Sent Reeling : Ventura dangled the bait, a prime spot for a restaurant on the remodeled pier. Only four out of 80 entered bids. Why the lack of interest?

Anyone who ever loved to cook and to dine well has had the fantasy of opening a restaurant. Anyone who has explored the possibility has learned that to do so requires much money, 80-hour-a-week dedication and the high risk of failure, closure, even bankruptcy.

Still, restaurants are held dear by many, and news of openings or closings always makes for hot discussion. Venturans have been eagerly awaiting the announcement by city officials of who will open a restaurant at one of the prime dining locations in the West: the newly restored Ventura Pier.

Much would be at stake, however, in the selection of such a restaurant.

Ventura’s newest restaurant would not only serve food but act as an important nexus: for residents, overnight tourists, day-tripping beach-goers, business people, the L.A.-to-Santa Barbara weekend crowd. Depending on how attractive it is in food and setting, the new restaurant would either help or hinder in shoring up businesses in an aging downtown split from its beaches by a roaring highway.

And it would either please or distress residents who chronically complain that there just aren’t enough good restaurants in Ventura County.

From the start, over a year ago, it seemed Ventura would be in the catbird’s seat--able to choose carefully from a clamorous crowd of eager, proven entrepreneurs. The site always promised that. It’s a 6,000-square-foot rectangle of space on the Ventura Pier--the only free-standing beachfront property available in Ventura for a restaurant.

And waterfront dining has held the imagination of developers and diners for decades around America’s perimeter. Something about salt air, the peacefulness of water and island views, the belief that fish on the plate was pulled that day from a stone’s throw away, the postcard quality of brightly colored sailboats--it all lends a special dimension to the dining experience.

Coastal communities everywhere have always managed, on beaches or docks or piers or stilts or barges, to erect popular, profitable fish houses of some kind: Backwater crawfish shacks dot Louisiana’s bayou; dining gardens with palm trees line the gulf beaches of the Florida Keys; Southstreet Seaport in New York transforms a west bank of the East River into a multitiered dining fantasy; Baltimore Harbor virtually sinks beneath the weight of Chesapeake Bay crab emporiums; Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco is where tourists go first to line up for steamers, and Southern California’s coastline is a happy hodgepodge of sea-view restaurants ranging from nautical kitsch to strictly uptown.

But not in Ventura.

Over the last year, things have proved difficult.

Not everybody, it turns out, wants to open a restaurant on the pier, despite the pier’s meticulous restoration only a year ago at a cost of $3.5 million. Despite unobstructed views to the Channel Islands. Despite a potential monopoly market on a beach-going crowd estimated at more than 1.5 million a year.

This week, city officials are scheduled to close negotiations with a Seattle developer, Hal Griffith, who runs a chain of nautically themed restaurants called The Fisherman’s Galley, two of them on piers in San Clemente and Newport Beach (see accompanying restaurant review). Griffith’s was one of only four proposals submitted after Ventura’s invitation to more than 80 parties to consider the pier.

That lackluster response prompts some to wonder whether Ventura could have done better, could have thrown a larger net for candidates, could have marketed its prized site more successfully.

“We’re frustrated,” says Councilman Greg Carson. “I expected more proposals. We were hoping that word of mouth would go out, that more people would be aware of it. It’s a special site. Where else can you do something like that?”

Bill Byerts, the city administrator who oversees the selection, sighs deeply and blames the economy. “Why no fever of competition? It’s real simple: They can’t get loans. They can’t get the money to do it.”

Fisherman’s Galley may well win the site, and that would please members of a selection committee from Ventura who dined at the San Clemente Fisherman’s Galley and were happy with the experience. Ventura Councilman Gary Tuttle was among the dining delegates and said, “I really liked it. It’s just what I had in mind for the pier.”

But Griffith’s negotiations with the city--over whether the city will bear part or all of the cost of constructing a restaurant shell on the pier, as well as the terms of a lease--are anything but certain in the outcome, and the result could be a whole new search for a whole new restaurant.

