The Making of a Philly Restaurant 2008

IT TOOK DAYS to achieve exactly the right color for the walls. First painting, then sponging, from the overpriced new wood floor to the sound-absorbing pressed-tin ceilings, only to discover that this shade of yellow was just too yellow, not at all the mellow, tobacco-stained shade chef Peter Woolsey remembered from the bistros of France. So Peter, who would much rather be in his kitchen, got back up on the ladder and washed the walls in wood stain, mimicking the decades of cigarette smoke the restaurant will never see. “This is what a bistro looks like,” the Philadelphia-born chef declared, finally, just a week before the planned July opening of Bistrot La Minette.

[sidebar]Lipgloss-red banquettes line the room, drawing your eye to the open kitchen, still in disarray as construction workers finish running gas lines. Behind marble-topped tables, the restaurant’s 12-person staff takes notes on the opening-day menu. Peter, with his chunky black glasses and permanent five o’clock shadow, details each dish, noting the ingredients, the cooking techniques, the variations available to vegetarians, vegans, and people with picky palates. The 30-year-old chef holds his four-month-old son Jules on his lap, bouncing him to the rhythm of the French menu titles he pronounces fluidly: coquilles St. Jacques aux endives braisées, oeuf en meurette, quenelles natures à la sauce financière.

His wife, French-born photographer Peggy Baud, gently corrects him, making a sharper K sound: “Quenelles.” Peggy is here to teach French to the $4.25-an-hour waitstaff. Or at least enough French to continue the Parisian illusion conjured by the Ricard-stamped serving plates, the dainty dessert spoons above each place setting, and the sign by the door: Ici, les vins sont fins et la cuisine soignée. “Here, the wines are fine and the kitchen cared for.”

That doesn’t seem like a tall order, but the process of opening a restaurant in Philadelphia is inevitably long and costly, one that tries your patience and then, when you have no patience left, tries it again. The 21-month-long story of the opening of Bistrot La Minette is the story of each of the region’s 8,000 restaurants — and probably of most of the restaurants that have opened anywhere, ever. The details may differ, but the pileup of delays and discouragements, of compromises and surprises, those are the tale of every aspiring restaurateur.

But that’s no comfort to Peter. One week before La Minette’s opening night, there’s still no electricity.

FALL 2006

Anticipated opening: Summer 2007

“I’m going to open a French bistro,” Peter says. The chef slides a pencil sketch across the Rittenhouse Square bar where he’s drinking French wine after his shift in the pastry kitchen of Stephen Starr’s Washington Square. The drawing is of Bistro La Minette — the name change, that extra “T,” will come later, after Peter orders hand-thrown wine carafes stamped with the more familiar spelling of the word; “bistrot” is just more authentic — and while opening a restaurant is an almost universal ambition among young chefs, Peter is more convincing in his pitch than most.

Peter talks about La Minette as if it already exists. After all, this is the restaurant the Bala Cynwyd-raised chef has imagined since he moved to France when he was 21 to study cooking at Le Cordon Bleu and in the kitchen of Michelin-starred Lucas Carton. Why did Philadelphia have so few restaurants successfully re-creating the classic French bistro? he wondered when he returned to his hometown, working his way through the kitchens of Le Mas Perrier, Striped Bass and Washington Square. His decade in restaurants gave him a clear picture of what his own place would be when he was ready to take the ultimate step of opening it. Now almost 30, Peter thinks he’s ready. Bistrot La Minette is his restaurant.

That small, banquetted dining room will be — is, in Peter’s focused thinking — in Northern Liberties; he’s in negotiations with the owner of an under-renovation building on 2nd Street. The photographs on those dining room walls will be — are — Peggy’s, evocative but unclichéd images of the French countryside and compelling portraits of her father and grandfather baking in the family boulangerie. And if you look very closely (and have Peter’s fervent narration in your ear), you can see a pitcher of unpretentious house wine and a blistered, bubbling gratin on every table.

Though you can’t see it in Peter’s sketch, beyond the dining room is an open kitchen. He draws a second rough sketch of a graceful, French-style circular cooking line. Peter will be in that kitchen, and alongside him, Christophe Tresca, a French chef he met through his wife. “I need to have a real French chef in the kitchen,” he says. La Minette will serve “la cuisine famille” — the comfort foods of France — and though Peter, fluent in French and in French baking, has steeped himself in all things France, he wants that extra insurance that La Minette will be a faithful rendition of the much and often poorly copied bistro. “Authentic” and “French” are Peter’s mantra, and one of the few concessions he’s willing to make to his Philadelphia-not-Paris address is the restaurant name. The French term of endearment “la minette” (literally, “pussycat”) is authentically French — it’s his sister-in-law’s nickname — but it’s also easily pronounced with a Philly accent.

