After almost seven years of building community through food, The Preservery will serve our last guests on Sunday, September 4th. Obe and I have sold the business but are retaining The Preservery brand and starting a nonprofit venture that’s been in the works for over a year, The Preservery Foundation. We will continue with the mission we started at the restaurant by providing hunger relief to people experiencing homelessness.
It’s a strange thing, to go through the life-altering task of shutting down your own restaurant. Back when we were still in that hope-filled, bright-eyed planning stage of The Preservery we had the good fortune to be directed toward the Small Business Development Center where we took a course in writing a business plan that ended up catapulting us forward when we may otherwise have gotten stuck in the idea phase. One of the things our beloved mentor from the SBDC, Nancy Bartnett, spoke about often was always making sure to have an exit strategy. We are huge proponents of doing vision work and creating a plan of action for starting a business, but an exit strategy? We thought: Never! We’re doing what we love, we’re going to be doing this forever!
Well, here we are.
There are two harsh realities that motivated us to sell the business. The first is that as long as we were tenants renting from a landlord, we were always going to be handing over any modest profits toward the cause of making a wealthy person (or company) even wealthier. Our rent has gone up almost 30% since we signed our lease in 2015. If we were to purchase property in a comparable neighborhood with similar square footage our mortgage would be 30% less than the cost of rent and all those mortgage payments would eventually come back to us. We had to learn the hard way, like so many other restaurant owners, that whomever owns the building has all the power.
Secondly, as long as we were running a restaurant we were always going to be tethered to it. Our greatest liberation was becoming our own bosses, but we couldn’t really claim that freedom when we had to be physically present for every operational hour of every operational day. Some owners find their way around this but Obe and I could not. The restaurant was our first baby and we never got to a point where we felt OK about stepping back and putting someone else in charge of it. And honestly, we couldn’t afford to.
Most importantly, our constant presence at the restaurant came at the expense of time spent with friends, family, and our only daughter, Adira. Obe has worked every single late night and most of his work days are at least 12 hours long. He has missed out on so many important family moments we can hardly count them. The day Adira was born, Valentine’s Day of 2018, Obe brought me to the hospital in the morning after my water unexpectedly broke a full month before my due date. They determined I needed a c-section which they scheduled for the afternoon, so Obe went to work to help get the team ready for one of the busiest services of the year, came back to the hospital to witness the birth, then went back to work again for dinner service. Around midnight he finally came back to the hospital to spend a few sleepy hours snuggling with us in the hospital bed. We made so many sacrifices to our own well being and happiness for this business that something finally had to give.
Then there was the greatest difficulty we ever faced: the pandemic. That first year, 2020, was completely fraught. In January and February, before most of us knew the gravity of the situation, we were already seeing almost 20% growth over the previous year and feeling like we were finally hitting our stride. Then, worldwide shut-down. We did take-out when all indoor dining was restricted but that was basically community service (read: not at all profitable or sustainable but at least kept half of our team employed). The outdoor-only dining phase, right at the onset of winter, was a practical nightmare. I’ll never forget having to plunge my hands into the bucket of warm sanitizer just to bring the feeling back to my fingers because they’d get so cold serving outside. Not to mention the fear of exposure to a virus that, back then, we barely understood. That being said, I have to take a moment to appreciate each and every one of our guests who dined with us back then - many were putting up with the discomfort in order to support the small businesses that they loved and we felt every ounce of that intention. However, we were only bringing in a fraction of the revenue we actually needed to survive. If not for PPP loans and grants and even help from family we would have gone bankrupt and the announcement of our closure would have been much sooner and much sadder.
It was during that uncertain time, in early December of 2020, when we had the first big snow storm of the year. I remember coming into work that morning, driving through Five Points and seeing numerous tent encampments around the neighborhood looking both vulnerable and brave, all blanketed in white. It seemed so shameful that we had a big, beautiful kitchen and a team of capable cooks who wanted to feed people while there were folks living right outside our door in terribly harsh conditions who really needed a hot, wholesome meal. An idea we had actually been tossing around for years finally made more sense than it ever would have in any other circumstance. We were going to feed people in need and we were going to ask our community to help us do it.
And, it worked! We had friends from New York, Texas, California and Washington reach out to purchase meals over the phone. We had guests from all over the community come in to support the Giving Meals program. We sold almost 1,000 meals in the first month and hand-delivered 1,000 hot, wholesome bowls of chicken soup to folks experiencing homelessness all over Denver that winter. I thought that once the holiday season passed people would be less inclined to give, but folks kept coming in and purchasing meals for others. It was the most heartening experience I’ve had as a restaurant owner and it set us on a path that would lead to a new mission: feed people in need.
Finding a way to involve the whole community in feeding those around us who don’t have the means to sufficiently feed themselves was a mission worth waking up for every morning. I can easily say it was that effort that kept us going during some of the darkest, most difficult days. As a restaurant barely able to survive, it was literally all we could do. Now, it is all we want to do.
We have other exciting side-pursuits, too. My side project for the past year or so has been teaching cooking classes to kids and it brings me so much joy that I plan to expand on that effort. Obe has, his whole life, wanted to do something with cars and is pursuing racing as well as managing a really fun and informative social media account, @iwouldbuythisride. We also plan to travel as a family because we never could get away for more than two nights at a time while running a restaurant. And, we will spend so much time with little Adira that she will perhaps, many years from now, not even remember a time when she used to cry in protest every night that her papa couldn’t help put her to bed because he was working late.
We are closing our restaurant “for good” so we can go do some good. One day soon we hope to purchase a commercial property and have a brick and mortar business again, but next time it will be on our own terms and in service to our community. Our society is so obsessed with the grind and there is perhaps no industry that better epitomizes this mentality than the restaurant industry. We are done feeding into that toxic mindset. What we’ve come to realize after all these years of grinding is that what matters most to us is doing as much good as we can while we are still occupying this earth and spending quality time with the ones we love. And, hopefully, have some adventures!
My favorite piece of wisdom for dealing with times of struggle is to reach out and help someone. When we were living each week like it could be our last week of business, we decided to focus on helping others and it not only gave us purpose in a time of turmoil but also led us to the next chapter in our life story. We can’t dismantle racism, we can’t end the housing crisis, we can’t solve world hunger, but we can do our best to help make sure the most vulnerable, disenfranchised folks in our community get the chance to go to bed with a full belly, because that is what every human deserves.
