From One to Two

A sneak peek from our July Best New Restaurants issue, on newsstands now

I.

“You guys gettin’ stressed yet?”

The young interviewee grins as he asks, an attempt to connect with strangers at this two-day open call for managers, servers and cooks, to show he understands the intensity of emotions that accompany the run-up to opening night.

Brittanny Anderson, the unquestioned queen bee of this quasi-interview session, and arguably the city’s most driven, most talented chef, fixes him with an expression that would be withering, were it not chased with a bitter laugh.

“You have no idea,” she says, and her two managers exchange knowing, sardonic looks.

It’s four and a half weeks before Brenner Pass, the chef’s Alpine-themed follow-up to her cozy cult hit, Metzger Bar & Butchery, opens to the public. Although from the outside everything appears to be proceeding according to plan — the light-filled space is taking shape quickly, and buzz is building — inwardly Anderson is more bubbling stew than composed plate.

Two days of open call, and only two cooks have walked through the door — she needs four — and, still, no dishwashers — she needs four of these, too. Adding to her growing unease is the fact that she is scheduled to move next week from North Side to Atlee, and has yet to make a dent in her packing. As if this were not enough personal upheaval at a time when her professional life stands poised to make a dramatic and defining turn, she has to take her driver’s exam — she hasn’t had a license since 2012, when she returned to Richmond from New York, and she needs to drive husband Kjell’s 2004 station wagon back and forth between her restaurants.

And these are merely the troubles that lie within her control.

It’s the questions for which there are no immediate answers that have caused her to bolt upright every morning at 6 — the middle of the night for a chef — in a heart-racing panic.

What if, in trying to grow as a chef, she winds up siphoning all the energy and passion out of Metzger and, rather than creating two great restaurants, she ends up with two solid but unspectacular ones?

What if — and this is the one that haunts her — Metzger’s success was less about her prodigious talent, or business acumen, than about the fact that she was compulsively hands-on in every aspect of the operation, from butchering her own animals to sourcing her ingredients in the field to overseeing every plate that exits her kitchen?

The new restaurant, the shiny prize of the sweetheart deal developer Spy Rock gifted her — $400,000 for the build-out in burgeoning Scott’s Addition, plus four months’ free rent — will have three times the seating of Metzger, along with a large patio, an adjoining coffee shop and bakery, and a capacious kitchen.

But what it won’t have almost matters more than what it will.

It won’t have her. Not all the time, anyway; no restaurateur has yet figured out how to be in two places at once.

If Brenner is to walk on its own, and if Metzger is to fly without her, then she is going to have to learn to give up the very quality that got her to where she is: control. She is going to have to trust that the team she’s assembled around her at the two restaurants can flesh out her exacting sketches.

Which means that she is, in some fundamental way, starting over, only this time with the scrutiny that comes of going from upstart to top dog.

II.

Nearly 60 percent of restaurants fail in the first three years, according to an oft-cited Cornell study. A place that does not shutter, but that sticks around and manages to eke out a little money, is one of the lucky ones.

To have not just survived but thrived, as Anderson has, is an even bigger accomplishment, and rarer than it sounds.

To have been wooed by a developer and handed a dream of a deal — this is rarer still.

But the second restaurant is a tricky thing, an altogether different endeavor from the first, requiring the cultivation of a new identity and a set of skills that most chefs, accustomed to working intuitively and not methodically, tend to lack.

The rewards are great, but so are the perils. Succeed, and the path is all but greased for restaurants 3, 4 and 5. Fail, and the prospect of empire is pretty much out of the question.

David Chang, the wunderkind chef behind the Momofuku phenomenon, a portfolio of 23 restaurants that stretch from Toronto to New York City to Washington, D.C. to Sydney, told me his almost-fatal mistake was to assume he could rely upon the lessons of his first, Momofuku Noodle Bar, to guide him in his second, an ill-advised “burrito bar.” Had he not course-corrected, Chang argues, not only would there never have been a 23rd restaurant, there might not have been a third.

“It’s scary,” says Gen Lee, the restaurant impresario credited with enabling vagabond chef Peter Chang to settle down and build a Szechuan empire that includes three restaurants in Richmond. “And with Peter, we had a model. We were going from one [in Charlottesville] to two [in Richmond] with the same food, and about the same size space.” Considering Anderson’s move he says, “Different food and different-size space?” An ominous pause; his voice drops. “I don’t know.”

Robert Wiedmaier, who recently debuted Siren, his 11th restaurant in D.C., likens opening a second restaurant to “painting two paintings at the same time.” Though he waited nine years before spinning off Brasserie Beck, he recalls that the experience was nonetheless “frantic and painful”: “You’re not watching every dish coming out of the kitchen. You’re running around. And you feel guilty. You’ve gotta change up your whole approach.”