Authentic. French. Authentic. French. The mantra raises an important question for the chef hustling to find the nearly $1 million he estimates he’ll need to make La Minette a reality. “Financially, how does a French restaurant work?” he muses. “I don’t know. Near as I can tell, you open a restaurant, work for 30 years barely making a living, and then you sell. That’s your retirement.”

SPRING 2007

Anticipated opening: August 15th, 2007

“This is the point of no return,” Peter says, with both enthusiasm and fear. He has given his notice at Washington Square. As of April 21st, opening La Minette will be his full-time job. (There’s a line item in the in-progress business plan allowing Peter a small salary for his efforts.)

This is still Peter’s baby, but La Minette isn’t the same restaurant it was six months ago. One of Peter’s original business partners has dropped out of the project; now Peter’s father, John Woolsey, an artist and entrepreneur, is partnering with his son. Meanwhile, Christophe, La Minette’s would-be sous-chef, is in doubt, his visa application in limbo, a victim of ever more stringent immigration laws. And the Northern Liberties space Peter was eyeing? It fell through when he realized you couldn’t install a kitchen hood in the space. “Everything can seem perfect,” Peter says of the ongoing location search. “Then you ask, can we fit a kitchen hood? Where do we put the trash?” He’s looked at more than a dozen spaces now, and despite this being the point of no return, he has a Goldilocks attitude, not willing to settle for the former restaurant with a cramped kitchen, or the soon-to-be-former restaurant with a poorly laid-out dining room.

As he hunts for the just-right location, Peter is also writing the restaurant’s business plan and sharpening his already focused idea of La Minette. How many styles of dinner plate will the restaurant use? (Just two, a simple, round white plate and a shallow white bowl, in contrast to the five or more styles used at many Philly restaurants.) Will the tables be cloaked in white linens? (It’s $5,000 to $6,000 a month for linen service; Peter and his father decide on bare marble tabletops.) What size are the wineglasses? (Eventually they agree on 14 ounces, a compromise between the petite style common in France and the popular American versions with oversize bowls.) The diner may not — shouldn’t — register the small details that fill Peter’s workweek, but together, these details define the restaurant.

The business plan Peter pens reads like an ambitious wedding registry: 20 onion soup bowls, three dozen red-wine glasses, a six-quart KitchenAid mixer, two custom-built walk-in refrigerators (price tag: $11,000), and 200 other must-haves. But by forgoing other customized kitchen equipment and planning DIY construction projects, Peter brings the anticipated cost down to a more realistic $500,000, not including real estate. “There are a lot of things I gave up,” he says, mourning the loss of his slicer and his sous-vide machine to the realities of restaurant economics. The business plan forecasts $300,000 in profits per year by the second year, and it calls for La Minette to lose money only for the first several months. That’s just how the restaurant business works.

FALL 2007

Anticipated opening: “A truly educated guess: February 15th”

When Peter saw a boarded-up shell of a space in Queen Village almost six months ago, he said, “My gut feeling is that this is the one.” This, despite the three-story-high dalmatian painted on the facade of the long-abandoned building, a marketing gimmick for a short-lived nightclub across the street. Now, finally, he has the keys to 623 South 6th Street. This corner already has two restaurants — creperie Beau Monde and Middle Eastern Shouk — with rumors of a third, though La Minette’s entrée price will be $3 or $4 above the neighborhood average.

“The numbers make sense,” Peter says of the building (though the financing plan was complicated; Peter’s father partnered with a developer to purchase the building, which then sold the first-floor space and basement to the restaurant for $750,000). In truth, though, it wasn’t money that convinced Peter. It was the aged iron pillars dividing the 70-by-25-foot room that first sold him on the space. Even months later, when one of those fluted pillars stands, unavoidably, in the middle of the kitchen, Peter gushes about their charm. And the 14-foot ceilings? “The ceilings automatically change the restaurant. You can’t be a country bistro with 14-foot ceilings,” Peter says. You can almost see him mentally renovating his restaurant, weighing the authenticity of this new obstacle. His conclusion: “You are a city bistro. You see a spot, and suddenly the style of the furniture in the restaurant changes in your head.”