Whatever the outcome, key questions remain as to why Ventura has been unable to attract a large number of restaurant candidates for its much-loved historic pier. And the questions inevitably invoke broader factors that affect restaurant performance: tourism, the level of spending in Ventura restaurants, and the ability of residents and visitors to freely move from downtown shops to the beach and the pier.

All factors help determine the success or failure of a restaurant. Yet all are problems only recently receiving sustained attention in Ventura.

On the Lower End

Fred Duckett of Palo Alto is among the restaurateurs who chose not to submit a proposal for the Ventura Pier. Duckett runs the highly successful and well-reviewed Fishmarket Restaurants in Northern California and Arizona, and he knows these parts well from his swordfishing days out of Channel Islands Harbor.

“The pier is a fair location,” he says matter-of-factly. “I looked at the (city’s) proposal briefly. But we do excellent locations only, and look closely at per-capita spending. Ventura is a lower-end market, say, than Santa Barbara, and it strikes me as more transient. Then, there was a short deadline for sealed bids, and, well, we just don’t do business that way.”

Malcolm Strand runs the respected Scott’s Seafood restaurants in San Francisco, San Jose and Sacramento. He echoed the comments of Duckett and numerous other restaurateurs who received invitations but turned the other way.

“There’s just not enough going on in that market,” Strand says. “I spoke to a friend who lives there to check it out, and I can tell by having visited, as well--there’s no action. And I would have to add that, upon investigation, it turns out to be a fairly low-end market.”

Low end. If Ventura incomes are lower than Santa Barbara’s, does that still mean that a fine restaurant can’t do well in Ventura? Rosarito Beach Cafe and The Chart House, to name just two that are quite respectable in their food and not exactly low in their pricing, prove the opposite to be true.

So what else thwarted the search?

The document that was sent to Duckett, Strand and more than 80 others is called a Request for Proposals (RFP). It went through three drafts in an effort to make the pier site more enticing. Still, Ventura’s RFP for the pier restaurant was a demanding document that presumed much about Ventura’s restaurant marketplace and the considerable burdens any new pier restaurateur might bear.

It stated that Ventura wanted “a new upscale premier restaurant facility” from a developer who “would be responsible for the construction of the restaurant shell and all tenant improvements” on the pier. The successful candidate, it went on, would install “public art at a minimum of 2% of the project cost” and “provide concession management and operation services for (a) snack bar and bait shop.”

Launching a restaurant these days is tough enough. But after investing heavily in such construction, the pier restaurateur would not own anything; instead, he or she would have a 10-year lease from the city to rent the space, open to renewal by renegotiation only.

Even the four who did submit proposals ignored the city’s demands. Each sought partnership of some kind--a sharing of the burden.

“Were we too restrictive? We were, at first,” says Councilman Carson. “But all those who did propose had creative solutions, and all had (the city) involved in building the shell.”

Carson pauses a moment.

“This has been a learning experience. We didn’t know what was out there. If we wind up doing it all over again, do we make it clear that (the city) would build the restaurant shell? We need to consider these things carefully, because we’re not in the (restaurant) business.” (The 10-year-lease clause is the least flexible of the city’s demands, however--it is stipulated by the Ventura City Charter.)

Shaky Assumptions

Knowing “what’s out there,” as Carson put it, is a key point in two respects.

First, the field of potential candidates was delimited by the city of Ventura’s grasp of the restaurant world. For the most part, it invited only those whom it knew or considered, based on regional reputation, to be worthy--brief advertisements in the Los Angeles Times business section notwithstanding.

Second, many of the assumptions and expectations brought to the search by Ventura officials are rooted in a 1989 restaurant feasibility study that cited pent-up demand for waterfront dining and rosily projected annual growth in Ventura restaurant spending through 1994. Indeed, the RFP itself cites the study, by Williams-Kuebelbeck and Associates, as showing “sufficient demand for a dinner restaurant in this trade area to support approximately 10,000 square feet of additional restaurant space.”

But the opposite has happened: Restaurants in both Ventura and Channel Islands Harbors have had difficulty in recent years--some have closed and vacancies remain--and per-capita restaurant spending throughout the city of Ventura, state tax files show, declined more than 8% by 1992.