The most important change, said more than a dozen chefs with multiple restaurants I spoke to from around the country, was to think like a businessperson first, not a chef. Think systemically. Mind the numbers every day. Cultivate an essential coldness, an imperviousness to others’ feelings.

The very qualities that Metzger does not embody, and that Anderson — intuitive, a relationship-builder — seems constitutionally incapable of adopting.

III.

Dropcloths everywhere, primer on the walls, ladders out: Brenner looks like a construction site. You would never guess this was a restaurant weeks from opening.

The pace of the progress is the least of Anderson’s concerns. She breathes in the smell of fresh paint, and she beams. The tall picture windows are an artist’s dream, ablaze with natural light. The large, horseshoe bar is little more than a placeholder at this point, but she envisions a scene of conviviality and hilarity, spilling over with happy patrons.

“I won the lottery,” she says of her deal with Spy Rock.

The deal is both blessing and curse, because for all her great good fortune in having been gifted this dream of a space, Anderson now finds herself on someone else’s timetable, and this sense of being accountable to a large company, with all the attendant financial and psychic burdens, only exacerbates the anxiety that starts anew each day.

But take away the anxiety, the pressures and the expectations, and the truth is that this is exactly where she has wanted to be since she graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York, to be in just this position to lead and influence.

If to its many fans Metzger is the restaurant equivalent of the garage band that hit it big, the more complicated reality is that the garage band has long had its eyes on the mainstream. It was not long after Metzger settled into a rhythm that Anderson began mulling not just restaurant No. 2, but also No. 3 and even 4.

Still, she never imagined that opening the second restaurant would happen as quickly as it did, let alone that the offer would be so tantalizing. No, she wasn’t ready, she says, but who knew when an offer like this might come around again?

“There’s a saying in the business that your first place is your dream place, your laboratory,” says Kjell Anderson, the chef’s husband, who also tends bar at Metzger. “Your second place is your important place, where you establish yourself.”

The success of Metzger and the vote of confidence from Spy Rock has brought the couple to a precipice — an enormously enticing one, but a precipice all the same.

“Her star is rising,” says Kjell. “We have to capture the momentum, you know? This is our chance to make some money.”

In another industry, this might sound crass. But he’s not talking about making a killing; nobody goes into the restaurant business to get rich. He’s talking about not having to worry, month to month, about bills. Metzger is a huge success, but it’s small, and its food costs are high, more befitting a fine-dining restaurant than a glorified bar. It barely breaks even.

Brittany, for her part, doesn’t speak openly about money. What animates her are the more tangible benefits: the ability to take care of your people, to reward them for years of hard work and meager compensation, to give them opportunities.

One night, after hacksawing a half portion of slaughtered pig (a small amount of which she uses to test a preparation of tête de cochon for Brenner Pass), she sits down at a table at Metzger with Olivia Wilson, her pastry chef, and James Kohler, her general manager and bartender, drinking and talking and relaxing — if only for a moment. “I have to behave myself a little bit more now,” she concedes, tossing back one of Kohler’s cocktails. “I can’t be getting fucked up with my line cooks every night. I have to think of myself as, like, being a cult leader. I have to enchant them, be in their heads.”

A couple weeks after inking the deal with Spy Rock, Anderson made Wilson and Kohler partners, to join partners Nathan Conway, her GM at Metzger, and Brad Hemp — a rare gesture of generosity from a rising chef. Her decision was motivated not by generosity but by practicality. She wants “buy-in” from the most important people around her, people who will “bleed” when things go wrong. 

Wilson and Kohler have bought in, and not merely monetarily.

Some chefs are feared, and want it that way. Some are respected and even admired, but not loved. To hear Wilson and Kohler speak about Anderson the way football players sometimes speak of their coaches, as someone they would run through a wall for, is to realize that Metzger’s success is at least partly a result of the unusual and inspiring culture she has built, one founded on mutual respect, empathy and support.

And she is determined to extend that culture at Brenner Pass, believing that it should be a collaborative and not simply an individual vision.

This is not, it is pointed out to her, how most empire builders go about building their empire.

Empire builder. Her. The thought makes her blanch.

She is going to bring some Metzger with her wherever she goes, she says proudly, to think small even as her operation grows.

IV.

“You have no fear that we open and no one gives a shit?” Kohler asks during the open call, between interviews.

“Nope. Not gonna happen,” Anderson says. Her fear, she says, is that people will sniff a sellout. “This is our pop album,” she says, their major-label debut.