Peter props open the door to let some light into the empty building and begins the tour. The restaurant’s entrance will be in the northwest corner of the long, narrow room; a small bar will anchor the southwest corner. The liquor license was pricey — $65,000 for the one previously held by Bennigan’s, plus $5,000 in legal fees — but the approval process was smooth.

In the “kitchen,” Peter pivots on one foot to show the economy of motion the design allows for; he walks the dimensions of the basement; he can even describe the soon-to-be-built bathrooms. Peter has already filled the rooms of his father’s Northern Liberties art studio with furniture and tchotchkes to decorate the space. On a vacation to visit Peggy’s family in France, he collected authenticity: copper pots, linen-lined breadbaskets, fogged mirrors, even an iron chicken. His father has been busy with local auctions, hunting for patinated sideboards and burnished chandeliers.

But right now, there’s nothing here except raw space — the grill of a car over here, an old furniture sign over there — and nothing but darkness and months of construction ahead. “I’m not ready to worry yet,” Peter says. His left hand comes up to his face, under his glasses, and rubs his eyes. “I come from a long line of Jewish worriers. I know when to worry. I have other things in my life to worry about. How do I open a restaurant and still be a good father?”

That’s one timeline that won’t change: Peter and Peggy are expecting their first child on April 1st.

SPRING 2008

Anticipated opening: “The third week of May.”

Peter has the frantic enthusiasm of someone who hasn’t slept in 10 days, not since his son Jules was born. “As soon as we get the vanilla box, all we need is two days to move in and — ”

“Two long days,” John Gonzalez interrupts. “Four human days.” John recently left his position as general manager at Striped Bass to become general manager at La Minette — and a general reality check for Peter’s unflagging optimism.

“Two days to move in,” Peter repeats, “and a week to train the staff.”

Two days or four, a week or a month, La Minette is becoming a reality. Reality is an adjustment for Peter, whose image of the restaurant is so clear, he’s been heard complaining about the need to post glowing red exit signs. (“They’re not French.”) Reality is the $41,000 sprinkler-system surprise, the last-minute decision to have exposed brick in the dining room to save the four inches of space drywall would require, the relocation of the restaurant’s front entrance to meet fire codes. Each compromise becomes a debate between authenticity (Peter) and money (Peter’s father). “I have to defend authenticity,” Peter says, and he does, sometimes loudly. “Otherwise I’m just going to be another restaurant, a restaurant with no soul.”

The construction concerns seem never-ending, but slowly, Peter and John are shifting their attention from the real estate business to restaurant business. There are wines to be tasted to create an affordable, all-French wine list, and cocktails to be mixed. There are recipes to be perfected.

Peter cooked the first “La Minette dinner” several months ago in his parents’ Old City loft, as part of his efforts to woo John to join the project. “When I tasted Pete’s salmon tartare, I was convinced,” John says. Now it’s time for the chef to get back into the kitchen. Christophe will fly in from France to help Peter test dozens of recipes in his South Philly home kitchen, but after that, Peter’s on his own. The sous-chef couldn’t secure the visa he needed to work in the United States. Which leads to the question of staffing. To serve dinner six days a week, Peter has budgeted for two cooks in the kitchen; John plans on six to 10 people in the front of the house.

“I’m not scared of anything,” Peter says. “But I’m … trepidatious. I’m trepidatious of staffing. I know I’m going to find people, and I know I’m going to find some duds.”

“I’m nervous,” John says.

JULY 2008

Anticipated opening: July 24th — “Or the middle of September. Or never.”

It should have been a simple phone call, a routine appointment with PECO to install the heavy-duty power lines demanded by the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerators and exhaust system. All the forms for the necessary electrical work had been submitted weeks earlier. But the utility had no record of the work request. It was July 1st, three weeks before opening day, and Peter, who doesn’t do angry often, or well, was livid. “My blood was at 211 degrees,” he says; that’s chef-speak for almost boiling. For the first time in the process of opening La Minette, he was faced with a problem he couldn’t solve.

The cause was a simple misstep; an electrician faxed the forms to the wrong phone number. But by the time Peter and John realized there was a problem and resubmitted the work request, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the damage had been done. PECO couldn’t install the power lines until September 8th. Opening day, scheduled for July 24th, would be delayed almost two months.

