(upbeat music) - welcome to business forward I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight Travis Mohlenbrink.

Travis is owner, founder, president he's everything of spice hospitality group welcome Travis.

- Yeah.

Thanks for having me appreciate it.

- Well, you've got some of my favorite restaurants so I had to bring you on so we can talk food and I'm hungry so I should've had you bring something.

- [Travis] I should have brought something.

(laughs) - let's start with you 'cause you're an entrepreneur at heart, aren't you?

- Yeah, 100%.

- Yeah, So what drives you to, when you first had this idea of a restaurant or cater whatever it was what started you to where you're at right now?

- Yeah.

Matt, I've always been in the food industry in one way or another.

You know, even when I was like junior high school I was doing dishes at the local restaurant in our hometown, you know so it's one of those things and people talk about all the time in the hospitality industry.

Like it, it kind of gets in your blood and you get that bug and it's sort of ends up being something that you're always gonna be a part of and do and it definitely held true for for me once I got that bug, I knew it was my passion.

It's sorta like what got my creative juices flowing when I'd wake up in the morning and I just ran with it and it's been kind of a wild ride.

- Are you from central Illinois?

- You know, from about two hours East of here a small town called Donovan, Illinois.

- Okay.

- Closest bigger city to that is probably what?

Seca.

- Okay.

- Kind of over by the kankakee area there.

- Gotcha.

- But yeah really small community.

I mean, I had like 32 people in my graduating class, so.

- Okay.

All right well, so when did you come to Peoria?

- Yeah, so I came to Peoria, so I was working for Chili's and taking some classes at Illinois state university.

- I gotcha.

- And from there I got involved with that organization and then ended up opening up some of the very first Panera bread franchises in central Illinois and I was involved with that franchisee the Wolf family from Iowa and I worked for them for about five years opened actually two of the stores here locally in the Peoria.

- I didn't know that.

- Yeah I worked out of the Springfield store, I opened the Bloomington store for them.

So once I was in the in the central Illinois area doing that that's sort of what gave me the ties and like I said I was about almost five years with that company and when I decided it was sort of time to like...

I worked for a couple other companies in between but decided, I was doing some traveling and decided it was time to like settle down and do something on my own because in this business I mean I was working, traveling, you know 80 hours a week, 70 hours a week and I'm like, if I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do it for myself.

- Right that's typical in the hospitality business though - It is - at 80 plus hours.

- That's right.

- I mean so when you got married your wife knew this is what I do.

- Yes.

Thank God it worked out that way because I've seen it not work that way before - Yeah.

Right.

So are you a chef yourself?

- You know I love to cook.

I'm not like a certified culinary chef with a degree in the culinary arts but I mean that is my passion is like coming up with...

I do a lot of our menu development, of course I do like all the concepts and everything from like day one through finishing the whole thing out so you know that that's a big passion of mine.

I do most of the cooking at our house.

- Okay.

Well so do I so we have that in common.

So let's talk about the restaurants in your portfolio.

So you've got Sugar, Cayenne, Time which that's my favorite, Industry Brewing, The Warehouse and Cracked Pepper and then you have catering, - Correct.

- Cracked Pepper Catering, that's separate.

- Right the very first thing I ever started was Cracked Pepper Catering.

- Okay.

So we're going to get to that for a second do you have a favorite of these or is it not fair to say that?

- Man I mean, people ask me that and it's like you know it's like picking your favorite child because literally like from concept to completion - Yeah.

- If there's an outlet on a wall in the corner over there I said that we need an outlet in the corner over there.

Again I do like the concept, the menu, the design, the decor I mean, I do all of that.

- So how do you come up with it?

How did you come up with the idea of this theme here?

- At which place?

- At all of them.

- Well... - Because I mean it's Spice Hospitality Groups.

It's kind of cool.

- I never wanted to do something, never wanted to take a concept and replicate it.

I wanted to do something different because again when I wake up in the morning in the middle of a project when I've got like those creative juices are flowing like that's what like gets me going and it's like a drug like I just want to do more and be more creative and that's what I love about what I do.

- Okay.

So now let's go to the individual.

So take time as an example where do you come up with the ideas and how do those juices flow into like menu development as an example.

- Yeah.

Once I have an idea then I start thinking about different menu items based on what that idea is.

and you know take time for example time is set up to be like a craft beer, bourbon and gastro pub restaurant.

So, you know, some like elevated bar food.

We definitely get some very unique items on the menu have some very unique items on the menu there but once I know that's the direction I want to go in I do a little traveling, I do a lot of research, I don't sleep a lot at night and I just really put a lot of R and D into whatever that concept is and as I'm looking at different menus at different places across the country every once in a while, you run into a place that's got a picture of like, you know, the location or whatnot and I was looking at a place actually in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and they had a bunch of animal heads on the wall.

