Rattlesnake Club: honing the art of fine dining

Nation's Restaurant News, May 8, 1989 by Alan Liddle

RATTLESNAKE CLUB Honing the art of fine dining

Michael L. McCarty and Jimmy Schmidt set out to create the perfect contemporary fine-dining animal when they developed the Rattlesnake Club, an art-filled "Modern American" restaurant in Denver's historic Tivoli Brewery building.

The goal, says Schmidt, was to end up with "an exciting environment with great service and great food."

McCarty and Schmidt's planning and sweating came to fruition with the Rattlesnake Club's December 1985 opening.

They didn't have to wait long for feedback.

Review after review in publications ranging from local newspapers to national magazines praised the taste of Schmidt's food and McCarty's taste in art.

Growing lines at the door indicated that diners, too, were taken by the Rattlesnake Club's unique foods, such as grilled breast of pheasant and leeks with vanilla, and its decor dotted with flower arrangements, views of the Denver skyline, and modern art.

While the concept proved workable, confusion over whether the restaurant was public or private and whether it served Southwestern cuisine exclusively convinced McCarty and Schmidt that the Rattlesnake Club name had to go. They say the restaurant will soon be known as Adirondacks, a New York state mountain range.

The Rattlesnake Club/Adirondacks seats up to 490 people and occupies 18,300 square feet on four levels of The Tivoli, which was erected as a breweryin 1859 and converted to a retail center in the mid-1980s. Development costs of $4.5 million were split evenly by McCarty and Schmidt and the developer.

First-year sales at the restaurant, which includes a 110-seat casual-cafe component called the Grill Room, reached $4.8 million, Schmidt says. Last year's total sales of $4.9 million, he notes, were flat in comparison with those of the prior year.

Encouraged by the Denver venture, McCarty and Schmidt opened a similar restaurant last year in Detroit and a third earlier this year in Washington, D.C.

The 6,000-square-foot back of the house in Denver, which includes offices, storage, and food preparation areas on four levels, was literally "tacked onto an outside wall" of the brewery so that none of the original space would be lost, McCarty says.

The sprawling nature of the restaurant required the creation of two full kitchens in addition to the exhibition line in the Grill Room. One kitchen supports the dining room and mezzanine, while the other supports private parties of up to 150 in the private Atrium room.

"It is difficult, but it's a workable situation. McCarty says. "You need managers on all four floors some nights."

While acknowledging that the Grill Room offers its customers some chili-laced, upscale Tex-Mex items that might be considered Southwestern specialties, the owners say that the dining room has no such regional slant and offers a broader-based cuisine, which they call Modern American.

About 10 percent of the dining room menu changes daily based on a rotational schedule, and complete revamps coincide with the seasons, Schmidt says.

Among the foods served in the dining room: roast pepper and eggplant salad with thyme and olives, chanterelle and spinach salad with peppers and mustard vinaigrette, and rock shrimp cakes with poblano chili and red pepper sauces. Entrees include pork tenderloin with chipotle (smoked chili), peanuts, andjicama, and grilled achituna with saffron, tomatoes, and basil.

Schmidt says the dinner only dining room and mezzanine, which combined seat 180, generate 50 percent of the restaurant's total sales. The per-person average for those spaces, including beverage and an 18 percent service charge, is $62, he says.

On average, he says, customers in the Grill Room spend about $15 at lunch and $25 a dinner. They are automatically assessed a service charge of 15 percent.

The interior of the Rattlesnake Club is framed by the Tivoli Brewery's original washboard ceiling, an ebony concrete floor inset with Italian marbie, and walls left in their natural, aged state, complete with cracks, discolorations, and the chalk marks of construction crews.

McCarty says that plans originally called for refinishing the interior walls. But after seeing some stunning villas in Italy in which the walls had been left in their natural state, he says "I came back and halted the $195,000 plaster job in progress [at the Tivoli]."

Before teaming with McCarty, Schmidt, 34, was the chef at the London Chop House in Detroit and before that was a student and employee of cooking guru Madeleine Kamman.

McCarty, who is 36, is an avid art collector. He has owned and operated Michael's restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif., since 1979.

The two men, both of whom were trained in Europe, met in 1983 while both were attending a food event in San Francisco. Their paths crossed again later when McCarty sent letters to a number of chefs, asking if they had an apprentice who wanted to cook at a new restaurant in Denver.

"[The chefs] sent me the resumes of their apprentices or of other people they knew; Jimmy sent me his resume]," McCarty recalls.