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| Chef's Showcase |
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| BUILDING ON TRADITION
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Executive chef: Lou Rook III
MCulinary education: Graduate, The Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, N.Y.
Adjacent retail business: Smoke House Market
Property owners: Thom and Jane Sehnert
Annie Gunn’s check averages: $13 lunch; $35-$40 dinner
Number of seats: 120 inside; 40 on outside deck
Number of wine selections: 643
Annie Gunn’s staff: 3 managers; 20 kitchen hands; 28 servers; 10 bartenders; one wine director; one sommalier
Total F&B Business: $21 million
Number of meals served during any one day: 5,000
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Sample menu items: Annie Gunn’s incredibly famous potato soup, $2.95 cup/$5 bowl; Muscovy duck confit on marinated noodle salad with pineapple verjus blanc chutney, $11.95; Grilled pork loin on brioche with jalapeno jack and house made pear chutney, $9.95; Sautéed calves liver with roasted sweet onion, apple wood smoked bacon and Jameson’s Irish whiskey sauce, $18.95; Grilled 20-oz. bone-in prime aged rib eye with cabernet cracked pepper butter, $29.95
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Executive chef Lou Rook III has been keeping Annie Gunn’s hearth fires burning since 1994.
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What’s been your process for bringing the food to the next level?
-- Questions & Answers
When you joined the Annie Gunn’s team about 10 years ago, what was the plan?
Before I arrived, the restaurant was a terrific little Irish pub with a meat market next door. But the floods of 1993 completely devastated the entire property and there had to be extensive remodeling and construction. That’s when the Sehnerts asked me what I thought about the idea of “taking it to the next level.” I came aboard in the spring of ’94 and we’ve been at it ever since. Now we’re an Irish pub with non-Irish pub food.
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How did your background prepare you for this kitchen?
I started my foodservice career at our family business…an old-fashioned root beer stand back in 1973. After that, I attended the University of Missouri in Columbia and got a degree in foodservice and lodging management. To further my kitchen education, I attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, where I graduated in 1987.
Some of the restaurants I’ve worked in include The Trellis in Williamsburg and Cardwell’s in St. Louis. For a couple of years, I ran my own place called Grappa, and followed that with some consulting before coming to work at Annie Gunn’s.
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How would you describe your cuisine?
My philosophy is ingredient-driven. It’s based on fairly simple preparations, made entirely in house; in order to feature the best fresh product that money can buy.
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How is this approach executed?
When you’re working with distinctive flavors and letting the products – the meat, the fish, the vegetables – speak for themselves, it is important to understand your cooking methods. The techniques need to be as simple and pure as the ingredients.
Obviously, this requires that we do a lot of work ourselves. People start at 6:30 a.m. and the last ones leave at about 1:00 a.m.
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Seems like your food costs might run high as part of the trade-off. How do you keep things under control?
Our food costs run between 36 percent and 38 percent. We shoot for 35 percent, which is a little higher than most places; then in reality we go up a little above that.
We’re really known for our steaks and our chops and those items are expensive. Seafood helps us out with the numbers a little bit, because we run almost all of those dishes off the menu. It also helps that roasted chicken is a very big mover and you’d be floored at the amount of calves’ liver we sell. I couldn’t take that off the menu if I wanted to.
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You raise an interesting point. As an established restaurant with a longtime reputation and a loyal clientele, how do you manage to change the menu at all without causing outright revolt?
It’s funny, this business, but over the years we’ve gone about menu changes very deliberately in a 10-year process. When I first got here, we only changed the menu once a year. Our claim was using the freshest available ingredients, but not pushing the preparations too much.
Now we change the menu about once a month to reflect what’s available in the marketplace. Oh sure, I suppose about one-quarter of the menu are dishes I put on at the very beginning so we always keep a few of the core items, like the trout, liver, chops, and a few of the appetizers. Then we work in the new items around that.
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What sort of synergy does the adjacent Smoke House Market provide?
The deli next door is geared for take-out – great sandwiches, our famous potato soup, pork, chicken, and of course smoked seafood and meats. Originally it was designed where we got the steaks from the butcher there, but now we do our own cutting. We prepare a lot of their food and then they “buy” it back from us.
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How do you educate customers about what you’re trying to achieve?
The waitstaff are actually our sales people and we take training them very seriously. We have two 30-minute sessions with the shifts daily. I want them to know the difference between dry and wet aging, for example, and be able to describe special preparations and ingredients. They are the mouthpiece to our guests and help build the strong rapport that makes Annie Gunn’s so successful.
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