Operator can not profit by ham and eggs alone; Bridge Creek to include lunch, dinner

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 27, 1986 by Alan Liddle

Operator can not profit by ham and eggs alone

Bridge Creek to include lunch, dinner

Unable to consistently turn a profit despite glowing reviews by food writers nationwide, Bridge Creek, until now a breakfast-only restaurant, will offer lunch and dinner by the end of the month.

"It's strictly a matter of business. You can't make money with a factory that operates one-third of the time,' owner John Hudspeth said of the decision to expand the menu and hours at his tiny (36-seat) establishment.

Hudspeth, who said lunch and dinner were always a part of his long-range plans for Bridge Creek, has also applied for a beer and wine license.

If all goes well, he said, the changes could boost the restaurant's annual sales from its first-year level of $425,000 to about $700,000. Such an increase would help lower his current head-shaking labor costs of 50% to 60% of sales into the 30%-plus range, Hudspeth said.

By raising menu prices by up to $1 for some entrees and by improving controls, Hudspeth has managed to keep his food costs at 23% to 25% of sales in recent months, down 3% to 5% since February.

As with breakfast, he is being assisted in the development of lunch and dinner dishes by his friend and menu consultant Marion Cunningham, the culinary scholar who revised the Fanny Farmer cookbook.

Hudspeth said he wants to offer some of the foods he came to love growing up in Oregon and while dining with his family in well-known West Coast restaurants.

Included in that category, he said, are such things as deep-fried dungeness crab legs; pot roasted brisket of beef with pearl onions, carrots and new potatoes; and a Cobb salad (a la the old Brown Derby in Los Angeles) with the ingredients mixed together rather than piled on top of the greens like a chef's salad.

Also to be found on Hudspeth's new menu will be a "fully dressed' hamburger on an in-house baked bun.

"I'm so tired of getting hamburgers on dried-out baguettes,' he said, adding that he will proudly pour his favorite brands of commercial condiments on Bridge Creek's fresh-ground burger.

Some of the new items will be influenced by Cunningham's passion for "old fashioned home[style] cooking in its simplest form.'

Few things make her mouth water more than imagining the taste of a good roasted chicken or a pork roast with baked apples, she said.

Also to be a factor in the new menu is Cunningham's recent study of traditional Shaker cooking.

Cunningham credits the Shakers, who were known as

Patty Groth, a recent Culinary "the first in this country to use fresh herbs.' Emphasizing just how basic their approach to food could be, she said Shaker lemon pie has just three ingredients: eggs, lemon and sugar.

"We're going to work on some Sunday menus to take dinner back to the farm,' Hudspeth said of tentative plans to occasionally offer "family' style meals.

Hudspeth opened Bridge Creek in September 1985 in a converted house on Shattuck Avenue just a stone's throw from Chez Panisse, where he once worked in the kitchen.

THE RESTAURANT is reminiscent of a country inn with paintings of pastoral scenes hanging on the off-white-painted and unfinished pine-paneled walls. The oak table tops all came from one tree farmed in Oregon and the mantel-framed fireplace provides a warm feel no matter what the temperature.

Bridge Creek quickly earned the kudos of many popular food writers who raved about its use of premium products such as pure maple syrup and fresh seasonal fruits and berries from the nearby Monterey Market.

But what really inspires the restaurant's fans are the simple, but tasty combinations of those ingredients into hearty fare such as Heavenly Hots (silver dollar-sized sour cream hot cakes), $7; fried pork tenderloin with potatoes and cream biscuits and gravy, $10; and an applewood-smoked bacon and Tillamook cheddar cheese omelet, $9.95.

WHILE the restaurant has been a critical success, Hudspeth admits the business side has been anything but rosy. He blames the limited seating for some of his woes, but does not ignore the negative impact his operating philosophy has had on the bottom line.

"We have not compromised our standards of quality,' he said of the restaurant's from-scratch approach.

Maintaining those standards, he explained, has caused a blurring of his original vision of Bridge Creek, which was named after a "wide place in the road' in Oregon where his father built one of his first sawmills.

He said he initially planned to create a menu priced so that the average ticket was $4 to $6--a tab that would encourage repeat business.

However, his refusal to use less than the best ingredients and his resistance to short cuts in the kitchen has resulted in a destination breakfast spot with a per-person average of $11.20.

(Hudspeth said he is looking for an average lunch ticket of $13 and $14, but is uncertain of how much per-person sales might build at dinner.)

BRIDGE CREEK'S destination status is confirmed by the swing in its average covers from 50 to 70 on weekdays to 200 on Sunday.