Recipe Is Hands-On Management

The sauce for the fish wasn’t quite right, so Jeff Williams donned chef’s togs and stood at the stove of Clancy’s Crab Broiler for half an hour until the cooks at his Glendale restaurant knew exactly what he wanted.

Although he’s not a chef by training, rolling up his sleeves in the kitchen is just the sort of hands-on management style that has kept Williams successful with his small restaurant empire. It’s also one reason why the California Restaurant Writers Assn. just named him Restaurateur of the Year.

Williams, 49, and his father, Jack, co-own an eclectic group of five restaurants in the Glendale-Montrose area and are investors in several others throughout the state.

Clancy’s is perhaps the best known, having been a Glendale staple since 1975 and the one that got Williams started. But he also operates Jax, a 120-seat, 35-employee jazz supper club in Glendale, the Black Cow Cafe and the Star Cafe, both 80-seaters in Montrose, and the 5-week-old Hamburger Central in Glendale.

And in a business that often eats its young, Williams is a survivor--another reason for the plaudits, said Bob Gourley, vice president of the 20-member restaurant writer’s group.

“We honor restaurants that have consistently good service and food quality,” said Gourley, who does restaurant reviews for radio stations including KTYM-AM (1460) in Inglewood.

Williams, Gourley said, has kept the originality of the long-established Clancy’s by maintaining favored dishes while trying new items, “which is very important for any restaurant.”

Williams’ longevity in a fickle field was also a plus, Gourley added: “Jeff is a survivor. He’s been in the industry a long time.”

Although Williams has worked in restaurants nearly all his life, he never thought it would be his livelihood. In 1948, his father invested in coin-operated laundries and a few years later in a fast food restaurant, Taco Tio in Tujunga, where 12-year-old Jeff would help out with odd jobs, such as sweeping the parking lot.

Throughout high school and college, the younger Williams worked in a variety of restaurants, from McDonald’s to the Ruben E. Lee in Newport Beach.

“You name it, I did it,” Williams said. “From fast food through full-service, from busboy to bartender to valet, I did it all.”

But he never thought of restaurants as a career. In fact, as a business major at the University of Southern California, he minored in marketing and real estate, thinking he’d make his mark in real estate.

His last year in college he even worked in real estate, but shortly after graduation in 1972, his father’s restaurant partner went bankrupt. Jack Williams took over the restaurant and asked his son to help run it. “It was my dad’s business and I didn’t see myself in the picture,” Williams said. But before he knew it, Williams itched to have his own full-service eatery.

“I had been watching a location on Brand [Boulevard in Glendale] and thought I could take it over and put in a little seafood place,”’ Williams said. At the time, he noted, there were few seafood specialty restaurants in the San Fernando Valley area.

Clancy’s opened in 1975, offering a simple fish-and-chips menu with a few fresh fish dishes.

“We could just squeeze in 72 seats, tops. We learned the business as we went along,” he said.

In 1983, Clancy’s moved to its present, larger location near the Glendale Galleria on Central Avenue. With an expanded menu, including a bar, catering service and banquet room, the restaurant now seats 300 and requires a staff of 85.

Williams, who lives in La Canada Flintridge, briefly opened Clancy’s in Santa Monica and Santa Ana, but hated the commute and sold them. Since he liked other kinds of foods, he decided to diversify and open a different type of restaurant closer to home.

“I like working with different chefs,” he explained. Back in Glendale, he opened Jax in 1981 and Noodles nearby in 1988.

Those were followed by the Star Cafe (gourmet pizza and pasta) in 1989 and the Black Cow Cafe (eclectic American cuisine) in 1994, both in Montrose.

But it hasn’t all been a cake-walk, and he is cautious about his company’s growth. At his peak, he owned eight restaurants with 400 employees, making him one of the largest employers in Glendale. Today he has about 280 employees.

“I’ve opened many restaurants over the years,” Williams said. “I’ve had my successes and failures. I got rid of the failures and am holding on to the successes.”

The 160-seat Noodles is a case in point. The restaurant was a big hit when it opened, serving gourmet pizza and pasta. But competition diluted the market for that style of food. Volume began to drop “and I just didn’t want to fool with it anymore.” So he turned Noodles into a banquet room of Clancy’s.

Probably his biggest mistake was holding on too long to a pizza/pasta restaurant in Woodland Hills.

The restaurant, similar to Star Cafe, had stiff competition from a California Pizza Kitchen and a Wolfgang Puck’s pizza place. Also, Williams admitted, he didn’t pay enough attention to the neighborhood, which was largely Jewish.

One weekend, “We didn’t have a soul walk in. I didn’t realize it was Rosh Hashanah.”

At the same time, successes like the Black Cow and Star Cafe (managed by his son Donald) are credited with helping bring customers and a bit of night life to the quaint Montrose Shopping Park.

“The restaurants really help bring business to town,” said Frank Roberts, chief executive of the Montrose-Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce and past president of the Montrose Shopping Park Assn.

Recently, Williams has gone back to his fast-food roots with his latest venture, Hamburger Central, a small dine-in or take-out restaurant in Glendale featuring hamburgers and tacos and managed by his daughter Christie.

A restaurant is probably the hardest business to keep afloat, he said, with about 80% of new restaurants failing. Even with 25 years of experience under his apron, Williams said, operating a restaurant “is tough [even] for me, and I’m good at it.”

“Everybody thinks it’s easy. People who made money in other industries see restaurants as a glamorous way to make money,” he said.

But the reality is that the cost of doing business today is high, he said, and one of the biggest downfalls is under-financing. In 1975, he said, you could open a restaurant for $12,000.

“Today, that would buy two pieces of equipment. You can spend $150,000 on a kitchen today and it would be a very modest kitchen,” he said.

An operation the size of Clancy’s, for example, would take about $3 million today to open.

A restaurant, he added, needs enough capital to carry a minimum three-month payroll, plus inventory. Advertising alone can easily devour $1,000 a month, and then there’s rent, utilities, permits, fixtures, employee training and more. Also, today’s stringent government regulations guide everything from labor to environmental issues. For example, he noted, a wood-burning stove needs a special $40,000 ventilation system, as opposed to $2,500 for a regular oven hood. Today a sewer hook-up fee might cost $20,000, whereas “back in 1975, you just hooked up to the sewer line.”

Increased competition not only draws away customers but also drains the work force.

“More restaurants eat up the labor market,” he said. “There are only so many good chefs and servers.”

Besides underfinancing, mistakes restaurateurs make include holding on to a losing property for too long.

“A bad restaurant can suck $20,000 a month out of you. That’s why it’s best to close a bad one very quickly. You have to see mistakes early on and correct them before it’s too late. You can usually tell within a few months if [a restaurant is] going to work or not,” he said.

When Williams and his father invest in other restaurants, they walk a fine line between protecting their interests and interfering too much in the operation. Nobody wants too many chefs in the kitchen.

“We’re not the silent investor types. We watch our investment and if it’s not managed right we step in. But when an operator does well, we stay out of the way,” he said.

A successful restaurant, he emphasized, has consistently good food and service. Location is sometimes a factor, but other times it doesn’t matter. But most importantly, he said, you need to pay attention to what customers want.

“Once you open your doors, you’re feeding people seven days a week,” he said. “It’s a labor of love.”