And it was a really cool Gastro pub had an awesome menu, James Beard award-winning bar program.

- Oh wow - And I was like man I just really thinks that that's a unique idea and something that I would want to run with and there you have it.

I mean, I had a buddy that worked for a company that was actually a gun range and they sold ammunition and guns as well and people would like hang out there and have coffee in the mornings and whatnot would bring a lot of their animal heads there and because they had them displayed all throughout that business and eventually like their wives at some point it would say," Hey it's about time to get rid of these animal heads in the basement."

And so he was like, we have so many of these extra animal heads here, and some are very unique.

If you can find a way to get these back to Peoria, I'll give you a bunch of them.

- Oh wow.

- So I rented a U-Haul truck and I loaded it up with a bunch of stuffed animal heads and brought them back and now they're the decor of the restaurant.

- And the design of the bar is unique.

So do you have other people help you with vision?

- Yeah so the whole back bar like it was me like on a piece of paper just kind of given an idea to the guys that build it and I source out all the product that went into it from a local guy here.

Most of the stuff I have in all my restaurants are made or done locally and we just kind of work it out together I tell him what I want it to look like and we get going with it.

- Well, you do a good job.

So let's shift here and talk about your employees because you take pride in your employees.

They're trained well I know that and that's key but this past year what have you done as a leader to keep the vision alive to keep that morale up?

- So in a normal year I do like to travel.

I mean that's where our new menu development ideas come from is I get out there and I try new things, I taste new things I didn't go in from the day that COVID hit and we were under executive orders, I didn't leave the area.

I think I told you earlier I didn't leave Peoria County for months and months and months and I was in front of my people that I continue to keep employed every day and if they needed something I got it.

- Yeah.

- If they wanted to talk about something that I was there, if they had an issue with maybe the way things were or how things were going or what's happening, I was there to answer those questions you know I don't know that I'd have the employees still today that I have that I kept through all of this had I not been around as much as I was and it was seven days a week for many months of me being with those people every single day.

- And you have your ups and downs.

- Yeah.

- I mean you're sitting here mentally going why am I doing this, oh this is awesome and at the same time taking care of the people that take care of your customers.

- Yeah.

You know we're so fortunate and when I say we, I never say I'm the sole owner of all those restaurants that you mentioned but when I talk to people, I always say we and people ask you have partners or what?

Yeah.

I mean they're are the people I work with every single day.

- Every day.

- And we're so fortunate to have so many people on staff that have been with me for three years, five years, eight years, 10 years, 12 years I've been in business for 15 years, to have that long-term employees in the hospitality industry.

- It's hard.

- It's hard - It's hard.

- And it doesn't happen very often.

- I know a lot of your employees and they say very good things about the way you lead and the way you manage and that says something in this day and age it really does because there's a lot of churning in your business.

You know, the next best restaurant comes into town and people think grass is greener over here.

So it's that constant in and out but to keep people in your business, it's tough, isn't it?

- It is I mean and you know I don't know what exactly that to pinpoint what that thing that I do to keep these people engaged like I do, I really give the credit back to them that they're just super smart, highly highly intelligent people in the food business and, you know, I appreciate that.

You know, we just, we didn't have a Christmas party or end of the year party.

We usually do it in the first part of the year, January, February and things sort of last January we're starting to get talked about with COVID and these things happening and then definitely by the end of February it felt like something was coming and we didn't do one last year and we figured out a safe way to be able to do it in our big warehouse building this year and I had an employee say, Hey are we gonna do something this year?

I really think it would help us all a lot to do.

And at the end of the night, when I talked I got on the microphone and I was talking to these people.

I was emotional and knowing that some really great people sacrificed money, time.

- Families.

- I never thought I'd have to have a conversation with multiple employees to tell them that as of tomorrow we have to shut our doors and I can only have two people work and I'll be one of them I never thought that could ever happen.

- Right.

- And you know, crying and you know it was a rough time but it was something that you know I know you was a leader you had to step up and make some decisions and do some things that were the best for you and the people that you're responsible for and I truly feel that responsibility for my people that are like my family.

- Right and not everybody understands the decision-making and the tough things that go on with that because you go home at night, you said you don't sleep a lot either do I and you lay there and your mind ever stops and I'll answer your question earlier that you said I don't know why people... it's compassion.

You have that compassion piece.

All right so restaurant business it's changed forever.

What are things that you had to change system-wide that is here to stay, and you're actually kind of liking it.

- You know we're definitely gonna do... We will always do more carry out than I think we ever did before.

