Christ Lutheran School Preschool - Grade 8 • www.clsphx.org LC-MS 3901 E. Indian School Rd., Phoenix | www.cclphoenix.org | (602) 955-4830 LOVE GROW SERVE IN-PERSON WORSHIP Traditional Worship 8:00am/10:45am Contemporary Worship 8:30am/10:30am Teaching Service 9:30am ONLINE WORSHIP Sunday @ 8:am/10:30am FB Live or CHRISTCHURCHPHX.ONLINE.CHURCH AUGUST 2024 16 with Chef Chris Collins of Common Ground Culinary 3160 E. Camelback Road, Phoenix • commongroundculinary.com In the Kitchen Chef Collins with his rotisserie chicken at The Collins Small Batch Kitchen. F ive years ago, Arcadia News started a column called In the Kitchen, and we had the pleasure of interviewing a neighborhood staple – Chef Chris Collins. Things have changed quite a bit since that first interview, so we reached out to see how things are going and what Collins’ restaurant group, Common Ground Culinary, has in store for the future. What’s new with Common Ground? The last five years have been the hardest operating five years in the history of restaurateurs. This comes from a relationship with my father [Wally from Wally’s American Gastropub], who was in the business for 40 years: ups and downs, recessions, political environments. There have been more changes in the last four years than he experienced in 40 years, starting with the pandemic. You and I had our first interview during normal times, and we’re still not back to that. First, we had the pandemic. No restaurants. Everything shut down. Phase two – curbside. We had to retrofit our operations; how do you take a 5,500 square foot building and turn it into curbside? Then came PPP and money from the government – what do you do with that money? How do you use it legally and correctly? Not to mention having to lay off 200 people so they could get unemployment. Then we started bringing people back and operating at 50 percent. Now, we’re a hybrid restaurant. Are you wearing masks? Are you asking people for vaccine cards? This was huge stuff that people were passionate about at the time, so we were navigating through it. Another phase: the pandemic seems to be waning, but I can’t get products. I couldn’t get chicken, fish, or plastic to-go boxes. We had to get trailers to backlog products. The next phase: people don’t want to work. We’re allowed to operate, but no one wants to work. Then, people started spending money like crazy. There are going to be economic classes studied in universities about what happened. And after those phases? We had the busiest months of my career – but I still couldn’t hire. And I could mostly get stuff, but not all of the time. Then, we were in a phase where I could hire and get all the products I wanted. It’s all good. But inflation – 9.6 percent inflation! Inflation is cooling; I can get product, but it’s soft. People are changing their spending habits. Are we in a recession? Are we not? Is it being forced? I can tell you I own six restaurants in the Valley and they were all down in sales. So here’s my question: when is it going to be a normal environment again? On a community-based level, restaurants are the canaries in the coal mine for the broader economy. A year ago, steaks and champagne – I’ve never sold so much champagne, and I couldn’t get it! It’s so wild to think all these things happened in 48 months. How did you come back from that? I am dubbing 2024 ‘The Great Reset.’ The world is getting closer to normal and stable. People are working again. We can get products. Everything is coming together. We’re going to rebuild sales from here. For the last three months, our mantra has been ‘unreasonable hospitality.’ We’ve gone above and beyond to show hospitality to our neighbors for spending their hard-earned money in our restaurants. We see that as a privilege and an honor and are so thankful that people come to our restaurant and hand us their money. One of my managers got a call, and the lady was in tears on the phone. She and her husband had just come from the hospital after he got the thumbs- up for being cancer-free. They went to Grassroots. ‘We didn’t say anything to the server, but at the end of the meal, she surprised us with a slice of key lime pie.’ It brought them to tears that there’s that type of warmth in the world. You’ll always get complaints – the number of avenues I have for someone to complain is outrageous. But to hear that positivity is just incredible. It makes other servers and managers realize, ‘We can do this.’ Unreasonable hospitality, that’s what we’re doing. We introduced a kids eat free option at The Neighborly and Collins Brothers. Hey families, we get it. It’s tough out there. We’ve got you covered. We brought back the family packs on Mondays and Tuesdays. We’re just trying to find out how to make the community feel good. You’ve always known you wanted to be in the restaurant industry? Since I was five years old. I’m one of six kids. I always wanted to be in the kitchen with my dad. My best memories are of being on the cook line in his restaurants. For a five-, eight-, 10-year- old who knows nothing of the world, and loves spending time with the guys on the cook line, it was special. I didn’t know these people came from different backgrounds and lived very different lives than what I was living. I just loved hanging out with them. Where was this taking place? In Reno. My first job was taking out pies to people. I remember the pies feeling so heavy! We eventually moved to Phoenix, and I went to St. Thomas and Brophy. All six kids were swimmers – the pool was the only place my mom could take us all at once! Four out of six of us got scholarships to college, so I went to Boston University and studied hotel and restaurant management. From there, I was recruited by Houston’s, worked for them all over the country. I worked at 10 restaurants in six different cities. My entire goal, my whole life – and I’m so fortunate for this because it allowed me to stay on track – was ‘I’m going to be a restauranteur.’

