. Hey, switching gears a little bit, a lot of people that are watching us right now are going, “That’s the guy from Bravo’s Top Chef.” Talk to us about that. That’s a cool experience.

Kevin Gillespie:
That was such a peculiar moment in my life. The Top Chef experience came about in a very weird way, frankly. I was at work. I was at Woodfire Grill. I was on the line. I was at actually, literally, cooking on the line.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
You’re cooking. You can’t even take a phone call.

Kevin Gillespie:
Well, right, so the phone rings at eight o’clock at night on a Friday, and a hostess comes and gives it to me.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah, it’s ground zero.

Kevin Gillespie:
He said, chef, there’s somebody who wants to talk to you on the phone. They said they’re from… I don’t even know if she said Top Chef, and I was like, “It’s Friday. It’s 8:00 PM.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Who would make that call?

Kevin Gillespie:
I thought my friends were playing a joke on me, and so I said some not very kind things and said, “You make sure you tell them that,” and so they called back the next day at 8:00 PM.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
They said, now we want this guy even more.

Kevin Gillespie:
I was like, “what is their problem?” I went up to the phone and read him the Riot Act and hung up, so then they called back three days later, like next Wednesday again at 8:00 PM.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
What is the deal with this?

Kevin Gillespie:
I answer the phone, and they go, “Look, listen, it’s not a prank. We’re being serious,” so, after I gave them a little bit of grief for the fact that I’m like you’re in Los Angeles, I’m-

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Five o’clock.

Kevin Gillespie:
Yeah, I’m in Atlanta. We are very much open right now. I heard him out and I said, “Look, I’m not interested, honestly.” I think the words I said in that moment was, “I’m a real chef, not a television chef,” and I walked away from it.

Kevin Gillespie:
Now, as life would have it, generally, when you do things like that that are very egotistical, life serves you up a little dose of humility. This was 2008. This is when all the wheels had come off-

Jim Fitzpatrick:
I was going say, yeah, wow.

Kevin Gillespie:
… all the different misses. We’re running a fine dining restaurant, something that’s a 150 bucks a person to eat dinner at. The following night after I talked to them on the phone, we did zero people for dinner that night. No one came in.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Are you serious?

Kevin Gillespie:
I’m very serious, and it broke my heart. This is me at 25 years old. I went to my business partners and said like, “Where does that put us?” and they said, “We have one month worth of money left.” We got to turn this thing around, or we’re in trouble, and so I said, “All right, I think I have a plan. I’m going to need you to buy me like six months because this thing won’t see the light of day for a little while, but we’re going to try this Top Chef thing, and we’ll see if that brings people in.”

Kevin Gillespie:
I called them back the next day and said, “Just send me a plane ticket. I don’t care. I’ve never seen your show, but it’s fine,” and I just got on a plane and I flew to Las Vegas, and I filmed that season and, as they would say, the rest is history, but certainly what it did was it saved the business. It genuinely saved it.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Did it really?

Kevin Gillespie:
Absolutely. We begged and borrowed and pleaded and took more money out and had more debt-

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That is a great story. Oh, my God.

Kevin Gillespie:
… and we were scraping by, and I remember the day that they announced the cast. Atlanta caught on fire. They were so excited, and our phones started ringing…

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That is awesome.

Kevin Gillespie:
… and within a couple of days, we were full for reservations every single night of the week and, within a couple of weeks, we were full for six months and, by the time the first episode aired, we had reservations one year out.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
No kidding? Oh, my gosh, it’s like tje Oprah effect.

Kevin Gillespie:
It changed everything.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That is incredible. What an incredible story. That really was a turning point for you guys. In the middle, as you said, of the meltdown of 2008, 2009, no small business owner has ever forgotten those times. That is incredible.

Kevin Gillespie:
Yeah. It got us to a really insane place, but I will tell people that it was a mix of being very fortunate in that moment, not giving up, but then also allowing the experience to do something that I think a lot of people overlook in their lifetime as a business person, which is allowing yourself to grow from these challenges. It transformed me in many ways as a chef. I feel like my food post Top Chef, my view of what it was really going to be like to be a restaurant owner changed tremendously through that process.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
I bet. I bet.

Kevin Gillespie:
I came out on the other side. Let’s just imagine that for some reason we had managed to just kick the can down the road or have been moderately busy. I don’t think I would’ve had the developmental growth that I did by going through those tribulations and then coming out the other side.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Isn’t that awesome? Wow, that’s fantastic. Here you are in your newest restaurant. Is it like where you’ve got kids and somebody says, “Which one is the favorite one for you?”