You know, I think whether it's subconsciously or not people are just used now to the fact that and maybe they weren't before were you make that phone call and 35 minutes later you can have The Time Burger show up at your front door you know and that was something a lot of people I don't think really utilize those services especially in Peoria before.

So I look at it as a way... we're a busy place and especially weekends we're on waits and so on and so forth.

I look at it as a way that we're going to be able to feed more people and hopefully make more people happy by the food that we can get them and a portion of that is gonna be from those to go sales because once we fill up that's all we can do and now with more people apt to do the to go stuff in third-party applications that they're ordering from that can be a very big positive for our industry.

- So those are the restaurants but you have Cracked Pepper Catering and a lot of events have gone by the wayside.

And I sit here and I, as an event guy, I'm sitting here just beating my head against the wall going man we need to raise more money and we to do this and it affects the bartenders and the caters and so on.

How does that look moving forward?

I mean, is there a timeframe in your head that we're going to get back to normal here or is it... - So what it looks like right now to me is probably at some point mid to late summer.

I think we're going to have a few things in between now and then but mid to late summer I think we really start to get a little bit more back to normal.

It's not going to be normal at all this year from what I can see.

- Right.

- You know there are people following through with smaller, you know they were going to have a 300 person wedding now they're going to do 50.

You know, there are people that had corporate events they moved it it was supposed to be in may now they're gonna move it to September with the hopes that things loosen up a little bit more and more people get vaccinated and there's a safe way that they can host their event but I, as far as this whole year I think we're going to have towards that mid summer to end a summer through the rest of the year we're going to have a lot of events but they're going to be much smaller than we're used to having.

So from a financial standpoint for us we'll never be able to match 2019 with 2021 and then 2022 we hope to start getting closer to what like 19 was.

- Yeah incrementally - That's right.

- You're going to have to look at it that way, right?

- Yep.

- So you had to be creative and one of the things I want to give you credit for was you continued to help local charities and I think that is a very, very cool thing and not just you there were some other groups in town that you even worked with that are competitors in normal times but give me some examples of things that you did with some local charities.

- Yeah.

So there was a couple of times where we paired up with the non-for-profit yours was one of them actually and I don't know if we did that on mother's day or Easter?

- It was mother's day.

- So mother's day and what we did is for each meal bought over mother's day is we would donate a meal back to that non-for-profit and so we did that on mother's day and we did it on Easter as well and Easter we did the dream center.

So we did those and then we've done a number of hosted, small outdoor events, like at industry brewing.

We've still did some things for St.Jude and honestly, a lot of other places around the 12 days of Christmas we were three of the 12 restaurants that teamed up with local non-for-profits during the 12 days of Christmas promotion locally and each of those days that we participated with we gave back to a local non-for-profit that we were teamed up with as well and there were other examples as well but I mean I there's never a better time to help people except for a time that people are in need.

And I know what the amount of events that we would do for non-for-profits in a normal year and almost none in probably zero there might be one or two small things that we did, but they didn't happen.

- I know.

- And I know it was hurting a lot of those people.

So I mean if we can we're going to help any way we can.

- Yeah and you know it was cool was when you say a meal goes back to the not-for-profit it actually went to the kids that have never had a meal as good as your food.

- Yeah.

- So it didn't go back to me it went back to the kids and it was a special day.

- And we were fortunate enough with your group that we had such an outpouring of people that wanted to get those meals we actually did a couple dates for you guys - Yes you did.

- So it wasn't one, it was two.

- It was a lot of kids got the food so that is very cool.

I want to talk about cleanliness because that is something you take pride in every one of your restaurants the way you even set up the catering there's cleanliness procedures that are very, very important and when you're handling this food but what have you learned I guess from COVID that will even make you even better at this.

- So we have some tools now that we didn't have pre COVID.

So such as like sanitizer sprayers which I bought a couple of that we share between the restaurants where periodically now we will take these sanitizer sprayers and spray down all surface areas where people touch and honestly I can do a whole restaurant in 15, 20 minutes.

- Oh wow.

- So things like that, that we never had before never even knew there was such a thing out there until this happened.

So now we have that tool in our arsenal to keep people safer and healthy and just during normal flu season it's great to have that and be able to do that a couple of times a week at each restaurant to really knock out whatever germs might be on those surface areas.

But yeah we've definitely had to change our cleaning procedures, which were already I feel as good as they, pretty darn good but we we've already changed that to just go a little bit more above and beyond what we would normally do on a daily basis because like especially now as we are opening back up indoor dining and and doing more and seeing more people the last thing you want to do is go to a place that looks like the mirror hasn't been washed for a week because it just makes you kind of wonder what are the other things that are happening or not happening at a place like that.

