Upstarts: Swingin' Hash

Hash House a Go Go fuses Midwest food with Los Angeles style to create avant-garde farm fare.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 2/1/2007

The mission statement calls it "twisted farm food," linking "fun food" verbage with phrases like "farm fresh fare" and "old recipes." But that still doesn’t prepare customers for their first glimpse of Hash House a Go Go signature creations. Servers at the two-unit concept are used to eye-popping reactions to the ample portions they deliver for breakfast, lunch and dinner on oversized oblong plates. And the company expects that to be the norm as it opens in Kansas City, Mo., this April and grows to seven units in the next three years.

Chef Craig "Andy" Beardslee’s menu includes Sage Fried Chicken, $16.95 lunch, shored up against a hardwood-smoked bacon waffle tower with hot maple caramel and fried leeks for monumental impact. The Eggs Benedict, $15.95, is served on a split biscuit with an 18-ounce, crisp, hand-hammered pork tenderloin that is more than 6 inches long, as well as tomato, spinach, griddled smoked mozzarella and barbecue cream.

But "we never want the ‘big’ in Hash House a Go Go to overshadow Andy’s taste profiles and sauces," says co-founder and President Johnny Rivera.

Hash House will continue to accent "generous farm abundance," but equal emphasis will go to the quality, never-processed message and cultivating a culture that’s big on avant-garde and fun. "After all, after seven or eight visits, guests are not just coming in for the meatloaf anymore," Rivera says.

L.A./Midwest Mix

The ambience at Hash House is energetically masculine with a postmodern aesthetic: stuccoed walls, lots of metal-sheeting accents, rivets and cables. Tables and chairs are sturdy, brushed aluminum, with broad cushioned booths, and black-and-white photos of farm machinery adorn the walls.

Menu-wise, finding the right mix of Los Angeles-style and Midwest-morphic food came easily to Rivera and Beardslee. "We just said, ‘Let’s create what makes sense to us,’" Rivera recalls. For Beardslee, who came out of his childhood in Milford, Ind., with a sense of whimsy and appreciation for heartland food, that’s meant everything from "glamorized hashes" to Strawberry Frosted Flake Flapjacks, $7.95, buttermilk batter griddled with strawberries and cereal. For Rivera, a Los Angeles native and former rock ‘n’ roll musician and wine marketer, that’s meant running the front of house and concocting specialty cocktails such as the Hash House Bloody Mary, $6.95, vodka (or soju) with Worchestershire, hot sauce, Bloody Mary mix and horseradish garnished with crisp green beans, jalapeño-stuffed olives, lemon wedge and ground pepper.

Taking it Back East

The combination attracted the attention of investors within two years of launching the concept in San Diego in July 2000. After some negotiation, a group out of Las Vegas—former Hard Rock Cafe exec Jim Reese; Jim Nyberg, former vice president of finance for Heartland Food Systems; and venture capitalist Bill Underhill—got together in October 2004 as Run Restaurants LLC to open and operate Hash House a Go Go across the country in partnership with Beardslee and Rivera’s HH Farmworks Inc.

The first Run Restaurants unit opened in September 2005 in Las Vegas. A second will open in April in Kansas City. Four more are scheduled to follow by 2010, with a total of 60 to 75 units envisioned.