Byerts says he drew up the RFP invitation list with help from the city’s redevelopment staff, which “targeted, by looking through trade journals, those companies that had strategies into which a pier restaurant might fit.” These firms, such as Duckett’s and Stroud’s, are joined by numerous Ventura and Oxnard individuals who had simply expressed an interest--people such as Ed Warren, original owner of The Busy Bee cafe and current owner of Smokey’s Saloon, both in Ventura.

But firms such as the Maryland-based Rouse Corp., creator of both Baltimore Harbor and New York’s South Street Seaport and respected worldwide as perhaps the leading developer of waterfront dining, went uninvited. Rouse also has done work on a much smaller scale in California, such as the inventive and extremely popular food court at Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Mall.

Asked why such contenders were not contacted, Byerts replied: “I really couldn’t answer you. It has to do with no one really knowing a lot of the big firms. We figured the ad in the L.A. Times would hit that.”

The optimistic 1989 study predicted that “additional demand for dinner restaurants in Ventura will be generated by new residents.”

But in 1989, at the time the study was written, 259 permits were issued to Ventura dining establishments for an annual gross sales of $98.6 million. Three years later, in 1992, the last full year for which figures are available from the state Board of Equalization, 260 permits were issued for an annual gross sale of $100.4 million--growth so marginal that, once Ventura’s 2.5% population increase is taken into account, it actually represents an 8.4% decline in per-capita restaurant spending. First-quarter figures for 1993, the latest quarterly figures reported, look even bleaker: The number of restaurant permits in Ventura had slipped to 257.

To put the best face on it, Ventura restaurants--some closing, but others opening and doing so well as to displace the losses of others--had proudly held their own through a tough recession. But Ventura plainly showed no growth in its restaurant economy in the three years following the 1989 study--contrasted with increases of 10.7% in Simi Valley and 4.1% in Thousand Oaks.

Clearly, the concept of pent-up demand for waterfront dining remains just that: an appealing concept.

The 1989 study, finally, argued that any new pier restaurant would generate 60% of its trade from tourists or visitors--a figure that runs counter to current experience at some of Ventura’s high-end, near-the-beach establishments. The Chart House, which offers ocean views from its perch on a bluff on Sanjon Road, has a clientele that is roughly 35% tourists, says Brian Brennan, the restaurant’s manager.

It is worth noting that The Chart House, for all its popularity and consistent quality, is open for dinner only, never for lunch or brunch--that’s simply what the Ventura market will bear. “It’s pretty local,” says Brennan. “I spend all Friday and Saturday nights walking around kissing babies and shaking hands with the locals. It’s just good business.”

An RFP was sent to Brennan, but The Chart House declined to bid for the pier site. “The numbers weren’t there for us,” says Brennan, who also serves as vice president of the Ventura Chamber of Commerce and chairs its subcommittee on tourism. “We just didn’t see the number of people we’d need walking by.”

“It’s a beautiful spot,” he continued. “I’ve had people in the industry call me about it, and I’ve encouraged them, but the numbers weren’t there for them, either.”

Not Yet a ‘Destination’

Tourism is always invoked in arguments about the vitality of Ventura’s restaurant economy. But the methods of calculating the numbers and types of tourists are uncertain.

Ventura reports that it had 1,531,817 day visitors in 1992.

To arrive at that figure, however, it uses a state-recommended “multiplier” of 2.17, which is multiplied by the number of overnight leisure visitors as reported by Ventura hotels and motels. The multiplier, created by state planners who did not focus on beachfront concentrations exclusively, is used in beachless Fresno and off-the-beaten-track Indio. So Ventura, loved for its beaches bisected by the busy 101, very likely has more day-trippers that it knows or reports, concedes Debbie Solomon of the city’s public information staff.

That’s the good news.

The less-than-happy news is that Ventura may not be the tourist destination it believes itself to be. Destination implies staying overnight, at times for many nights on a vacation, and that’s where things get sketchy.

Devlin Raley, an advertising executive of the firm Creative Images, is chairing the city’s newly formed Tourism and Special Events Committee, which will seek to coordinate efforts among the city, the Visitors and Convention Bureau, the state-affiliated Ventura Fairgrounds and Ventura Harbor.

