Country inn: Benish scores at Le Chambord with a full house

Nation's Restaurant News, Nov 6, 1989 by Mort Hochstein

COUNTRY INN

Benish scores at Le Chambord with a full house

Elegance, class, and tender loving care combine to keep business overflowing

To paraphrase the old saw, Roy Benish has been up and he's been down. Up is better.

Right now Benish is on a roll. "I've paid my dues," he says happily as he surveys a full dining room and a reservation book lined with upcoming weddings, business meetings, and private parties.

Benish is proprietor of Le Chambord, a Colonial Inn at Hopewell Junction, less than a minute off the busy Taconic Highway in the Hudson River Valley region of New York. The white-pillared mansion and its two new outbuildings are home to a classic gourmet restaurant, 25 bedrooms, and a small network of banquet facilities.

One recent Sunday evening Benish was slowing down after a weekend of five weddings, 100-percent occupancy of his rooms, and three nights of full-house dining. "It's been a good year, and it's going to be better," he prophesies.

A restaurant person all his life, Benish became an innkeeper almost reluctantly but now admits it would have been impossible to survive without the benefits of the rooms and his banquet facilities. Born in Yugoslavia, Benish came to this country in his preteen years and worked from childhood in Manhattan in restaurants owned by his father and other family members. He was a manager of the Tavern on the Green and later ran a private club in Poughkeepsie.

In the early 1980s, he'd dropped out of the restaurant business to concentrate on another passion, art collecting and dealing, an avocation reflected in the rooms of Le Chambord, which he furnished and decorated himself.

In 1984, with no advance planning, he bought the building that was to become Le Chambord. "A real-estate broker had been after me to look at a wonderful house she had. Finally, to get her off my back, I agreed to see the place.

"As we left the highway, I saw a big, white house at the next corner. "`If that's the place,'" I said to her, "`I'll take it.'

"I and everybody else must have passed that house a thousand times and thought `what a beautiful propery, what a perfect restaurant it would make.'

"I can always see what I can do with a place by looking at the property, so, in effect, I bought it without going inside. Once we'd toured the house, I said to her, `OK, Pat, let's get to work. I'll buy it.'"

Benish bought his dream location, a stately mansion with nine bedrooms, and began a year of convincing local authorities to allow him to build a restaurant where they had forbidden similar propositions in the past. He won that batbusiness.

"Instead of writing contracts, I shook hands. I was told my parking lot would cost $12,500, and when it was finished, I got a bill for $52,000. "This happened with several contractors, and I had to pay for it. My architect didn't tell me I'd need a sprinkler system, and putting that in cost me an additional $75,000.

"I'd started with $250,000, my money, Momma's, the bank's, other people's, and that would have been enough if the original figures had held up. But they didn't, and I kept getting deeper in the hole. Finally, in 1986, the bank said `no more,' and I was forced into Chapter 11.

"It was either that -- reorganization -- or Chapter 7, which is bankruptcy. Close your doors and get out. But I knew what I had, and I wasn't going to lose this place."

Benish convinced the judge that he had a good plan for survival, and his creditors bought the plan. The key element was getting his first banquet room built. Benish found a new source for financing, and the recovery was dramatic.

"Working just with blueprints, not a shovel in the ground, I booked 55 weddings. People were desparate for someplace beautiful. They were tired of factories with four walls, frozen and precooked food.

"I had a reputation from my years in Poughkeepsie, and there was no problem lining up catered events. Once the rooms were functioning, our gross jumped from $30,000 a month to $125,000."

When Benish bought the empty house, he knew there was a pent-up demand for what he would have to offer. "This is IBM country here," he declares. "One of their largest plants is less than half an hour away, and we get many of their people and their visitors." There's a huge Texaco installation in the area, and there are dozens of high-tech corporate offices as well as huge manufacturing plants all within less than an hour's travel. The corporate market is vital to his livelihood, as important as the sojourners from Manhattan and New Jersey who come up for a weekend of relaxation and antiquing.

In early summer 1989, Benish added two more buildings, Tara Hall, which brought him up to 25 bedrooms, and Butler Hall, which gave him more facilities for small parties and business meetings. Now with everything in place, he's projecting a $2 million gross for '89.

"You cannot survive as a restaurant alone these days. Two failed within the past year or so just down the road from us, and the site is now an office building. A restaurant has to be packed night and day in order to survive today.