KC’s Iron Chef
At 6 a.m. on January 15, Rob Dalzell is already two hours into his day. He’s chopping olives and joking with two employees in the concrete bowels of his first restaurant, 1924 Main.
He wears a black T-shirt and pin-striped black pants with the word “Chefwear” on the hip.
The employees — Chrystal Tatum and Lindsey Kiliany — playfully roll their eyes when their boss brings up odd facts about them, such as Tatum’s old pet hedgehog and Kiliany’s shock the day she found herself serving University of Kansas football coach Mark Mangino. They tease Dalzell about being from Fayette, a small Missouri town halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis with little in it but a traffic signal and a Dairy Queen. And they sing along to oldies such as “Come and Get Your Love.”
By 8 a.m., the women will transport the olives — along with grilled tortilla sandwiches they call “sandittos,” massive tubs of soup and dozens of single-serving salads — two blocks down Main in Dalzell’s mustard-yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser to his second restaurant, Souperman.
Meanwhile, he’ll be around the corner, lighting fires in Italian stone ovens at his third restaurant, Pizza Bella. And nearby in the Power and Light District, behind glass walls covered in brown butcher paper, construction workers will hammer away inside Dalzell’s unfinished fourth venture — Chefburger.
It’s clear during his and Tatum’s walk-through later in the morning that there’s still much to be done at Chefburger. There’s no kitchen equipment yet, and the walls remain unfinished. Over the next two months, construction delays and absent city inspectors will force Dalzell to put off his planned March 1 opening by 10 days.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Dalzell faced opening-day headaches. He was so unprepared for the huge turnout on Pizza Bella’s first day that he now uses that mistake as his rallying cry as he prepares to unwrap Chefburger.
Dalzell is used to keeping this kind of hurried schedule. At 33, the lean chef with an often stubbly face is quickly becoming a downtown restaurant mogul. His eateries include fine dining and fast casual, and they remain — for now — unique to Kansas City. Someday, Dalzell hopes to franchise his restaurants nationally; he has set 30 restaurants as a goal for the first round.
“Eight out of 10 restaurants fail,” he says. “One of the big reasons is nobody really wants to do the work.”
Doing the work isn’t an obstacle for Dalzell — it’s an obsession. Seven days a week, he rises at 4 a.m., heads to Scott Fitness in the City Market and then spends at least the next 16 hours cooking, cleaning, tending bar and closely managing employees in one or all of his four restaurants. “Basically,” he says, “I leave the house at five, and sometimes I don’t get home until midnight.”
That doesn’t leave a lot of time for his wife, his two young daughters or his oafish Labrador, Bud. Dalzell talks about a far-off future when he and his wife, Margarita, will lounge on a beach, unfettered by restaurant responsibilities. Until then, the endless days will help put his kids through school and allow him to pay Margarita’s mother to be a live-in nanny. “Means to an end” is a mantra that the self-described workaholic repeats. “In the back of my mind, I say, Nobody’s going to work harder than me — or longer.”
Doug Dalzell, his father, says he has encouraged his son to take a break and reports, with a look of awe, “He told me, ‘For me, relaxing is coming into the restaurant. So why take a day off?'”
[page]
Dalzell can’t relax away from the restaurants because he trusts so few people. “If you think you can start a restaurant and hire someone else to run it, you’re mistaken,” he says.
He opened 1924 Main in 2004. And for the first two years, he insisted on doing virtually all of the cooking himself. This hasn’t endeared him to all of his employees. Dalzell admits that he has made some enemies over the years. Only in the past six months has he positioned himself as more of a kitchen overseer. “I always wanted to cook everything,” he says. “One of the hardest things with cooking is learning to delegate a little. I need to learn how to be a better delegator. My job is to set the standards.”
By any standards in the restaurant business, Dalzell has expanded quickly, and his newer restaurants haven’t earned the stellar reviews that greeted 1924 Main. Already stretched thin, Dalzell will have to figure out how to maintain quality while opening his fourth restaurant in as many years.
On the night of the First Friday art openings in February, dressed-up couples pack 1924 Main. Among them, a man feeds chocolate to a woman in a slinky red dress sitting among the row of stools surrounding the restaurant’s open kitchen. Not more than 5 feet from the woman in the red dress, in his usual black chef pants and white coat, Dalzell watches the room from his edge of the kitchen. His eyes dart. His hand keeps reaching for the walkie-talkie at his hip so he can relay commands to his staff.
It’s 8 p.m., and he’s been working 15 hours. His blue eyes look dull; bags hang under them; he takes occasional pulls from a tall, disposable cup of coffee. On the other side of the line, three white coats prepare entrées that include Berkshire pork loin and braised lamb. A young cook sets up salads and desserts. Dalzell inspects everything. A beef tenderloin needs more sauce. A table needs checking. Where’s Margarita?