WE HAVE MOVED 4600 E Shea Blvd | Suite 100 | Phoenix, AZ 85028 NW corner Tatum and Shea | West of Trader Joes 602.955.8700 • FPSAZ.com IN PRACTICE CELEBRATING EXPERT DOCTORS AND PRACTITIONERS. CONVENIENT SERVICES. EXTENDED HOURS. Our Family Caring for Yours 17 AUGUST 2024 Tell us more about working at Houston’s. During my senior year, the dean of the hospitality program pulled me and two other students in and said, ‘You are the three we are recommending for Houston’s.’ It’s a notoriously difficult job to get. If you study American restaurant tourism, Houston’s is the best of the best. We use them as the benchmark to try to achieve. So, two out of the three of us got job offers, and we took them. I worked for them for five years. They have a manager-in-training program through the university. I looked at hotels and did internships because I wanted to make sure I explored my opportunities. My mindset was entrepreneur. Hotels are too big of a thing. I got unbelievable exposure to that industry but knew it was restaurants for me. I learned what makes Common Ground Culinary from Houston’s – uncompromising dedication to your brand and operations. What I learned from my dad is, ‘These people in your neighborhood, you live and die by them. Treat them well, shake some hands, know some names. This is important.’ Common Ground is a good middle ground between those two styles of operating restaurants. After Houston’s came Grassroots Kitchen and Tap? Grassroots was the first restaurant, yes. I was 28, had very little money to my name, had no partners or investors. There was this Chinese restaurant for sale, and the only reason the landlord considered speaking to me was that it was 2011, the aftermath of the great recession, and there were a lot of empty spaces. The guy gave me a shot and probably didn’t expect me to succeed [ laughs ], but Grassroots opened and it’s still the busiest restaurant in the company. My vision for Grassroots was back to the basics: ‘I’m going to take what I learned from Houston’s and from my dad,’ and right in the middle is Grassroots. That was 13 years ago. How many restaurants do you have now? We have six restaurants, an ice cream shop – Sweet Provisions – and a catering company that we opened in 2019. The menu is engineered to utilize the favorite dishes across all seven brands. But also, what works in a catering environment? Our Brussels sprouts are the number one ordered dish in all the restaurants. I’ve been told that my company buys more cases of Brussels sprouts than any other company in Arizona! We developed bruschettas; we have boards – salmon, cheese, crudité – that are packaged. We sell bento boxes. We came up with those to take to hospitals during the pandemic, but now we sell 99 percent to corporate offices. We also do chef sit-ins, where me and one of my sous chefs host a private dinner at a person’s house. Those are popular during the holidays, but I use those as donations to local charities. They’ve consistently gone for upwards of $10,000! So Arcadia Catering has a lot of different approaches to food off-site. Why is your group called Common Ground? I was reading stuff about restaurant tourism and it came out that food in cultures are people’s common ground. You can come from a lot of different places and you can have feelings on other things in society, but food is the thing that brings people together. It’s what we can all sit down and agree upon. It’s who we are. The Collins family cooks food, and raises children [ laughs ]. It’s how we live our lives – through food. What’s Bar Neighborly? Bar Neighborly is above The Neighborly on 7th Street. It just got remodeled, and we will use it as a private event space until we open it up in the fall. We host Third Thursdays – before the pandemic, these events were held at The Macintosh. We have awesome relationships with so many people in town, so we collaborate with places like Huss Brewing, Nelson’s Meat and Fish, Press Coffee, and all these people we work with. Every third Thursday, we do a collaboration dinner: four courses with drink pairings. It is really popular. We had to get rid of a lot of fluff during the pandemic, and now Macintosh is so busy that we don’t want to hinder it with events. Third Thursday is now at Bar Neighborly. I don’t have the sound on the televisions in my restaurants, but when the Diamondbacks go to the World Series, we are going to play that. We’ll do cool things. For example, if they’re playing someone from St. Louis or New York, we’ll feature food from those places. ‘Cheer on your D-Backs while you eat the loser’s food!’ [ laughs ] This will be Common Ground’s party bar. We’ll have sangria in Stanley cups. Beer in metal solo cups. It’s going to be so fun. Are your sons interested in the restaurant industry? I’m setting up the business so that it’s available to them if they want to do it. I will say this – I hope they don’t. It’s a grueling lifestyle. I’m fortunate that the restaurants are in our neighborhood, so we’ve made them part of our everyday life. But that’s not the case for a lot of people. I want my kids to be successful because they have a talent or passion for something, and people seek them out for that talent. Not because they’re willing to be there for 80 hours a week. But my father couldn’t keep me out of the restaurant if he tried, and if that’s the case with my boys, then I’m excited. They’ll work for someone else, and if they want to come back, we can run Common Ground together. What’s your favorite part of the industry? The people. Whether it’s the guests or my team. I love all of my staff, and I mostly love all of our guests. I get to be with people all day. My success is based on getting out there and having relationships with people. Making my team members feel good about how hard they work. Making people feel good that they are spending their hard-earned dollars at my restaurant. Seeing the smiles on their faces when they get an awesome dish or a slice of pie. The most challenging part? The people [ laughs ]. Keeping my team of 250 employees happy, focused and motivated. The guests. Sometimes a guest gets after you, and you know it has nothing to do with their experience at your restaurant. They’re just having one of those days, and you are the punching bag. And you never know what kind of news someone got that day, but when you want to be that neighborhood place, you have to absorb the neighborhood emotions. What do you do when you’re not working? I’m hanging with my boys. They’re eight and 10 now, so we’re in Cub Scouts. We love camping and hiking. We’ll go out, and they will dig for cool rocks – anything semi-clear is a diamond. I got a box of pretty gems – tiger’s eye, stuff like that – and I’ll drop one when they’re not looking. If they ever read this, they’re going to be mad [ laughs ]. But yeah, I’ll drop a cool rock, and they have a collection, so they’ll add that to the box. Every summer, we take a snorkel trip. I told my boys, ‘I’m going to give you two gifts in this world. One is that you’re not going to fear the ocean. And the other is that you’ll know how to ski!’ Every summer, we snorkel, and every winter, we ski. I’m doing stuff with them to set them up to have some know-how. That’s my job – and it’s all things I love to do! To what do you attribute your success in this industry? My father, and watching his ups and downs in the business. My dad is the reason I do this, and I love it. His biggest lesson has always been how you treat the community and how people perceive you because we are in a unique role. When you own a public-facing business like a restaurant, what you do affects the community. Look at what LGO did – they changed the neighborhood. Had they not gone into that plaza, I guarantee that neighborhood would not be what it is today. That’s a good example of how impactful our businesses are. What’s next for Chef Collins? A lot of things! The market is a little soft – I know more restaurants have closed in the last six months than they did in the pandemic. We have opportunities to get some good, long-term leases. But we should talk in, like, six months [ laughs ]! Common Ground is not done – we’re excited to keep growing! My dad is the reason I do this, and why I love it. His biggest lesson has always been how you treat the community and how people perceive you.