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Photo by Theresa Stanley
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Photo by Theresa Stanley
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Photo by Theresa Stanley
Asking Ouita Michel for details about her newest restaurant, Honeywood, only sees her steer the conversation to a sweet back story about the gorgeous 150-seat spot, which opened May 3 at Lexington’s new mall, The Summit at Fritz Farm.
Don’t doubt that she’s thrilled to have her first brand-new facility, a structure not in need of patching up like her historic locations. Unlike her first, Holly Hill Inn, whose spaces are divided into multiple rooms, Honeywood is airy with high ceilings and few interrupted sightlines. It doesn’t look a thing like Wallace Station, where the décor is somewhere between homey and homely. Furniture, fixtures, floors and colors at Honeywood are contemporary and sleek.
The Honeywood story according to Michel is mostly about how committing to it transformed the way she and husband Chris Michel now run their operations. It’s about them learning to work on their restaurants rather in them.
Out of the Kitchen
That insight wasn’t born of a personal epiphany, Michel said, rather she learned those lessons from key members of Bayer Properties, developer of The Summit. Historically, restaurateur-landlord relationships are contentious on the best of days, so it’s ironic to hear that Michel fears her company would never have improved were it not for Jeffrey Bayer, founder, president and CEO of the Birmingham, Alabama-based company, and a key Bayer team member, former chef and restaurateur, Tristan Simon.
“We had a meeting with Tristan, and he said, ‘You’ve got to quit working in the kitchen,’” said Michel, who’d hardly left the kitchen in her 30-year career. “He said we needed to hire a chef for Holly Hill and stop running it. And then he said we needed a director of operations [for the entire company]. We knew he was right and that we had to change.”
Simon, a highly successful operator of 16 Dallas restaurants and night clubs, sold his businesses three years ago to become a consultant. Able to relate to the Michels as peers, he convinced them that a larger restaurant that produced higher cash flow would deliver many benefits to their entire restaurant portfolio. He helped the couple develop a proforma that showed them “how [Honeywood] would deliver strategic value that could lift all our restaurants. It’s done that, and I could not have seen that without his help.”
Jeffrey Bayer said his company “wanted a Ouita Michel restaurant in the development” to give it regional caché and to help attract other local retailers and restaurants. But he said all his charms and wiles would never have landed the five-time James Beard Award nominee without Simon’s guidance. He said operators of freestanding restaurants often struggle to comprehend running a business in a lifestyle center, and Simon understands those mental hurdles.
“He could figure out what was bothering Ouita about coming here, and he could talk her through her fears,” Bayer said. “He was able to convince her what coming into an environment like this is like, and he walked her through how this could operate. He was able to convince her, but I wouldn’t have been able to. I’m not chef.”
Life in a Lifestyle Center
Having developed lifestyle centers across country, Bayer allowed that large format, chain restaurants are traditional go-to choices. Olive Garden, The Cheesecake Factory and others like them have nationwide recognition and are good tenants.
But he said the Great Recession reset developers’ thinking about the size of lifestyle centers, as well as their occupants. Adding residential options became increasingly appealing as new demographic clusters sought sleek urban settings conveniently located to retailers and eateries. But within that format, residents expressed a desire for a mix of local and chain business options, not just big name brands.
“People really want local cuisine, people who can bring farm-to-table food, do it well and already have a following,” Bayer said. “When we came here a few years ago, we found out pretty quickly that Ouita Michel was the celebrity chef for here.”
Getting Michel to commit to Honeywood, Bayer said, was essential to drawing other home-grown Lexington concepts such Athenian Grill and Crank & Boom. Those three restaurants are parts of 22 total dining options that include national chains Ted’s Montana Grill, Shake Shack and Blaze Pizza, and regional options like J. Alexander’s, Edley’s Bar-B-Que and Babalu Tacos & Tapas.
“We knew getting Ouita Michel was the key,” he said. “Then we could tell retailers, local and regional, who all knew Ouita, that she’s putting in a signature restaurant. That added instant credibility to the project.”
Warmly welcomed to the 90-business roster at The Summit, the Michels now had to create the new concept, find an architect to design it, raise capital to build it and learn about doing business with a large leasing corporation.
“I’d never heard an LOI [letter of intent] until we got involved,” she said. Luckily, her attorneys had and guided the Michels through the process. “Usually it’s me and Chris bootstrapping and figuring out how to get it all together, but everyone on the project did as much work as we did to bring it to fruition.”
Sourcing Food – and Chef
Hiring the right chef also was crucial, leading Michel to call on Josh Smouse, a proven talent from Holly Hill’s past and a cook who shared her determination to work directly with farmers for the best local food. She also wanted a chef who could take the best menu items at all her restaurants bring them to Honeywood’s menu while giving them unique twists.
“I started talking to him about it two years ago, and he said no a bunch of times,” Michel said. Back then, Smouse was in Bardstown working as sous chef at Harrison-Smith House, another dedicated farm-to-table restaurant. “When he finally said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ I knew I’d get him.”
Compared with many chefs’ work, Smouse’s ordering duties are challenging. Where most restaurants order 80 percent of their products from a broad-line foodservice distributor, he’s sourcing food from as many as 20 farmers, which requires much more relationship building and telephone time. Three Springs farmer David Wagner is considered a “staff farmer” because 100 percent of his crops are dedicated to Honeywood.
“Three times a week we get this epic shipment of vegetables from David, which means two people, three times a week, have to properly wash, break down and process all those vegetables correctly,” Smouse said. “There are a lot of moving parts in buying locally as we do, but it’s in our DNA.”
Ouita Michel’s especially. On a recent Wednesday, she couldn’t resist jumping back into the fresh-food buying frenzy when she learned a bumper strawberry crop was ripe and ready for sale. So she convinced her father to bring his large pickup truck to help her retrieve two dozen flats of berries — an amount equal to the size of a twin bed mattress. Yet when she arrived, there were no berries to be had.
“My dad looks at me like I’m a flake, but I’m seeing other buyers there from out of town, standing around hoping to get them, too,” she said. “So at least know I’m not crazy.”
When she posted the plight of her strawberry shortage on Facebook, she found a berry source in short order. As a result, making pies and preserves is now on Smouse’s production list.
“I just love having strawberries for Mother’s Day,” she said. “But really, this is what we do every day.”