Located in the Crossroads, 1924 Main is the flagship of Dalzell’s empire. He offers three- or four-course meals for a set price of $38 or $48. The menu changes monthly and includes sophisticated offerings such as mushroom-stuffed ravioli of monkfish served with capers and raisins.
The prix fixe concept and his entrées are too highfalutin for some KC diners. And Dalzell doesn’t run his kitchen as most chefs do. Hoping to inspire creativity in his employees, he doesn’t use recipes. He gives his chefs primers on the dishes, then lets them use their own measurements when cooking. It’s a novel approach, but it can be inconsistent. The Souperman clam chowder, for instance, may taste rich and flavorful one day and dull the next. Even the dough at Pizza Bella comes out chewier some days. The results may irk some customers, but Dalzell’s methods help him teach the young chefs working under him.
First Fridays are always good nights, and on this one, Dalzell doesn’t relax until the 90-minute rush subsides. He looks down at a stack of white napkins that Kiley Zumwalt, the hostess, has just folded. The corners aren’t square; the stack leans. Dalzell smirks at her and says, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
It’s the kind of thing he rattles off to his staff daily: “If you’re not on time, you’re late.” And “lack of preparation is the kiss of death.” His tone is paternal, but despite being the father of two baby girls, Dalzell, with his flashing blue eyes and young features, seems more like a know-it-all big brother.
[page]
Zumwalt rolls her eyes. Earlier that night, she spilled water on some customers on her way to the downstairs storeroom. She approached Dalzell with some trepidation to confess, but he just laughed and teased her for being clumsy.
He says she reminds him of a lump of coal.
“That’s not nice,” Zumwalt says.
“But I can see the diamond inside!” he insists with a smile.
Dalzell leaves cleanup duty and cuts out early for a change. He stops at the bar for a vodka press (Belvedere on the rocks, a splash of soda, a little Sprite) and heads to the basement. Trey Davis, one of Dalzell’s high school buddies, strums an acoustic guitar in the downstairs bar. Tomorrow, Dalzell will do something else unusual: He’ll take a day off to spend with Davis. The chef says it will be his first Saturday off in three and a half years.
With his eye on Davis, Dalzell leans against the stone wall and reminisces about Fayette, where he spent 22 years of his life. His mother, an elementary-school teacher, took Dalzell and his sister to work with her at 4 a.m., and they sat in her classroom while she graded papers. “She definitely taught me how to get up early,” he says.
He played wide receiver for the Fayette High School Falcons and then for Central Methodist University, where his father was vice president of development and institutional advancement. Dalzell planned to teach and coach high school football, and he got a degree in history education at Central Methodist.
Hoping for something better than a teacher’s salary, Dalzell took a job out of college at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Overland Park. He hoped to advance quickly, but carting around grouchy businesspeople in a regimented, 9-to-5 day didn’t suit him. “There were times I almost envisioned running my car into a tree,” he says.
Food was already a passion by then. At 16, Dalzell worked as a busboy at Le Bourgeois, a winery in Rocheport, Missouri. “My whole childhood consisted of average home cooking and fast food,” he says. The pudgy teenager balked when the Le Bourgeois chef demanded that he sample some mahi-mahi, roasted potatoes and fried green beans. But the first bite changed his life. “At that moment,” Dalzell says, “I didn’t know what I thought I knew about food.”
For the next four years, the young busboy loitered in the kitchen and asked more questions of the chef than the cooks did. “He kind of convinced me that maybe I should pursue a culinary path,” Dalzell says.
But a career in the volatile restaurant business didn’t seem practical until his soul-sucking experience at Enterprise. Within three months, he’d had enough. “I said, ‘I’m gonna be on top of the clock tower in three years if I keep this up,'” Dalzell recalls. So he quit Enterprise and took a $7-an-hour job as an assistant to the pastry chef at Grand Street Café. A year later, in 1997, he enrolled at the Napa Valley Cooking School in California.
During that 14-month program, he learned in all kinds of kitchens: the Napa Valley burger stand Taylor’s Automatic Refresher; an upscale French eatery called La Toque; a restaurant in Florence, Italy. When his schooling was finished, Dalzell opted to stick around in Napa, which he considers a mecca for chefs, for about four years.
The chefs he worked under made him feel like a scolded dog, but he says he got the most from the harshest trainers. As a student at Catahoula Restaurant and Saloon in Calistoga, California, Dalzell says he got some of his toughest criticism from chef Jan Birnbaum. At just over 5 feet tall and weighing 400 pounds, Birnbaum said Dalzell was too skinny to be a chef. When Dalzell put all of the ingredients for redeye gravy in one pot instead of keeping them separate, Dalzell says Birnbaum asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
[page]
With four kitchens of his own now, Dalzell demands perfection, too. “I’ll be the first to admit, not all of the employees like me,” he says. But he tries to inspire his staff with his standards and energy.