“I called everyone I could think of,” Peter says, his head in his hands. He’s sitting at the Bean Exchange, a Queen Village coffee shop that has become the restaurant’s unofficial office. He’s talked to his councilman, the building developers, other restaurateurs, even his father’s neighbor, CBS 3 consumer reporter Jim Donovan. Days of working the phones, and there’s still only enough power in the building to operate the yellow-caged construction lights, strung from chandelier to chandelier, and maybe a microwave. But his optimism wins out. He’s certain PECO will arrive any moment. He has to be. He’s afraid any delay will mean losing the staff it took days of interviews to hire. He knows any delay will mean losing money. “There’s always a second mortgage,” he says warily.

“There’s a PECO man out front!” Peter stage-whispers, more than once, during the staff training, moving forward in the un-air-conditioned restaurant. But it’s always a false alarm; it’s never the PECO man. Finally, Peter delays the July 24th opening, even though he promised his wife it would come before she left for a month-long trip to France on July 25th.

Then, on August 8th: Five PECO trucks arrive outside the restaurant. Peter watches their every move from the dining room window. “I feel like a kid on Christmas,” he says. He turns on the lights.

AUGUST 25th, 2008

Opening Day

In the moments before John unlocks the front door and welcomes the first paying customers into La Minette — a table of two with 5:30 reservations — the restaurant looks remarkably like the one Peter imagined two years ago (though the Philadelphia French restaurant scene, particularly with the July addition of Stephen Starr’s Parc, is different). The details of La Minette have changed, but the essence — authentic, French — hasn’t.

Throughout the last-minute preparations, Peter was calm, carefully portioning halibut and steak, serving up a hearty staff meal of cabbage salad and pasta, asking silly questions at lineup. But now he transforms into “Chef,” dressed in his blue-embroidered whites, his actions quick and efficient, his commands even more so.

“HERE WE GO, guys,” he says, clapping his hands briskly as the point-of-sale system whirs with the first ticket. “Ordering! Tarte paysanne! Salmon!”

Peggy’s French lessons are forgotten in the quick-paced shorthand of the kitchen, a mixture of English and Spanish that gets shorter as the orders come in: “Behind!” “Hot!” “Corner!”

“Fire two amuse!” a server directs. A cook passes him two gougères, savory cheese puffs compliments of the chef. The red-vested waiters — their uniforms still with packaging creases — seem well on their way to wearing a path in the new floor as they butler the amuse-bouche and pour the complimentary wine. (The liquor license is in, but the full wine order isn’t.)

Although you can see the dining room from the open kitchen, you can’t hear the Édith Piaf soundtrack over the rattle and clank of the dish room, nor easily identify the diners, a mix of friends, neighbors and restaurant types. From here, guests are known only by their orders — “Two halibut! Rabbit!” — and the special requests delivered by the waiters. “That table wants olive oil for their bread,” one waiter says, a little bewildered. Peter pauses. That’s not French. “Okay,” he says. A moment later, the waiter is back: “They want salt and pepper.” The hunt begins for the shakers, which aren’t part of the standard place setting. Time ticks by. Finally, three minutes later, the staff gives up the search and fills two small bowls with sea salt and ground pepper. A moment later, the waiter returns: “She wants your pepper mill.” “Fuck!” Peter says. Then he’s back to his stove.

Peter’s everywhere, rhythmically scoring scallops, boning the rouget, whipping cream for the pastry chef, encouraging his chefs to focus on the task at hand. Then, suddenly, he stops.

“My little man! My little man is in the house!” he says. Now Peter’s running from the kitchen to greet Peggy and five-month-old Jules, who returned just a few hours ago from their month in France. For a moment, everything else is forgotten. “I want to finish the night right now,” Peter says. “I want to go home and see my kid.”

But first: There’s an eight o’clock logjam of would-be diners at the small bar. John, short-staffed in the front of the house, takes a deep breath just out of sight of the dining room, then opens the doors to the private dining room and seats two more parties at the banquet table. In the ever-hotter kitchen, the house-made ice cream and sorbets are melting even as they sit in the freezer, so it’s whipped cream in place of the cassis sorbet on the berry tart. And the kitchen’s running low on, well, everything. Between orders, Peter updates the waitstaff: “I’ve got three tartes left.” “That’s it for the bread.” “Eight-six the rabbit!”

There were 62 people on the books for the night; they fed 84.

“Okay,” Peter exhales. The dining room isn’t empty, but the doors are closed. He takes off his glasses, wipes his forehead on the sleeve of his still-white chef’s jacket, replaces his glasses, and focuses intently on his two cooks. “Okay. Now we just have to get through tomorrow.”