by Jeff Miller
The first step to success is often failure. Failures like Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, and J.K. Rowling all agree on that. And you can add Kelly Brown to that list.
For Brown, the watershed night was May 7, 1993. “I screwed up,” he recalled.
Brown and a finance partner were opening The Natural Café at 508 State Street. The idea was good, clean food at a reasonable price. The problem was, to get that food on the plates you had to order it.
“I tried to open on Friday,” Brown recalled. “But if you wanted your order delivered on Thursday, you had to call it in on Monday.” What with all the pressure of hiring staff, developing the menu, dealing with code enforcement, etc. and etc., “I forgot,” he said.
So that Friday night at 6 o’clock, the doors opened but only half the menu was available. What to do? “We served free food.”
“I think we served 100 meals that night,” he said. “Those people told their friends and the next night we did 200 dinners.” Again, free. “Sunday we closed all day for prepping. We got our delivery and when we opened on Monday we had a line out the door.”
That was 30 years ago. Over those decades Brown opened restaurants from San Luis Obispo to Simi Valley. At one point he was running 15 establishments simultaneously. Not bad for a “failure.”
The Kelly Brown story took a while to come into focus.
“I grew up in Newport Beach, came to school here [City College] in ’76, then played for 10 years,” Brown said. That playing took him from Maui to Steamboat Springs, with stops at Kauai, Park City, and Sun Valley in between, mostly working in food. “When you’re transient, you’re pretty much limited to the restaurant business,” he said.
“The problem was, I was hitting 26 and working with guys who were 40 years old,” Brown noted. “They’d been doing it for 20 years. I could see how you could just fall into doing that.” Meanwhile, the owner of his current restaurant was off heli-skiing in Canada. “Oh,” he realized, “that’s the job I want.”
So he made a move, signing up for a restaurant training program. “Two things happened,” Brown said. “My workload doubled and my pay went down by half because I came off the floor.”
But it was worth it. “I started in restaurants when I was 15,” Brown said. He’d run the usual gamut, dishwasher, prep cook, busboy, etc. But in the program he learned how to run a restaurant, rather than just work in one.
After that he returned to Santa Barbara, bought a boat, and lived on it in the harbor. He worked hard waiting tables, saved his money, sold his boat, and eventually went in halves with an investor on the first Natural Café. “It was $110,000,” he said. “Today it would be $750 grand.”
For that first Café, at 508 State, they signed a five-year lease with a five-year option. “The rent was $4,000 a month for 2,000 square feet,” Brown said. “Everyone thought we were crazy.”
Over the years he had come to appreciate simplicity in food. “Clean protein, clean starch, and some veggies,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing I wanted to do. You go to a restaurant, 95 percent of the time you overeat, and it’s not necessarily good for you. So much saturated fat, refined sugars, and sodium.”
He wanted food you could eat every day and still be healthy. Some people did exactly that: dine there every day. “I’ve had people come up and thank me,” he said. “They lost 30 pounds eating at my restaurant. Very gratifying.”
His big sellers? “Not much has changed over the years,” he said. “Cabo fish tacos, veggie lasagna, veggie burritos, the Zen burger, the Old Town Salad — still huge for us today. It’s got to taste good but be good for you as well. Charbroiled turkey burger, chicken enchiladas, no lard in the beans. I think people are moving toward good, clean protein.”
Brown shoots for 75 percent organic, depending on price and availability. “We work the produce market every day,” he said.
If you’ll recall from a few paragraphs ago, Kelly Brown started working in restaurants at age 15. He’s now 65. That’s half a century in the food biz. What has he learned?
“Three things,” he said. “A. Every restaurant should have great food, whether it’s steak or a freaking chimichanga. B: Great service. We want to be the second-happiest place on the planet, because you can’t beat Disneyland. C. Value. We’re not talking cheap. We’re talking tasty and affordable.”
Then Brown added a couple subsections. “A good, clean environment, and a staff that feels valued. If they’re happy to be at work, guess what? The guests will be happy to be there too.”
Brown closed the original Natural Café location in January, after 30 years. His issues with the city’s management of State Street are well known in Santa Barbara. But still he has five locations up and running, and, as he puts it, “Life is good, man.” And with his daughter Madeleine running day-to-day operations, it appears the natural life of the café will go on and on.
But at this point, after 50 years in restaurants, 30 of them at The Natural, it’s natural to step back and reflect. One of his favorite memories has to do with a guy who came up to him a while back and said, “I was there that first night. It was good.”
“Yeah,” Brown responded. “I definitely made a mistake. But it was free.”
www.thenaturalcafe.com
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