Is it stealing?
Stealing has been very good to me. Or is it stealing? I think there is the grey area in between outright stealing and inspiration.
What I’m talking about is how you get your ideas. Our first restaurant was completely original because we didn’t fashion it on anything we had ever seen, but rather made a restaurant to fit the space we could afford.
Ah, but the second…
When my best friend since I was 10, Tom White, and I travelled to Italy when we were about 20, we decided that we wanted to do a restaurant that served Italian food. This is while we were sitting in a restaurant across from the Ferrari factory. (see above).
While Tom was in San Francisco attending the culinary institute a couple years later, he ran across a restaurant called Ciao, which was built in 1977. It offered a new take on Italian food: much more upscale, but still affordable using fresh ingredients in an updated atmosphere. We loved it so much, when it came time to do our second restaurant, Scalo, in Albuquerque, we fashioned it to be much like Ciao.
We used to go to San Francisco as often as our wallets would allow in order to hit up restaurants looking to see what innovative things were being done. Literally we would go to about twenty restaurants per day. Some we would just pop into. Others we might have a drink, or appetizers, some we would save just for a meal. We might take a menu idea, or the way the place was decorated. For Scalo, we borrowed the idea of the uniforms of the wait staff we had seen, even to the degree where the servers had to wear real black bow ties that they had to learn how to tie themselves. It became a badge of honor.
At one point we were in San Francisco and burnt out on fine dining. We ran across a pizzeria that just had a basic deck oven, but design-wise, was really cool. We ate pizza and thought “if you took a casual pizzeria, but used traditional wood ovens, and made it architecturally unique, while still keeping prices down, that might fly”. This was in 1990.
We remembered these ideas when in late 1991, a location opened up across the street from our existing restaurant Scalo. We opened IL Vicino signifying that we hoped this restaurant would be a place for many to enjoy in the same neighborhood.
When I decided I wanted to add a brewery in 1993 to IL Vicino, my wife Sandy and I went to Portland and looked at the McMenamins restaurants, which had quite a few breweries even back then. They just used old Grundy tanks and dairy equipment. I was inspired by their ingenuity. So that’s what I did for our IL Vicino in Albuquerque, and a year later in Salida, Colorado. From their example the ideas for Frankenbrew came about.
When I opened the Palisade Brewery in 2003 I was trying to think of a different label to use, and was in a grocery store where they had large blown up copies of the fruit crate labels from the 1930’s. Palisade is in fruit growing country, so Voila! Our labels looked like old fruit crate ones.
These days you don’t have to fly off to another city to get ideas or be inspired. When I am looking for pizza ideas for Colorado Boy, I simply do a google search on best pizza in say, Atlanta. Then I look at the menus from the top restaurants.
If I am brewing a dark mild, I might look at the winners list of the World Beer Cup in the Mild category, then go to the breweries web site and if lucky, get some insights on what went into their beer.
Brewers Forums can be a huge help in getting advice for all sorts of things from cleaning to what POS systems people are having good luck with.
If I see a brewery that is using a Letina tank as a fermenter, I know they somehow got that idea from me, because I’m pretty sure I was the first to use them in a brewery (they are made for wine). That makes me very happy!
Call it stealing, call it being inspired, but no matter how you look at it we all need to keep moving forward and trying new things. Heck, it’s no coincidence that in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s artists in Paris started the impressionist movement with many shared characteristics. There was some stealing, or inspiration going on. Same goes for the explosion of hazy IPA. Trends are examples of this phenomenon.
So I say go for it. Travel and get one or two interesting and fun ideas from a brewery you are visiting. When brewers come to you place, show them around and let them be inspired by you as well. There isn’t just one pie we all have to take a slice out of. There are as many pies as there are variations on a recipe. It isn’t stealing.
PS. My idea for the logo for Colorado Boy was based off my dads Boy Scout manual from the 1930’s. I wanted the guy (Colorado Boy) to have a timeless look, and was inspired by that Boy Scout.
