The Exchanges

Q you know, the show is adapting you guys. It's now 70 years that you've run Your family has run Canless Fine Dining, and in one week, two weeks really, since you started planning, you've thrown that out the window, and now you're doing these three different things. Like, can you walk us through, when was the moment you realized that, that this was gonna happen, and you needed to change?

A A couple weeks ago now, my wife and I were in New York City doing something for the James Beard Awards, and, uh, we got the news that Seattle had its first case. And we went back to the hotel and just started talking through, like, you know, this thing's coming. It's here. It's here in Seattle. Um, and what does that mean? What does it mean for our family? What does it mean for Not just our marriage and our own children, but our extended family. I have parents who are in their seventies. Um, and, uh, what does it mean for, for the, for the restaurant family, for the staff? And, um, a couple days later, uh, back at home, we had a meeting as a team, and we just said, um, you guys, let's, let's really think through this a little bit. While we were having that meeting, uh, King County or the governor, I can't even remember who it was, but someone official announced Had this live stream, and kind of came on and said, hey, this is a much bigger deal than we thought. And, you know, it's like, at first, you just kind of have, it's like the sucker punch to the system. You've got the wind taken out of you a little bit, and then, Um, pretty quickly we realized that it would be just as risky to do nothing as it would to do something really radical, and, um, if we were, if we were gonna live into our values, uh, then, you know, every once in a while that really is probably gonna cost you so…

AI assessment note: “A couple weeks ago now, my wife and I were in New York City”

Q Yeah, well, so for anybody of our listeners who are in the Seattle area, probably many who, even many who aren't, you already know a lot about Canless, but Mark, can you give us a little bit of the history? I mean, it's a very, very special place. This isn't just another restaurant. Maybe, can you go back and talk about your grandfather's story and Hawaii and Pearl Harbor?

A Sure, you know, we Yeah, if we're gonna go all the way back, um, I run this restaurant with my brother, Brian, um, and we very much feel like this is the tale of a couple different grandfathers. It's an amalgamation of four generations of Canlases doing restaurants. Um, our great-grandfather cooked for Teddy Roosevelt, um, after his presidency on an African safari. He was picked up at a hotel in Egypt, and Um, invited to come along and be a steward on that whole thing for a year and a half. Um, so really, it starts there. Uh, he and my great grandmother would, um, come to the United States somewhere around 19 oh nine, 1910. They started a restaurant in Stockton, California, um, at that time, and had a bunch of kids. One of them, Peter Canlis, um, started this restaurant, Canlis, in 1950. So, Uh, that was my grandfather. He passed away in the seventies, and my mom and dad ran this, uh, for 30 years. Brian and I have not been doing it since 2003, and in so many ways, we feel like we're just getting the hang of it. So, slow learning. Um, but, you know, more or less a hundred years of trying to cook for people.

AI assessment note: “It's an amalgamation of four generations of Canlases doing restaurants.”

Q And there's always, if not, maybe there's like a couple hours a day where there's someone not there. But when you talk about that 115 people, it's like, Like, two a.m. to bake bread or something?

A Yeah, there are four hours a day we don't use our kitchen. So it's 20, it takes us 20 hours to, to, to open for what is essentially five hours of, of dinnertime service. Uh, so a lot of prep obviously goes into that, and yeah, sure, you're baking bread and, and, and setting things up sometimes take a couple days to bake, but, um, But today we served, you know, about 1200 people through the drive-thru. Uh, we served about, I don't know, somewhere in the range of 300 people for breakfast. Uh, tonight we'll send a couple hundred dinners out for delivery, so it's a much different impact for us, and we're not exactly set up for it, so we're, we're trying to figure that out as we go, but, um, Today was a day of rest for us. It felt so, um, every day this week we've opened a new restaurant concept. Um, we started on Monday with the drive through Tuesday. We added bagels and yesterday we added, added home delivery. So, uh, today we were just sort of refining some of those systems again. Uh, it was kind of nice just to, just to run them and see how we could tweak it.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, there are four hours a day we don't use our kitchen.”

Q That's so cool. Technically, how did you make that happen? You guys adapted. You've been on TOK, the, um, reservation and ticketing system for a while. How did you, did you work with TOK to make this happen?

A The guys at TOK were awesome. We called them early on, and we're like, we have this crazy idea, and we're actually trying to, like, hack the system. It's, so TOK is a reservation system for those that don't know, and those guys are awesome. Um, and we were trying to morph the reservation system into a delivery system, And we just about figured out, and they, they called, like, you guys, stop it. Hold on a second. We can, we can do this. Give us five minutes. Five minutes later, they called back, and they said, we stood our company down. We're turning it back on. We just called everybody in. They're in Chicago, and we're just gonna work on this so you have the platform, and they cranked it out, working around the clock for a couple of days, and, um, and we were able to launch, and so that is a mechanism that any restaurant in the country, look, not everybody can do drive-through, I mean, it's just the physicality of it. The location's gonna work for them. But any restaurant in the company could do delivery, and now that we've got the software for it, it's just, it's, it's not, You know, overtly tricky.

