Death of a Restaurant or How We Changed Our Lives with Pizza

You have to be a little bit crazy to own a restaurant. Luckily, we knew that going in or we really would have been up the proverbial creek. We ran our restaurant, Pangaea, successfully for 9 years, 4 more than the average restaurant lifespan. We bought property, had 2 kids, a dog, a cat, a restaurant and each other. After 9 years (1 of which was spent in marriage counseling) we closed the money pit as we lovingly called our business and decided to diversify. In other words we got even crazier. We decided to take our circus on the road.

My husband Rob Hunter is a chef, and we owned a small restaurant in Gualala, CA, on the south coast of Mendocino County. We are committed to making our living feeding people organic, sustainable local food. This is completely in line with the food politics in vogue right now, and with the majority of the folks who call our small coastal community here in Northern California home. However it is expensive to live by your ideals, and even harder to make money from them unless you have this thing called volume. Suffice it to say our volume was not what it needed to be, and given the current economy the horizon was looking bleak indeed. Sidebar: Oprah, please stop telling people not to eat out! We need them!

Restaurants operate on this thing called margin which, until we bought the restaurant in 2000, I thought was the area on either side of the page of the book I was reading. Turns out my life would be forever altered by this word, because ours was alarmingly low. The basic formula is simple, even for a math challenged theater geek like me: Fixed costs (like rent, insurance, utilities etc) plus operating expenses (like payroll, food/liquor/equipment costs etc) equal overhead. Sales equal income. Subtract one from the other to get a (hopefully ) positive number and there you have the ever elusive profit. Then things get weird, which is why I employ a bookkeeper. We looked at all of the numbers, charts and graphs and realized we had too much overhead. We looked at our children and marveled at how fast they were growing. Then we looked at each other and decided Carpe Diem, baby. Change had to be coming for us, or we could lose everything.

There are several companies that build catering trucks, and some that make custom built trailers. Rob had this great idea to mount our Italian wood-burning pizza oven onto a trailer. I was totally skeptical but after 15 years together I have learned that he is an idea man who actually does follow through with the ones that really matter and will work. So I kept my mouth shut while he did all the research and waited for him to pitch it to me. He worked with Matt at West Coast Trailers to create his (almost) ideal mobile kitchen, and after 6 months there it was, the idea in full flower: we would close the restaurant, build our catering business, and insert this new elemen, the Pizza Oven on Wheels. We could take it anywhere, travel with the kids to see the country, go to Farmer's Markets, set up in our town of Point Arena to sell food to-go...the possibilities were enormous. I looked at the excitement in his eyes, how happy and animated he was, and realized he hadn't been like this about the restaurant for a while. I took a deep breath, swallowed my fear of the enormous risks, and said “Let's go for it”.

So here we are now, 2 months after closing our beloved Pangaea. We have about 15 catering gigs lined up for the year so far. We go next week to the Sea Otter Classic mountain bike festival to sell organic, hand-made pizza to gonzo bikers with our friends and new partners in the pizza wagon business, Jen & Ben of Windy Hollow Farms. We're taking all 4 of our kids, and camping there for 5 days. I think we have succeeded in changing our lives, for the better. I'll be letting you know.