Multiconcept Operators: The French Connection

A Frenchman and a local girl teamed up at the soccer field to create a Kansas City dining empire without barbecue or steaks.

By Margaret Littman, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 7/1/2003

French chef Patrick Quillec and food stylist/real estate pro Kim Weinberger are the masterminds behind Viola! Restaurant Group.

Kansas City, Mo., is a long way from the Brittany region of France, where Patrick Quillec was born and raised, the son of a chef at the local crêperie. Quillec spent the first two decades of his adult life working in restaurants in Miami, Kansas City, Charlotte, N.C., and even Puerto Rico, bringing both his genetic propensity to cook and the talents of his countrymen to tables this side of the Atlantic.

His enthusiasm always came through in the kitchen. While at Chez Daniel, his brother’s Charlotte restaurant, he developed a flourless chocolate cake that was lauded by Gourmet magazine. His artichoke ravioli were first created in 1981 and have been in high demand on his menus ever since.

But five years ago Quillec laid the groundwork for what is likely to become his lasting legacy: a collection of authentic French restaurants—from bistro to brasserie to upscale—in Kansas City.

Restaurant Town
For foodies outside of this Midwestern steak-and-potatoes town, this seems an odd, if not impossible, undertaking. But since 1998, when Quillec opened the casual French-Asian Hannah Bistro Café, locals have shown that their only reservations about eating French food are at the hostess station.

“Only people who don’t live in Kansas City see it as a steakhouse town,” insists Doug Frost, a local restaurant consultant. “Now barbecue—that’s different.”

Quillec is not as convinced as Frost that locals aren’t into steaks. “You look at a street and it is barbecue next to barbecue next to steakhouse next to steakhouse. I just don’t understand it.”

Be that as it may, Frost says Kansas City has one of the highest per capita spending figures for eating out in the country. That willingness to pay the check, combined with a culture of former restaurant managers from Gilbert-Robinson (the precursor to Houlihan’s Restaurants Inc.) and other local businesses, created a more sophisticated restaurant market than diners on each coast realized.

“All I really want is for people to come from all over—wherever they’re from, San Francisco or New York or wherever—and experience what I’m trying to do,” Quillec says. “And when they leave, I want them to say, ‘There are great restaurants in Kansas City.’”

Well, that’s what they’re saying. Hannah Bistro Café, of which there are now two, was nominated for “Best Restaurant in America” by the Zagat Survey Restaurant Guide. Café Provence and Café Paris, the other two French concepts operated under the Voila! Restaurant Group umbrella, have gotten similar accolades from reviews, visiting business executives and locals. And all are breaking even, or are profitable, despite a sluggish economy and French backlash.

“People very much get a neighborhood feel from these restaurants, and they really lock on to them and consider them ‘my neighborhood joint.’ The fact that they are owned by [one company] seems immaterial,” says Frost. “Lots of chains try to do that, but not very many do.”

A Match Made in the Soccer Stands
Such kudos are exactly the kind of thing Quillec and his partner, Kim Weinberger, were hoping to hear. While Quillec had the back-of-the-house down after opening Hannah Bistro (named after one of his six children), he needed real estate, marketing and front-of-the-house help if he was going to fulfill his ever-growing expansion dreams. After a previous partnership dissolved, Quillec met Weinberger through their kids, who knew each other from soccer and other middle-American-school kid activities. A Kansas City native who had left to work as a food stylist in New York, Weinberger returned home to raise her family and started rehabbing, buying and selling real estate.

By 2000 the two had formed Viola, and Weinberger started looking for space being sold by failed restaurants—complete with used kitchen equipment and liquor licenses—that could be French-o-fied with the use of a glue gun and an HGTV do-it-yourself attitude.

The idea sat well with Quillec, in part because Hannah Bistro, in the hip, restaurant-heavy neighborhood of Westport, was in a former Pizza Hut.

“We all had really a good chuckle about this Frenchman who was going to open a Pizza Hut,” Frost remembers. “But it was really very clever.”

