The Recipe for Wealth
Restaurateur Dan Mesches says a mentor's question changed his approach to business.
(Star Restaurant Group)
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Thomas Heath's "Value Added" is a new column appearing each Tuesday on the WashBiz blog. Most weeks, he plans to profile local entrepreneurs, asking them how they make their money and what they do with it.
Restaurateur Dan Mesches, who runs D.C.'s Zola, Spy City Cafe and formerly the red-hot Red Sage restaurant, now defunct, talks about the "aha moments" that change your life. That's when something crystallizes in your brain and a path or explanation opens up in front of you.
Mesches's aha moment came a few years ago when Bill Allen, the chief executive of Outback Steakhouse, asked the budding restaurateur what his exit plan was.
"I said I don't know what my exit plan is. And he said, 'What are you doing to create wealth?' And that was like getting hit on the side of the head with a baseball bat."
Mesches is the sweat-equity guy who helped invent Star Restaurant Group. Sweat equity means he gets a piece of ownership in return for the skill he brings to building the business. Real equity is putting up money. Sweat equity is putting in your time.
Zola and Spy City Cafe are in the Gallery Place/Verizon Center area. He also owns a restaurant consulting business.
Mesches said he will open a rustic Italian restaurant and bakery this year near The Washington Post, at 15th and H, in the Woodward Building. No, not Bob Woodward.
The new place will include a great bar (I love nice restaurant bars), outdoor cafe and views of the Washington Monument and Treasury building. How do you get a view from the first floor? Well, the street slopes down and you are eating on the high ground.
Mesches, 49, went to Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and he grew up in the Hudson Valley. Beautiful place. He went to grad school at the University of South Carolina and almost went to work for the CIA. He didn't get in. Rather than finish his thesis on, get this, "Soviet Constraints on Finnish Defense and Economic Systems," Mesches went into the restaurant business.
Good call.
That was 1982. After stints running restaurants for W.R. Grace and for Marriott and other places -- remember the Pleasant Peasant? Nick's? Raku? -- he joined Red Sage as director of operations and kept it from going bankrupt. How did he do that? He renegotiated the lease. Renegotiated bank loans. Re-did the menus.
With Raku, which has locations in Dupont Circle and Bethesda, he "hit the cover off the ball" with a success.