AI assessment note: “we were trying to morph the reservation system into a delivery system”

Q Yeah. Uh, can you talk through any restaurant in the country can do delivery? I'm sure there's a lot of folks that, that own restaurants that are listening to this.

A Sure. Um, it takes lower guts. Um, and it takes, um, just that kind of good old fashioned restaurant scrappiness that every restaurant tour already has. If you're in this business, I guarantee you have what it takes because it's just, It's just the same thing it takes to run a restaurant. It's, it's that. It's a little bit of, um, Uh, the willpower just to make it happen. That's, I think, what all of us are going through. So, um, all we did was figure out a menu, and, uh, we launched a website, so someone that knows what to do on the internet, that's not me, um, but our design team drew up a little logo, which is not necessary. Uh, we threw a little splash page on top of canless.com, which is also not necessary. You could just post on Instagram Having to switch to delivery, um, so appreciate you supporting us doing this. Um, it takes, ah, you can do various versions of it, ours is pretty fancy, our servers have it all on their phones, they get the maps, they get the texts, we can do drop-offs, no-contact drop-offs, alcohol, again, talk made all that possible. Um, But you can keep it really simple. I mean, it takes ordering some boxes and some to-go containers, coming up with one thing that holds hot really well, and letting your constituency know that tonight's a great night for takeout. So, um, yeah, we sold out three nights worth of takeout in about 90 minutes.

AI assessment note: “all we did was figure out a menu, and, uh, we launched a website”

Q There's, um, there's a pretty cool, um, military history, right, with, with the restaurant, and starting with Peter too, right?

A Yeah, so then on the other side of the family are a whole bunch of folks who have served in the armed forces, um, and that is, uh, just continues to be, uh, something that we're really proud of in this family, and, and something that we've, many of us have chosen to do, and, um, and represent, I think, some of the sweetest years At least for my own life, and I would say that the same is true for my dad, and my grandfather, um, and my brother. So, uh, I was in the, I was in the Air Force with Brian. Uh, Dad was in the Navy. Grandfather was a Marine for 43 years. I don't even think you can do that anymore, but back then you could, and, um, so we have, yeah, that's just been a part of our family story, and, and to be completely honest, a very large Um, influence on the way that we lead. Last, you know, yesterday, we're running this crazy drive-through, we've got cars everywhere, shut down traffic, and I get a, um, I get a phone call, and I have hearing aids, so the thing just comes, like, straight into my head. It's as if, like, the phone is ringing in your brain. So I just answered it, because I thought it was our, our road team. And it was the colonel that I worked for, you know, 25 years ago, Colonel Mueller, a man that just had such a remarkable influence. On the way that I lead, and it was random. I haven't talked to him in years, and I was like, Colonel Mueller, no way. Um, …

AI assessment note: “I was in the Air Force with Brian. Uh, Dad was in the Navy.”

Q The story is, am I right, you bought the swimming pool on Amazon?

A Well, no, so, uh, for, we like to test things out on staff parties, and the goal of a staff party is to throw one that the staff would willingly come to If they had no association with the restaurant, right? So if you just said, look, you guys, it's a true day off, or it's a true night off. Like, do whatever you want. And also, we're gonna be throwing this party over here, and it's like, totally, like, no expectation come. Only let me just talk about it. So, um, Anyway, yeah, at some point, uh, we were throwing a luau. Oh, yeah, we had covered the parking lot and sawed, uh, because we were like, it's not cool to throw a party in a parking lot in cement, and wouldn't it be cool if it was grass? So we sawed the thing over, and we threw a volleyball party and made a pig roasting, and somebody said, at some point, well, every luau needs a beach. So, we, like, brought in sand, and then I went on Amazon, and I'm like, no, wait, you could buy a pool for, like, 2000 dollars. Well, that's cheaper than You know, in the world of staff parties, this stuff adds up quickly. So anyway, we bought a pool, and we filled it up, um, and then it just kind of like went from there. So then, that was a really successful party, and we were thinking about fun things we could do over the summer, and we thought, well, why don't we just throw the staff party for the city? And honestly, you guys, I thought,…

AI assessment note: “then I went on Amazon, and I'm like, no, wait, you could buy a pool”

Q Can we go back to the three concepts you guys are doing? Breakfast, the bagel shed, drive through lunch, and then delivery for dinner. Where did they come from?