Kohler argues that while Brenner Pass will be bigger and less personal, the menu is, if anything, even more ambitious than the one at Metzger.

He doesn’t say this to reassure her, but Anderson seems to be reassured by it all the same, her jaw unclenching a little as they go back and forth, as if a close friend had just tried to comfort her after a dark night of the soul.

Later, though, she confides that as much as Brenner Pass keeps her up at night, in some ways she might worry more about Metzger.

Married, but without children, Anderson often refers to Metzger as her “baby” — her first and, still, at this point, her only. She will do anything, she says, to protect her baby.

It’s not empty talk, I come to learn; her staff all describe her as a mother figure, and their devotion to her is fierce.

As she speaks about her feelings of abandonment and guilt, her broad, open face becomes lined with worry, and the conversation travels to that anxious period when she returned to Richmond five years ago — taking a job on the line in the kitchen at The Roosevelt, socking away money, dreaming of a place of her own.

And then, from there, to her tumultuous  teenage years as the poetry-mad child of parents who split when she was 7, shuttling between a mother who was away for weeks on the road, selling makeup and toothpaste, and a caring but distracted father — all those lonely, uncertain days by herself, when she had no choice but to discover life on her own.

But this, now, is an entirely different order of upheaval and uncertainty.

Zagat and Yelp would have you believe that a restaurant is the sum total of food, service and atmosphere, as if acing these categories is all that is required to produce a good place. The smart restaurateurs know that they’re after something much more elusive and mysterious, one in which hard work, passion and luck align and those categories cease to feel like categories, where the experience feels, as it sometimes does at Metzger, almost magical. It is not a product that, having been created, can be replicated endlessly.

If somehow her cell division ends up weakening Metzger, Anderson says she would “slit my wrists.”

I think she’s joking, but for a long moment, as she locks her penetrating blue eyes with mine, it’s hard to tell.

V.

On day two of the open call, a talented cook who apprenticed in New York shows up. “I’m gonna hire that boy,” Anderson declares the moment he walks out, suddenly encouraged. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that the next few weeks are urgent ones at Metzger. Mike Ashley, a former line cook who has taken over running the kitchen at Metzger, says “everyone is spread thin right now.” The next day, as if to prove this very point, nearly all the restaurant’s principals can be found gathered around a table in an office adjacent to Brenner as Anderson meets with a supplier.

Rocking a black tank top that reads “Slay All Day,” a reference to the chorus of a Beyonce hit, she exudes all the ferocity of her musical inspiration. “I’m gonna need a shit-ton of Emmenthal and Gruyere,” she says. “And buckets of olives. Gallons.”

The next half-hour is like a cross between watching a kid shopping unsupervised in a toy store and a director giving notes to her cast. Charcuterie? Yes, please, but European charcuterie, not American. Crab, sure, but stone, not blue. Wildflower honey, not clover. And what about rabbit? she asks. Loin? the supplier offers. “No,” she says, as if she were rejecting not just a cut of meat, but the expectations of all those who would limit her. “I want to serve it whole, family-style, and with all the insides.” “Whoa, OK,” the supplier says.

In the fanatical attention to detail and surety of purpose, it isn’t hard to see exactly what has made her so successful.

It’s only after the meeting that all the anxieties come rushing back and she is forced to return to more complicated reality. The meeting is a stabbing reminder of what she’s giving up. “I’m not a cook anymore,” she says, frowning, processing the epiphany.

VI.

Brenner Pass debuted more than a year after news of the deal went public. Every day for the past few months, Anderson and her staff fielded questions about the new restaurant — when, when? — the anticipation as palpable as the humidity on a late July afternoon. The cynicism was nearly as thick; some in the food world had grown weary of hearing about the project, and resented that a restaurant that had yet to open was generating more attention than places that actually existed.

Brenner Pass had so far managed to avoid crippling problems, and even rippling ones, but its first week has been nonetheless challenging, as Anderson and her team adjust, not just to doing everything on a larger scale, which they had been preparing for, but also, and more crucially, to the increased scrutiny that comes with elevated expectations. For Anderson personally, the opening week has been both exhilarating and exhausting, and she couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt so used up at the end of the day.

Evenings like the one at Metzger, in the run-up to opening, were little in evidence. Sitting that night with Kohler, Wilson and Conway, with great quantities of food and booze on the table, she became grand and philosophical. “Nothing matters more than the team you work with every day. Nothing. The most important thing is that you like being in your restaurant. This is my home. Right here.”

They leaned in to hug, and Anderson, the last to pull away, observed, jokingly, though with an edge, that she wasn’t doing such a great job of transitioning to management.

“Whatever,” she said. “I’ll figure it out.”