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CommentsJames Clary Is So Psyched
He’s one of Springfield’s best-known restaurateurs. Six months ago, he sold his namesake fine-dining place and is now concentrating on Fish, his casual seafood eatery. In a volatile time for restaurants, Clary is blazing ahead. Why? How?
By Gregory Holman
(page 1 of 2)
On Friday, August 19, 2006, James Clary revealed to 417 Magazine that he was planning to sell Clary’s Restaurant. Clary would not name the sale price, saying only that it was “the biggest check I’ve ever seen—by far.” However big the check may have been, selling was a big decision. He had owned Clary’s since he opened it in 1989, blooming it like an exotic orchid amid a bed of Midwestern daisies.
Clary was 28 years old in 1989. (Today, he still looks years younger than he is.) At that time, Springfield was considerably different. There were nearly 100,000 fewer people in the metro area than there are now. Downtown was still falling down a steep, shabby slide; it was not a place where affluent Springfieldians played on nights and weekends. In a broader context, the country as a whole had not experienced the affluence of the 1990s. The “rural rebound” began in that decade, starting the (now) familiar narrative of people moving to southwest Missouri from major cities and the coasts. That season of plenty helped cultivate a new food America, a country whose inhabitants eat organic kumquats and are aware of the difference between soju and tofu.
Still, Clary opened Clary’s. And nearly 18 years later, in a business and cultural context that looks toward affluence and sophistication as its pole stars, Clary decided to sell Clary’s and focus on another restaurant, one with “CASUAL DINING” written on the sign above the door: Fish.
Fish Dilemma
“Oh man,” Clary said as he announced the sale. “I am so psyched.” He was psyched about spending “100-percent” of his time on Fish. Clary opened Fish in 2004 as an exercise in “casual fine dining,” a restaurant-ese phrase that just means “food with just enough exoticism to entice customers without going overboard or intimidating them.” Seen from a marketing point of view, Fish was a valid concept, but from a branding point of view, it hadn’t quite worked for Clary. The Springfield dining public had already spent 16 years thinking of James Clary as a synonym for very fine dining, so when many longtime regulars at Clary’s tried out Fish, they came up disappointed by an experience that was never intended to be a special-event meal. As Clary put it back in August, “There were quality issues when I wasn’t there.” (For the record, 417 Magazine reviewed Fish positively. I wrote the review and was particularly seduced by Fish’s almond tilapia.)
In December, I called Clary on a weekday afternoon, hoping to profile him and get an idea of how Fish was doing in solving its dilemma: Would it be more upscale, or would it try to make the casual dining label stick? Before Clary would agree to an interview, he wanted to drop by the magazine’s office and chat with me in our conference room. I was happy to oblige, as the thought of Clary in a chef’s coat sitting at a conference table holding court sounded like fun. It was fun. Clary was his usual self—mercurial, expressive, intelligent, a bit loud—as he evoked some different possibilities for Fish’s future.
Clary Thoughts
I arrive at Fish at 2 p.m. just before Christmas and sit at the the long, curvaceous bar to wait for Clary to disentangle himself from work. Some notes sit on the bar. From a few feet away I can see a phone number for William Mauk, the executive chef at Clary’s Restaurant, who now works for the new owners.The staff is busy checking their cell phones, rolling napkins and doing all the things that need to get done between now and dinner time, around 5 p.m. After a few minutes, Clary comes out. He says lunch at Fish was good today. There were a lot of Christmas parties, two tables of 20. “It was nuts at 12:40,” he says.
He excuses himself and dials his Blackberry cell phone/personal data assistant to make a quick business call. If you want a window into the everyday life of the owner of Fish, get him talking about his Blackberry. Clary says he’s had one for two or three years. “That’s what I do. I’m on the phone. People wanna get a hold of you.” In this way, the Blackberry has changed James Clary’s life. “People wanna get a live person,” he says. “I never listen to voicemails. Just call back. I e-mail a lot on it. I use it to get the weather forecast when I’m on the road. But when I’m at home, I put it away.
“Family is so important. Time with my kids is so precious. There’s so little of it. I might turn it on if I run to the store, but that’s about it. Part of me is kind of… we do get too wrapped up in that stuff… pundits said technology would equal more time, more leisure. But now we’re richer in money, but we’re working more than ever.”
More productivity is the name of Clary’s game. Before cell phones, Blackberries and other handy-dandy electronics, Clary endured a process with each new catering client that included hand-writing a menu, carbon-copying it and sending it to the client on paper, through the U.S. Postal Service.
“It took two and a half hours to book a $500 party,” Clary laments. “Now it’s three minutes.” Today we live in a wealthier society, he says, one where even our houses are much better than the ones of our parents.
Is this good or bad? “I would lean more on the bad side,” he says. “Me, personally, I never found happiness in material things. Of course, you still desire those things.” With two kids, Matt and Drew, and his wife, Lisa, Clary is a family-first guy: “Being a better husband and father will make me a better restaurateur.”
Clary is a wide-ranging conversationalist. Causes and effects and themes link up when he talks, like tributaries trickling into a bigger river. He shifts gears and starts telling me about a book he’s reading. It’s called Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, and it was written by Danny Meyer, the man who opened Union Square Café in New York City when he was 27.
“Everyone thought he was crazy,” Clary says. “But he had one innate, important idea. This business revolves around hospitality. Period. Three things: service, service and service.” He feels like Fish kinda got away from that.
Measuring the quality of customer service in a restaurant is incredibly easy if you’re a guest, but it’s surprisingly hard if you’re a restaurant owner dividing your time between two or more places. “When things are great, people don’t have a problem telling you they’re great,” explains Clary. “When they’re really bad, they don’t mind telling you. If it’s just kinda bad, they don’t want to pipe up and attract attention.” Servers, he adds, clam up as much or more as guests. “They don’t want to get in trouble.”
So what’s a restaurateur to do? Just make the rounds, work the room from table to table. The owner has to take an interest in guests’ lives. Clary calls it “connecting the dots.”
Clary has an introspective facial expression. “I don’t know if I’m a better cook than my peers—but our service is as good or better.”
Indeed, says Clary, creativity in cuisine is not his strong point. “I learn stuff about cooking all the time. Only a week ago, I learned the exact reason why green beans turn yellow when you cook ’em and shock ’em.” (If the beans aren’t cooked in enough boiling water, the water temperature decreases, and the beans emit a gas that changes their color.)
Clary says he is: Left-brained. A tactition. More a builder. More comfortable with numbers and books. The sort of person who’s strength is in enjoying people. “And yet people say, ‘Oh no, James, you’re very creative.’ It’s all building blocks. Toss them up in the air and let them fall where they will.” Peter Tinson, with whom he shares ownership of Gallery Bistro, is the opposite. He “just comes up with stuff.”