A There's also the fourth concept coming. Super stoked about, but, um, yeah, I can kind of walk you through all three of those. Um, the first one was, uh, the, was the drive through. Uh, we saw that as being the biggest revenue generator. Um, we have a ridiculous amount of labor here. It's, it's the most expensive thing, and we knew that one of these concepts had to actually work. Um, and so, we just, I, geographically, if you understand the way this restaurant works, you can pull right off of the street, right under our port cashier, you can stay in your car, and you can roll right on down the driveway, and it was like, that's what we knew we needed, that the cleanliness there, the ability to not have any contact with the guest, Um, but still sort of be facing them, and, um, so yeah, we were embracing our inner drive-thru as a fine dining restaurant. It was just like, guys, this is us. Come on, let's just let it out of the bag, and, um.

AI assessment note: “The first one was, uh, the, was the drive through. Uh, we saw that”

Q And Mark, just to context that for our listeners a little bit, when you say getting back to our high volume roots, for folks not from Seattle, Canlis is fine, fine dining. What does normal volume look like, and, uh, what does the adapted volume look like?

A I don't know. I feel like I live in a bubble, and I don't really understand the real restaurant business, but, um, in the, in the world of Okay, so let's just try to understand fine dining for a second, because I think it's a funny term. Um, we consider fine dining just to be the most considered form of caring for somebody with, with food and hospitality. It's like, um, so, uh, for us, we're considered to be a massive fine dining restaurant. In the world of fine dining, you know, 12 to 15 tables is pretty standard. Uh, we have 33. Um, but on a busy night, the most guests we can serve are somewhere around 150 to 200. Um, I have a 115 employees to make that happen. So we are a model of inefficiency and, um, that's just six dinners a week. That's all we're doing.

AI assessment note: “on a busy night, the most guests we can serve are somewhere around 150 to 200”

Q So as we start to wind down here, that's, that's the question on my mind is, I know it's only been four days, but, um, of the three restaurants you talked about and, and fourth that we'll keep under wraps for now, um, what do you think might make its way into Canlis when we live in a normal world again?

A Um, here's what I hope makes its way into Canlis. I hope that what comes out of this is a visceral reminder of how alike we all are, and if there's anything that I think we've learned so far, it's that our understanding of the human spirit is limited at best, and it's only when When you come to me and say, Mark, I think you got this, man, and I reflect that back to you and say, look, Ben, um, you got this, right? Like, that's, that's what happened. Something really powerful happens there, and the whole mission of this company, which is, I know, a really weird mission, but it's, it's to inspire people to turn toward one another, and when we saw the disease spreading, and I am not talking about COVID 19. I'm talking about, um, the amount of fear, um, the amount of discouragement, um, when we saw that spreading, um, and often for really good reason. This is not, these are not insignificant days. This is a good, overused, but good word. This is unprecedented for the entire world to go through something together, where no one gets to say, yeah, it doesn't apply to me, right? Um, When something like that happens, I think we have a responsibility to remind ourselves of the truth. And the truth is, we don't know, um, what we're capable of. We, the Canlis team. We, the city of Seattle. We, the United States of America. We, the citizens of this rock that we're floating around on. Um, and…

AI assessment note: “I hope that what comes out of this is a visceral reminder of how alike”

Q Can you talk about average ticket price for each of these three concepts?

A Yeah, burger price is 14 dollars. So, you know what? Like, we, uh, have designed this thing not to make Money. I think it's a little bit weird to be pro, ah, let's see, this is a tricky, this is a tricky thing. I don't think there's any unethic, anything unethical about, um, making money in this time. I, I, in a certain sense, we have a duty to do so. Um, but mostly as a, as a means of, um, protecting the staff. And to be clear, I don't, I, we're only four days in. I don't know if we are. That's to say the bagel concepts clearly does not make money. Um, it's labor intensive. We don't have the equipment to scale that in any way such that we could, we could move that to be a profitable business. Um, we could raise the prices, but that just feels dirty. So the point again is to keep people employed. So, um, with burgers, we probably make a little extra with bagels. We're definitely losing, um, with dinner, as we scale that up, that'll be profitable. And somehow if we can get to break even, um, Um, even from the onset, that's what, that's what the goal was, was like, it'd be amazing if for the next three months, Canlis could not lose money. I think that'll posture us really well coming out of this thing on the other side, and I do think of it as a few months, not just a few weeks. So, um, yeah, Bagels came out of the idea of, well, we're gonna be really busy for lunch. Um, our expe…

AI assessment note: “burger price is 14 dollars. So, you know what? Like, we, uh”