“Hopefully,” he says, “five years from now, people will look back at me as a mentor.”
On a typical Monday afternoon, Dalzell chases Izzabella, his nearly 2-year-old daughter, around the pizza shop he named after her.
Giggling all the way, she runs up and down the long, wooden bench that bisects the dining room. His feet on the floor, he stays parallel to her, also laughing, his white chef tunic flapping. His arm shoots out when the toddler teeters or tries to drop a half-eaten breadstick back into the table centerpieces. They also engage in some of her other favorite activities: hanging from the coatracks across from the restrooms and printing out never-ending sheets of receipt paper, which Izzabella swirls around and hands to people.
Pizza Bella is open for business. But for at least two hours, Dalzell has no customers. His devotion to downtown Kansas City leaves him dependent on a clientele that hasn’t entirely moved into the urban core yet. That’s obvious on dead afternoons like this. Souperman shuts down at 3 p.m., and though 1924 Main and Pizza Bella serve lunch and dinner, the Crossroads doesn’t have the foot traffic to keep the restaurants hopping — or patronized at all, really — between 4 and 6 p.m.
“All day long, all day strong” is Dalzell’s ultimate vision for Chefburger, with breakfast sandwiches and upscale doughnuts served in the morning and burgers built from lunch right through the rush when the bars close. But the burger shop needs to open first; initially, it will serve only lunch and dinner. The $15,000 fryer he ordered hasn’t arrived yet, so in the meantime, he focuses on what’s right in front of him.
For a man who barely sees his family, these afternoon lulls provide an opportunity. On this day, Margarita captures some of the playtime on video and laughs intimately with a couple of employees waiting for the dinner rush. Dalzell’s mother-in-law, Alice De Castro, moved to Kansas City from Las Vegas to help care for her grandchildren. She cradles Izzabella’s infant sister, Elohra.
Like Dalzell, 30-year-old Margarita is a workhorse. She works full time as the assistant director of financial aid at the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences — on top of running the business end of Dalzell’s restaurants and helping with table service in the evenings.
The couple met in August 2002 when they were both employed by the University of California-Santa Barbara. He worked in the catering department, his first job with benefits and a salary after culinary school; she was the office manager for housing and residential services. Within eight months, he was offered a job at Turtle Bay Resort in Hawaii, and she agreed to move with him.
The couple didn’t see much of each other in paradise, either. She commuted two hours every day to the other side of Oahu. In 2004, after a year and a half of scraping by, they moved to Kansas City — where rent was cheaper and they could afford to start a business and raise a family.
[page]
Eventually, Dalzell wants Margarita to work full time for Eponine, the parent company of his restaurants. Theoretically, they could spend more time together then — at work.
Margarita and her mother bring the girls to Pizza Bella or 1924 most afternoons. Dalzell might miss a lot of his daughters’ firsts, but he won’t miss the chance to make them cheese pizza. Izzabella likes pizza better than the fancier fare she has to eat on 1924 days.
Dalzell holds her up to the brick oven as she works the long handle of the pizza paddle. When it’s done, Izzabella’s pie is just dough and cheese. Dalzell asks Margarita if Izzabella likes marinara sauce. Neither one is sure.
On January 15, before the lunch rush, Dalzell takes Chrystal Tatum, his No. 2 at Souperman, to the Power and Light District.
Chefburger is located in the courtyard of the H&R Block complex, directly behind Chipotle. They enter through one of the glass doors covered in brown butcher paper. Less than two months before the tentative opening date, the space is still nearly vacant.
Inside, five or six young construction workers seem to be between tasks. They stand around and steal glances at Dalzell before acknowledging this man with spiky, graying hair. One of the construction workers — no more than 20 years old — pipes up: “So, this place is gonna be like Fuddruckers?”
Dalzell and Tatum look at each other and laugh uncomfortably.
“Fuddruckers has nothing on us,” Tatum finally shouts.
Dalzell makes a crack about the wilted lettuce at the burger bar at Fuddruckers and promises that everything will be fresh at Chefburger — prepared for the customer, how the customer dictates.
The worker puts it together. “So, like Fuddruckers and Chipotle, but Chefburger,” he says.
This is Tatum’s first tour of the facility she’s going to manage. In her black Souperman garb, Tatum wanders wide-eyed through the area that will be an open kitchen. She marvels at the windowless rectangular room that will be her office. It looks big now, but it won’t when one end is full of dry storage.