- Yeah I was talking to Stephan Zeller and he has all the Av antis and the first thing that he brought up when the pandemic hit was cleanliness.

- Yeah.

- And so I know that comes first to mind to you too.

So I wanna go back to the food I always think food but you use fresh ingredients but that's more costly but that's what you do right?

- Yeah.

So I it really bit us pretty hard whenever this pandemic first hit because having a lot of fresh items we had nowhere for it to go so we ended up giving a bunch of stuff away but yeah take for example a restaurant like Sugar we have one single door freezer in that whole restaurant with like four shelves on it right.

So there are a handful of things that we can use like pepperoni for the pizzas that we'll get in frozen or whatnot but like everything else we do in that whole restaurant is made from scratch.

And same thing if you were to look at our freezer spaces at all of our restaurants we have like one or two door freezers and that's really about it with the exception of our catering kitchen where sometimes we'll have things that we freeze that we make in bulk and then can use sauces and such that we'll use at a later date but yeah it's it's always been super important to me to make sure that the quality of all our products from catering to any given restaurant is as fresh as it can be.

- I think what's interesting what you just said about just having one small freezer what you mean by that is you're not bringing in trucks of frozen food and have all this huge walk-in cooler space you're actually using fresh, a lot of times homegrown, a lot of times local you being a local restaurant, all ties together.

- Yeah we get like Time gets deliveries five days a week and the reason being is because we want fresh food five days a week, all my other restaurants are between two and three days a week depending on but there's a lot of places you're right that we'll get a truck a week and a lot of it goes in a freezer and then they take it out, cut the bag open and throw it out.. - Throw it on the fryer.

- And there's your Italian beef for the day, like, we do Italian beef we buy in inside rounds, we season it, we cook it, we cool it, once it's cool, we slice it I mean it's a two day process.

- I mean you got smokers, smoke it.

- Yeah we smoke our own bacon we smoker the salm...

I mean we do things the hard way, for sure.

- Yeah and that's why people like your restaurants.

Give me an example of something you make from scratch because I always think about restaurants of consistency your very, very consistent not everybody's consistent.

- Yeah I'll go back to sugar again we make the sauce from scratch, we make the dough every single day from scratch so like we make the dough, the dough sits overnight and that's done purposely just to help the gluten in it hold a little bit better when we're cooking at such a high temperature, so we get blocks of cheese in so we don't even buy her cheese shredded, we buy blocks and then we blend our cheese to the blend that we want that we find melts the best in high temp in a high temp oven.

So that's one example, so for a margarita pizza for example, we make the buttery garlic sauce that goes down first, we're shredding the cheese, fresh mozzarella, we slice the tomatoes that with the aromas that we bring in, we're making the sauce so, I mean, it is, it's all from scratch.

- I'm so hungry right now.

- Yeah.

- That's pretty cool.

Did you learn consistency from Chili's and Panera because they're pretty consistent.

So I guess chains have to be right.

- Yeah you know, this is what I always tell people I took what I thought made sense working for chains, things like that there's procedures in place for temperature controls and make sure that everything on your line is either under a certain temp or over a certain temp if its sold hot, closing checklists, things like that, things that I was like, you know, these make sense these really can help I'm going to take these and do that in my restaurants and I took things that I thought were a little bit maybe overboard and didn't make sense for a smaller mom and pop restaurant and just like maybe added a lot of extra work for my managers where I don't want them in the office giving me two pages of numbers every night I'll find those numbers if I want them I want you making sure that our food quality is there, the place is clean and the guests are having a great experience.

- Right.

- So, you know, those are like things that...

I used to work in restaurants that would there'd be afternoons where you would spend all afternoon in an office sending numbers to somebody in a corporate office somewhere - Or scheduling or whatever.

- Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So I just kind of took the things that I thought made sense and got rid of the rest.

- Do you have a head chef?

- Every location.

- Every location - And a front of the house manager at every location.

- What about catering?

- I have a catering general manager and then I actually have two head chefs in catering.

- Two head chefs and catering.

Wow that's a lot of head chefs.

So you get to see a lot of fun stuff.

- It is fun again that's like one of the things that really is fun for me is the menu development side.

So like, if we're looking at taking two menus off of a or two items off of a menu and adding two on generally speaking I'll come up with at least one of the ideas maybe two and then somebody else the chef will come up with an idea or two we sit down we try those ideas.

Usually it's not good on the first time.

It's like two or three times later.

So I get to eat them like two or three times and then by then we both agree that it's a great dish and it goes on the menu.

- Very cool.

We could talk all day about food.

We appreciate everything that you do Travis Mohlenbrink all your great restaurants Spice Hospitality Group.

I'm Matt George and this is another edition of business forward.

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