Raley is a rampant, unabashed Ventura booster. But his gift is holding a hard, clear eye on realities:

“Our overwhelming majority of overnight visitors (91.8%) are staying only a day or two, and we need to increase that to three or four. We have problems getting people around--from the harbor to the beach to downtown to Surfers Point. We also have parking problems--if you come here, where do you go? We’re just not focused on what tourism really is to us. We have work to do.

“What are we selling anyway? Until we define ourselves to the regional market, we just won’t be happening. Let’s stop saying we’re a destination resort until we become one.”

Predictably, Raley has a sense of the Ventura Pier’s role in all this:

“It will help close that loop with downtown, which is revitalizing. Putting an appropriate restaurant there is key. If it’s too upscale, we’ll be defeating the personality of that pier and reduce usage of it by local residents. And the truth is, our business community must survive 12 months of the year, and tourism is really only four months of it.”

Retro Rejected

One of the three unsuccessful restaurant proposals came from the popular retro 1940s chain Ruby’s.

Doug Cavanaugh, who represents Ruby’s, is disappointed. “We’ve wanted to be in Ventura a long time,” he says. “It fits our profile: younger families and retirees. It’s us.

“And I do feel that people who are walking to a pier are not dressed up and already have chosen not to make a big deal over dining. History shows that more upscale places in this setting are less successful than the casual, and I believe history will prove us right.”

Hal Griffith, who declined to be interviewed while in negotiations with the city, did say his firm is considering reducing the ambition and price of its entrees at its Newport Beach restaurant. The Fisherman’s Galley is at the far end of the pier, requiring diners to make the long seaward walk. That, Griffith said, tends to attract an even more casual crowd. Downscaling the menu to fish and chips is being considered. He said he didn’t feel that that would be the case in Ventura, which would want the more upscale menu (see pricing in accompanying article).

The two others who were passed over have different views of the city’s approach to finding a restaurant.

Larry Janss of the Janss Development Corp., a former partner in the old Pier Fish House at the pier, pitched a seafood restaurant with entrees from $12 to $19 and an on-site micro-brewery as a special draw, particularly for the slower midweek crowd. But he concedes: “The whole problem of traffic and demography was making me a bit nervous, and my last years at the pier, with gangs and a shooting, had caused me some concern. So I was not in deep despair when I wasn’t selected.”

Jana Johnson, however, a broker representing the Reel Inn chain, is perplexed with the city’s handling of applicants. Johnson said that Reel, whose nearest restaurant overlooks the water in Malibu, took the proposal quite seriously, submitted a 55-page document that included a conceptual site plan and architect’s rendering, and considered itself a perfect solution for Ventura in that it offered both inexpensive, casual dining as well as pricey, ambitious dining for those who wished a special night out. But the city never responded, says Johnson, not even to say that Reel had lost out.

“My client read it in the paper,” says Johnson. “That’s a slap in the face. The city’s not taking the time to interview us--that surprised us. But no notification? I would have to hesitate and think whether I’d want to put a client through that process again.”

Byerts rejects Johnson’s claims outright. “That’s just not accurate,” he says. “We sent notification of whom we selected.” But news of Griffith’s selection may have been publicly discussed by a councilman before notices were received, he acknowledged.

Facing Financial Burden

Whoever gets the pier site faces tremendous upfront costs.

Byerts estimates that it would take $1.5 million to $2 million to build, furnish, staff and open a restaurant at the pier. Then it would take as much--$1.5 million a year--in gross receipts to pay the bills, with profitability a good two years of operation away. (Note: The Pier Fish House, less than half the size of any proposed new restaurant, showed gross annual revenues in its final years of operation of about $750,000.)

Who will take on such costs--particularly when the market continues to lack definition, though restaurateurs do report gains in business in recent months--remains unclear. Also unclear is how far the city of Ventura will go toward building a shell, improving the empty lot between the pier and the Holiday Inn parking garage, and launching a people-moving transportation system, such as a trolley, that links downtown and Ventura’s multiple waterfronts.

Hal Griffith of Seattle may know. He has built on many a pier, sold many a plate of fish.

But if for some reason he wriggles off the hook, Ventura will to have to cast about all over again--and this time with new soundings, new bait.