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Future of Food // Seller Insights // Juniper Restaurant

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Hi Square Sellers, I’m Neil -The Culinary Lead at Square. As the economy has shifted to shelter in place, I started reaching out to some of my friends in the restaurant industry who also happen to be Square Sellers to see how they are meeting the moment. I’ll be sharing a series of interviews with you all here. For my first feature, John Perkins, Chef/Proprietor of St. Louis restaurant Juniper (in Missouri in the US) talks about his atypical path towards ownership, the adaptations he's making to survive the Covid crisis, and how he envisions the future of sit-down dining. 
 
 

Tell us about your journey into restaurant ownership.

My journey is a little bit unusual but started with a love of food and hospitality which I credit my parents for as they were always hosting big parties growing up. Very early on in my marriage, I would end up putting on big dinner parties where I was spending more money on food and booze than we could afford. It became a financial strain but I didn’t want to stop. 

 

I took a trip to Seattle and someone was doing underground restaurants where guests would donate to offset the cost. I came back to St. Louis and started using that format. I did my first secret dinner in August of 2008. In many ways it was a complete disaster but it was a lot of fun. It grew quickly, I started with 15 emails and within a month had a 500 guest list of people wanting in. It took on a life of its own. I had no official training as a chef. I’d only worked in a restaurants a handful of shifts. It’s not an approach I recommend.

 

In January of 2013, I started doing pop-up restaurants. One was called ‘A Good Man Was Hard to Find’ and it was Southern-inspired cuisine. It was really well received. The name was inspired by a restaurant called How to Cook a Wolf in Seattle which came from the M.F.K Fisher book.

 

I finally began building my first brick and mortar restaurant and of all my underground dinners and pop-up concepts, the Southern cuisine had the strongest reception. In the end I named the restaurant after one of my daughters.

 

John Perkins, Chef/Owner of JuniperJohn Perkins, Chef/Owner of Juniper

 

Tell us about all the adapations you’ve had to make due to Covid?

We pivoted in 24 hours. Our last day of service was on March 18th and on the 19th we launched deliveries with DoorDash. Two weeks later we switched to Square Online Store with curbside pick-up. We had always intended for Doordash to be a short term solution. We wanted to control the process, not pay such a high percentage fee and the ability to sell alcohol was a huge incentive. We just integrated the donations link and started delivering meals to Covid front line workers at Barnes-Jewish Hospital this week.

 

Tell us more about providing these essential meals.

We’re in the business of feeding people. When someone walks in the door and has decided to eat with us, I see that as an honor. Providing these meals solves two important problems at once: these workers really need the food, and I also need to keep my employees working. My team needs to be focused on a legitimate task.

 

How has support been in the community?

Really strong. So many of our customers continue to support us. We had a regular come in on our last regular service day and buy a $1000 gift certificate. We’ve been busy and business has grown each week.   

 

The dining room at Juniper.The dining room at Juniper.

 

How will you adjust if a new mandated lower occupancy limit is put in place for restaurants?

Well, we currently have 48 seats in the dining room, I would guess we’ll need to go down to 30. The bar seats 30 and will probably go to 20. That’s a huge reduction in revenue. I think that this new constraint would give us two options: we convert to a fast casual concept: high covers and low check average or we move to a more fine dining model with less meals but a higher per person tab. It makes more sense for us to lean towards a fine dining experience along the lines of Husk (Sean Brock’s iconic restaurant) so we’ll probably relaunch with a 3 or 5 course meal in the dining room with longer turn times and then have a separate casual menu available only at the bar. That menu is what we’ll continue to sell online for pick-up either in the store or curbside if that’s still a preferred format.

 

What will change in terms of common surfaces?

Paper menus feel like they will need to change. I’m more inclined to do phone menus than any other digital options. I don’t want flat-screens with menus in the dining room.

 

What can you share about the economics of restaurants that will help other operators?

I built out an extensive financial model before we opened and you have to reverse engineer your cost limits based on your revenue estimates. For our first year, I did a bunch of projections and I came $150K over my estimates which I thought was pretty good given all the unknowns. Operators need to be realistic about revenue levels and build their labor and food expenditures to work within that framework. It’s essential to factor in exactly the ongoing cost of debt from the construction build out. Sometimes that gets overlooked.

 

Juniper's incredible fried chicken sandwichJuniper's incredible fried chicken sandwich

 

What has worked well?

I found it so neat that Square as my POS platform gave me the ability to integrate an online store. I don’t think the legacy systems like Micros or Aloha could have ever supported something like that and it’s made all the difference in the world.

 

What’s next?

You have to be able to imagine what the future looks like. Imagination is the umbrella. Under that is hope, conceptual ideas and the roadmap to moving forward. It keeps you from focusing on having to shut down. This isn’t the end of my story.

 

Thank you Chef! Great to chat.

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