Jerry Gaines, a Kansas City Realtor and specialist in restaurant real estate with Block & Co. Inc., agrees. “If they can take over a location, with the equipment that has been relinquished, they save a tremendous amount of money,” he says.

Once formed, Viola opened Café Provence, the upscale eatery, and Café Paris, the brasserie, for just $300,000 and $120,000 respectively. At Provence, once a small takeout restaurant with a 50-seat dining room, Weinberger wallpapered an unsightly column with photos of Quillec’s family growing up in France and, with a friend, glued fringe on lampshades for the intimate look she wanted. Quillec’s sister, Nadine Millier, is the general manager at the restaurant, which lends the family vibe credibility. Millier’s husband, Max, is the chef at Café Paris, where Millier’s and Quillec’s brother, Daniel, is the general manager. The 150-seat Café Paris was once a Semolina unit, now adorned with dark booths, a piano and velvet drapery.

The ingenuity continued on smaller scale items, as well. Quillec, a fan of developing dishes based on trios, wanted a way to serve three tastes of homemade ice cream at once. Unable to find an affordable plate or bowl, he asked the ironworker, already hired to build Hannah Bistro’s patio, to solder an arch-shaped iron stand for three small dishes.

Kansas City Special
Working on a shoestring budget with an unconventional cuisine has not been easy, Quillec admits. When he wanted a true European pastry cart at Café Paris, he ran afoul of health department code, which required the products be covered and that wait staff wear gloves when serving from the display. The gloves ruined the ornate look and sensibility of the cart, Quillec felt, and he scrapped the idea rather than try to change the health code.

Finding good workers—Viola currently employs 125—who are not related to Quillec is no less a challenge for the firm than for anyone else in the restaurant industry. The staff must be up to date on the restaurant’s extensive wine lists, which are changed as often as 10 times a year, and be able to talk wine and celery root and frogs legs in a way that won’t intimidate first-timers.

During the early months of 2003, Viola’s business was down as much as 20 percent, attributed to the downturn in the economy, which kit Kansas City later than the coasts, and backlash against all things French after the Iraqi war. Quillec addressed the anti-French sentiment head on and says most of his regular customers were more than supportive. Business in May was still down 10 percent but moving up, and he was confident that June’s numbers would be up over 2002.

Quillec is so confident, in fact, that he and Weinberger talk often about what’s next for the multiconcept operator approaching $5 million in systemwide sales.

What’s Ahead
The existing restaurants have done well, breaking even or turning a profit, even Café Paris in that difficult first year of business. They plan on adding several more concepts with average unit volumes between $1 million and $2 million, which is where the three concepts now fall. Among them are two other French restaurants that, surprisingly, would not duplicate Viola’s existing concepts.

One would be a crêperie, like that of Quillec’s youth, and that concept is just waiting for Weinberger to find the right space. Real estate, particularly freestanding restaurants, is at a premium in the neighborhoods where Viola would like to open the eatery.

The next would be a sports bar—that’s right, a sports bar—where patrons will be more likely to watch soccer than the Kansas City Chiefs. The team thinks that can fly, in part because the satellite TV that broadcasts a French TV station at Café Provence is a big hit.

Weinberger would like to open an Italian place—a trattoria like the French bistro. Quillec jokes about not to waning to cook Italian cuisine or drink Italian wine, but in fact it is one of the projects about which he is most excited.

While the idea of not having their hands, or those of their family members, on every dish and lampshade is intimidating, the two are in talks to franchise Hannah Bistro in other midsize cities.

“When we opened the second Hannah, we realized how easy it was to reproduce,” says Quillec of the unit in suburban Lee’s Summit, Mo. “If we can find a spot where an existing restaurant was in Charlotte or Indianapolis, we think we have a real shot of making that into something with Hannah Bistro.”

As is the case with family-owned businesses that make the leap to franchising, Viola’s expansion plan has its share of worrywarts. “I don’t see how anybody can manage five or six restaurants,” says Frost. “Beyond three I always feel like execution becomes a huge challenge. But I can’t speak to that at Viola because the word of mouth is so good.”