Kevin Gillespie:
People ask me about which one is my favorite all the time. I tell them that my first born, which is Gunshow, has a special place in my heart, and that’s because I built that restaurant for myself. I genuinely very selfishly built a restaurant to function in a way that I just wanted it for me and I didn’t really care whether it made business sense, which has turned out to make the most successful business probably that we’ve ever built, and maybe that’s because it’s so authentic, so real.

Kevin Gillespie:
At the end of the day, the reason I build more is that they each represent an aspect of me personally that I have yet to express to the public in a culinary way, in a front-facing business way. Each of these restaurants has a slightly different feel about them because I like to think that, for myself, I’m still expressing my creativity and, like any artist, this sounds a bit pretentious, but as time goes on, your art changes and it manifests differently, and so that’s why it continues to change and grow.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Okay, so tell us a little bit about the food here. What can people expect when they come in?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
For people that are watching, you’ve got to check this restaurant out. Obviously, you heard this incredible success story, but the place is phenomenal. It’s got a great view right here on the Beltline, and the food is amazing.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Tell us about your favorite dishes.

Kevin Gillespie:
The menu here is very much what we’re calling pub classics. Now, that being said, we have a standard across all of our restaurants as far as the kind of ingredients that we work with and the kind of food that we’re making, and so that means locally produced products. We’re doing everything in house, everything. If there’s something with bread, we’re making it. We’re doing everything ourselves because, for me, I love the idea of the neighborhood dive bar, I love the idea conceptually of it, but a lot of people know that I am a cancer survivor and have gone through a lot of…

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Oh, boy, wow.

Kevin Gillespie:
… treatment over the last few years. If I was to go to that, your average neighborhood dive bar, it’ll make me pretty sick. I can’t really eat the food. There’s too much preservatives. There’s too many processed things, and I just can’t handle it, but I still want that atmosphere and I still want that kind of place, and so I just said, “Well, maybe we should build that for ourselves. Maybe we should build a place where you can go get a burger, but you know for a fact that every single ingredient on it is of the absolute pinnacle of quality, somewhere that you could go get an order of nachos,” to me, the ultimate bar food, but all the way down to the base itself. We have made everything in-house…

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s fantastic.

Kevin Gillespie:
… and we really doted on it to ensure that it’s as tasty as possible, and then there’s also a menu item on this that I think is a bit of a “we’ve come full circle here” in that my very first cooking job ever was at a very small fried-chicken-only restaurant in my hometown called the Chicken Coop, and we were famous for making chicken tenders, and so I put the original Chicken Coop chicken tenders back on the menu here. That business has been closed for 25 years now, but it felt like, you know what, maybe it’s time we bring that one back out, bring that one out of retirement and put it on the menu here because it turns out that really good fried chicken is liked by everybody.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. People that are watching, they’re going, oh, my gosh, he goes through 2008, 2009. Nobody’s in the restaurant. You get this opportunity to be on TV. It blows it up. All of a sudden COVID hits, and then, in the middle of all of this, as you just mentioned, you’re a cancer survivor, and then you use that as a stepping stone for lessons learned to make better food for your restaurants. Is there anything that comes your way negatively that you don’t spin it around and make it a positive?

Kevin Gillespie:
I think I am just an eternal optimist. I don’t want anybody to think that that means that, in every single moment of your life, that you’re constantly chin up. That’s not how optimism works. It’s this belief that if you just wait out the dark part, there’s light on the other side of it. For me, I see each of these things as opportunity. They’re speed bumps. They’re not roadblocks.

Kevin Gillespie:
Getting sick and fighting for my life changed me as a person. It made me a lot more aware of just the fact that struggle is struggle, and so whether that be that you’re physically ill or that you are emotionally I’ll or that you’re financially ill, the people in my life have all experienced these challenges, and so being more aware and mindful of that makes you a better leader. I think it makes you more in tuned with, to a certain degree, what are you doing for your community and remembering that being a good business person is not just about being a profitable business person. It’s about doing something with your work every day that is rewarding to you and to other people.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Kevin Gillespie:
It has to mean a little bit more than just the transaction, and so I think that additional focus has been good for me. We don’t always get it right out of the gate, but the difference is that we don’t let like a couple of bad swings at the plate stop us from trying to bat.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Your words mean a lot to a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening to you today. Your story is so inspiring. I want to thank you, Kevin Gillespie.

Kevin Gillespie:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Thank you so much. Man, this has been great.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Obviously, as I said earlier, for those of you that are watching us have this discussion, this is a place that you need to check out not just because of the incredible chef and the story, to meet him because he’s always going to be here, but for the food and the ambiance. These are the places that make Atlanta great.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Thank you so much.

Kevin Gillespie:
Thank you. I really appreciate it.