Bart Hutchins: Do your customers care about price? Oh, boy. They do. I've been thinking about this a lot. So I was—you know, it's the end of the year, so I'm doing numbers and all those things you have to do when you have investors. And I was looking at the price of French fries specifically, and we've been noted for the French fries and the beef tallow fries and the best fries in D.C. and whatever. And I think they're on the menu right now for 12 bucks an order. And I was looking at an old menu of mine from restaurant, you know, in 2019, and they were all the same fries. I've been making the same fries forever. They were on the menu for nine bucks an order, and I was like, wow, you know, we've really gone up. 12 bucks is kind of expensive for an order of fries. Like, is there any room for this? And I started sort of digging into the price of goods and the labor involved and realized that, like, if I wanted the same sort of margins on that $9 order fries that I have on my now $12 order fries, they would actually be 25 bucks.

Joe Weisenthal: Wow. So like, we've just sort of like the the cost of goods is like eviscerated sort of the margins on that. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway: And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, we were down in DC several weeks ago. We were at that iaff conference and, we had a great meal and we were in town.

Joe Weisenthal: We did indeed. So we had a good meal. Yeah, we went to a place called Butterworth's, which is getting a lot of buzz. Yeah, it's been getting a lot of buzz for a while and sort of serves, I don't want to say farm to table because that's not really it, but like an emphasis on organic tonic, maybe like rarer cuts of meat. I remember we had bone marrow, which you love.

Tracy Alloway: I love bone marrow. We had really good fries, which famously. And we'll probably get beef tallow, no seed oils, very, very, very hip, very strong. So I'm pretty sure we had, something with foie gras, which I love. I love doing, restaurant episodes, period. Because if you want to understand the economy, both in the sort of short term like where we are on this, like with food costs and labor costs and, how, you know, free spending people are they're a great snapshot in any given time. They're just this perfect combination of labor cost inputs and rent, which is like the whole economy there. There's also the supply chain issue.

Joe Weisenthal: There's also an interesting cultural element in this. And like everything is cultural and political nowadays, including the restaurant. Yes, because Butterworth's has been described as a sort of right wing. Yeah, MAGA hangout. So we should talk about that too. We're going to be speaking with Bart Hutchins. Bart, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What does it mean? What's a maga restaurant?

Bart Hutchins: Oh, God. Where do we start? In DC, the version of that now that sort of politics or pop culture is like what politicians are eating at these restaurants and that sort of becomes what you're known for. And so early on, we were on the hill. And so we developed a following among the new administration that came in like two months after we opened. And so now it is a Maga restaurant, because that's like an interesting way to talk about the restaurant. Because they're there. And so early on, we had a lot of customers from the administration from like Scott Batson to Marco Rubio, Steve Bannon, whatever it may be. But like if, if we did what we did it Butterworth's in New York, it would be like the Wall Street restaurant.

Joe Weisenthal: No, it is not quite true that it's like, oh, you opened the restaurant before the new administration and they started, I mean, you're one of your co-owners. I think there's like, affiliated with Breitbart UK. I mean, there are Butterworth. Yeah, named after him. There are there are political routes to the restaurant. Right.

Bart Hutchins: Totally. I mean, this this is part of being in DC. We have six investors, I think two—the third one, I would have to ask because he's like a tech bro. But two of them are pretty solidly like classic libs. And a few of them are pretty, pretty like MAGA adjacent conservatives. I will say the one you're talking about, Raheem Kassam, he used to work with Steve Bannon, was the Breitbart editor in London. One of our investors, when we started, when we opened the place, you sort of invite all your friends and family, and that's how you sort of get the business going. And it turns out he was just way better at it than the rest of us. Right. So, like the first night we were open, there's like 60 reservations and I'm pretty sure like 45 of them were from Rahim. And so the MAGA thing did sort of generate in that way.

Tracy Alloway: How difficult is it to get investors for a restaurant business in general, but also specifically in DC?

Bart Hutchins: It's like it's a terrible investment, right? Like if you're if you're listening to this for financial advice, don't do it. If you're looking to sort of build for yourself a place to be to always have the good table, to invite your friends, to have something to talk about at dinner parties. It's one of the best investments, right? But as a, as a business investment, it's like the worst, especially post-Covid. Like the margins are joke.

Joe Weisenthal: Let's talk about the menu. We I mean, the whole team came. Everyone loved the meal. Like, how do you go about the process of sort of conceptualizing the overall menu?

