![]() ![]() What are the plans for opening the Denver location? What is the vision there? We have 50 bottled beers and 24 draft beers. Our goal is to have our customers come in and find a beer that they have never had before. We don’t change our beers they are consistent pretty much year round. We wanted to keep it simple so we could show our customers that these are the styles and recipes of beers that have been around for years. A lot of bars constantly rotate their beers so that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the beers that are available. We decided to stick to Belgian and German beers. The beer culture in America has just exploded. But as we continue to grow, we have more employees that can handle aspects of the business so we can continue to stay on top of the market and deliver the best and most diverse sausage varieties. We’ve had to take the alligator sausage off the menu because we couldn’t consistently source a quality product for our customers. We want to make sure that our quality is consistent. ![]() We started making phone calls and meeting the sausage makers and we would come across sausage varieties that you’d never heard of before like the rattlesnake and rabbit, which has become our top-selling sausage. Initially, when we were researching the different sausages people were making our goal wasn’t yet to be sausage makers-we wanted to be more like curators of the best sausages. Where did you come up with some of the sausage varieties? Like the rattlesnake and rabbit? I mean, we tried out 50 different bratwurst recipes just to get that savory, but also sweet butteriness down. We’ll make 20 different versions of the same type of sausage until we get the recipe right. We built a test kitchen so we could constantly be doing research. Where is the sausage made? How do you come up with the recipes? and ultimately we’ll be rolling out our very own sausage line. In the products we make, we use the finest ingredients we can get and the sausage is made in L.A. Today, we manufacture five or six of our sausages and source the rest. When we started we came up with a list of different sausage flavors and undertook a “best in breed” kind of testing and decided to feature the best of each variety. We wanted to find the best sausage in each category of sausage. How many sausage varieties did you start with? We don’t have a lunch rush and insane three-hour lines anymore, we’re just kind of constantly busy. In 2011, we were able to open our second location in Venice and now in January we’ll be opening our Denver beer garden. At the end of 2008, no one was opening restaurants, but that has definitely changed. That was the beginning of the craziness for us over the next few years, and for the food scene in the city overall. But on that second day, unbeknownst to us, the food writer for the Los Angeles Times came to check out the sausage and she wrote a great review. We met that goal, so the second day we said we wanted to sell 150 sausages and we did that too-people were loving it. When we opened back in 2008, our first day we had a goal to sell 100 sausages. How has the business developed over the past six years? So we saw our restaurant as a communal place where people could come together. Sausages are a uniting food-everybody loves a good sausage. We wanted to create an entire experience around sausages and beer-so we decided to do a German beer hall. We tried to think of a type of food that hadn’t been done at a high level and we thought of sausages. The city basically told us that they didn’t want to open many bars, so they kind of strong-armed us into opening a restaurant. And in 2008 there was kind of a halt on large-scale development. So things were underway, but the results weren’t happening. They had been redoing a lot, improving the metro and transportation, cleaning up the streets. Plus the city had been positioning the downtown area for growth. And we started seeing more people from New York moving to Los Angeles as well. You know, like people from San Francisco were beginning to talk about L.A. You could see that people were starting to move to Los Angeles. Well, it was just noticing migration patterns. and saw a city with not many people living in the downtown area, but that the area was ready to explode. While I was at USC, my business partner Joseph (Pitruzzelli) and I, wanted (like most college students) to open up a bar. ![]()
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