“Chrystal views it more like our business and less like my business,” Dalzell says later. That makes her a model employee — the kind he relishes seeing rise through the ranks of his growing little empire. “The thing with business is,” he says, “if you have a No. 2 and you never make ’em a No. 1, they’ll go somewhere else.” And at the rate Dalzell is expanding, he’s going to need a lot of competent No. 2s in the wings.
If Kansas City were bigger, he says he could see “eight to 12 Soupermans speckled across the metro.” He could also see Pizza Bellas and Chefburgers sharing space around sports arenas.
The Cordish Company, which is building the Power and Light District, could help Dalzell realize his franchising dreams. With a drink in hand at 1924 Main on February 1, Dalzell’s father, an investor, talks about expansion as if it’s inevitable. He says “the Cordish deal is for real” and that “Pizza Bella and Chefburger are going to St. Louis.”
Three weeks later, over coffee at 1924 Main, Dalzell chalks up that big talk to his dad being his salesman. Dalzell says he has no deal with Cordish beyond the first Chefburger. “It just really depends on how things go this first year,” he says. “It could be a relationship that grows.”
[page]
Chefburger’s success will be tied in part to how well the Power and Light District fares. If interest in the area wanes, chains such as the neighboring Ted’s Montana Grill or Gordon Biersch Brewery have the means to survive longer.
Finances will determine whether Dalzell continues to expand. “Do we have the capital right now to open another one right now? Hell, no!” he says. “Do I want to do it again? Yeah, but I’m going to have to make a lot of pennies.”
His venture doesn’t consistently show a net profit yet. “There are some months when we lose money, some where we make money and some when we break even,” Dalzell says. Eponine lost $14,000 in January.
By February 28, it’s clear that construction delays will prevent Chefburger from opening on schedule. But Dalzell doesn’t want to miss the crowds that will descend on the Sprint Center this week for the Big 12 basketball tournament. He insists on training his staff for at least two days before what could become a busy March. “I don’t even know how many burger patties to order,” he says, laughing.
His ever-cool demeanor hides real anxiety. The last time Dalzell opened a restaurant was, he says, one of the worst days of his life. Having served just 25 people on Souperman’s first day, Dalzell expected a similar turnout for Pizza Bella. Five times that many showed up. “We ran out of everything,” he recalls. “We couldn’t even stay open for dinner because I ran out of dough. I was so embarrassed.”
Dalzell swears that won’t happen again. He’ll have 12 people working on Chefburger’s first day, he says. And, eyes gleaming, he promises that will be on March 10, with or without a liquor license.
But on March 5, a city inspector blows him off. And without the inspection, Dalzell can’t schedule visits from health or fire inspectors. “The city is like a giant octopus,” he says. “But the thoughts aren’t conveyed from one arm to another.” As he explains this, his brows furrow and, for a second, he’s visibly perturbed. Then he smiles again, and three employees head his way with questions, taste-test reports and phone messages.
“If it was my first restaurant,” Dalzell says, “I’d be frustrated and scared.”
Chefburger finally opens on Monday, March 10, and Dalzell is beaming. The beer’s on tap, the grill’s hot, and some of Dalzell’s most trusted employees stand behind the counter, rapidly building burgers. At the top of the assembly line, his wife takes orders. At the bottom, Dalzell checks them.
The bright, clean room evokes a 1940s cafeteria, updated with blond wood, cooks in white tunics and a milkshake machine. The $4.99 shakes come straight or, for $3 more, spiked with flavored liqueur. Burgers, which cost an average of about $6, are made to order or available from a list of eight “Signature Burgers.” Some of the combinations migrated from the 1924 Main menu, including the BLFGT — bacon, lettuce and a fried green tomato. The fried green beans from 1924 Main are on the menu at Chefburger for $2.99.
The first lunch rush starts at 11 a.m. with a trickle of folks Dalzell knows. Two 1924 regulars are the first to order. A few minutes later, three young, well-dressed men stroll in; one reaches over the counter to pat Dalzell on the back. By 11:30, Dalzell’s father stands in a line of customers that curls behind the cash registers.
Although Dalzell is too busy blotting grease and making milkshakes to say much more than “hi,” familiar faces are good for an opening day. Friends forgive early hiccups, like a 15-minute wait for food or the occasional sandwich mixup; one woman who wants a beef burger gets a black-bean patty instead.
[page]
An hour into Chefburger’s existence, Dalzell struggles to keep up with the tickets spitting out of the machine at his station. He rifles furiously through a stack and then sets it down gingerly. He has a line of trays with tickets on them, waiting for burgers to finish cooking on the open grill. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly and goes back to figuring out who gets what. The long sigh is a rare sign of exasperation from a man who rarely shows how stretched he’s become. There’s a slight kink in production flow, but it’s not a disaster.
This is the kind of moment when Dalzell reminds himself that he could be busier.