Bart Hutchins: So our specifically is working with farmers. So I have a host of farmers that I've been working with as a chef for I guess, a decade now. And most of them are the, the sort of Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonites. So, you know, the sort of not technologically plugged in folks. And so it's I get a call from them on Mondays, like, go, this is sort of what's coming out of the ground this week. These are which animals are being slaughtered? Which ones do you want? And then those products come in and the menu is based off of that, which sort of, doesn't really allow you to have the same dish on the menu every single day, which is a classic sort of trope of the restaurant industry.

Tracy Alloway: Is it true that you don't serve burgers because you don't want everyone to just go into the restaurant and order a burger all the time?

Bart Hutchins: The the burger conundrum is the bane of my existence. I had a restaurant three blocks from Butterworths years ago called Buca. And we did a burger because that was, you know, it's good money at the time. And it quickly became like one of those like, oh, this is the best burger in DC. The problem with the burger is not that it's it's bad economics or that it's a bad dish. The problem is, if you do it well, it's it's the only thing you become capable of selling. Because it's so self-explanatory and it's it's so desirable. If you want to be able to sell these weird vegetable, you can't have a burger because it just dominates the entire menu.

Joe Weisenthal: The supply chain. How did okay, so you talked to the farmers in Pennsylvania, etc.. How does it get there? What are the who are the entities that, sort of that actually deliver the food?

Bart Hutchins: So I'm a psycho and I try to avoid the like quote unquote larger supply chain at all costs. So the, the, the actual way that the produce and most of the meat gets to the restaurant is a as a literal Amish, Amish guy with like a hat in the beard and everything shows up at seven. He's like one of the few people that has the key box code to the restaurant. For a lot of restaurants, it is sort of Cisco and a couple other really large companies that are that are doing this procurement. But if you if you want to break out of that, you're dealing with like a guy with a Ford F-150 in the, in a trailer.

Tracy Alloway: How much does price actually influence your decisions? So, you know, if a farmer comes in and says, I have the best gras in the world or something like that, but it's really, really expensive. Would you still buy it?

Bart Hutchins: Chefs are not inclined to think about the price of goods because they want the best product. Like they'll sort of go they'll sort of stretch their own margins to get the better product. If you're if you're eating at a restaurant where, like, the chef is named on something, you're getting the the best product, no matter what it cost, because we're just psychotic and obsessive in that way. Because they tend to be more artists than like, economists, right?

Tracy Alloway: How competitive are restaurants when it comes to getting the best chef?

Bart Hutchins: Extremely. It's like, when we were opening Butterworths I would go stand out back of restaurants that I liked, where the dumpsters were where people might take smoke breaks in hopes that I could talk to the cooks and steal them. So we, we trade talent, and sort of fight over talent in an extremely competitive way. Particularly if you have like, a really good, fast dishwasher and I can have one dishwasher instead of two, I'm going to take your dishwasher.

Tracy Alloway: How important is the, I guess, the vibe of the restaurant to the overall business?

Bart Hutchins: Massively important. Right? Like, the, the I think these days I spent as much time thinking about lighting and volume level and like, spacing out of seats and, and and whether or not you can hear the person you're talking to and that stuff, as I do about the food. You have to combine the best food with a comfortable place to hang out or with a specific social scene.

Joe Weisenthal: You mentioned lighting. How much of that? When you think about lighting, how much is it about the experience of the diners that night versus lighting for Instagram ability or TikTok or whatever it is?

Bart Hutchins: What I'm actually trying to do is the exact opposite, which is like our food photographs, terribly. If you have photos on your phone from that night, they probably look awful. But it's a reaction to that thing which is like, I want to feel like something sort of more classic or more timeless than that. The rule of thumb, I work for this great restaurateur, his rule of thumb was, like, if it's if it's too bright to reasonably get away with giving a handjob, that it's too bright.

Joe Weisenthal: One thing I wanted to ask is, you know, we talked about the clientele earlier and, you know, you got some well known people into the restaurant. If Steve Bannon comes in for the first time, what do you do?

Bart Hutchins: So it's it's actually the exact opposite. My big fear is if the people find out there they are, they'll start coming to interrupt her in the middle of dinner. And then that person's gone. So for me specifically, I would never, ever, in a million years be like, hey, Politico, by the way, like in the spotted, you know, Marco Rubio having dinner with his family, because then you'll just never see that customer again.

Tracy Alloway: Health code violations and permitting and all that stuff. If you watch that show the bear. How real is it from your perspective?

Bart Hutchins: The first season that Uber Eats episode, that ding that it makes when a new order comes in, it still sends me into like a blackout rage. With the the permitting and all that stuff. It took us almost eight months to get the single permit for that. Because you're paying rent that entire eight months. It is legitimately, stopping new restaurants from opening.

Joe Weisenthal: Bart Hutchins That was fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.