Sam Gelman is the co-owner of The Webster and The Paper Crane, two restaurants in Iowa City that are leading Iowa’s culinary scene.
Sam sits down to discuss his perfect winter meal, how he sees the Midwest developing in the culinary world, and what he feels the average customer may not understand about owning and operating a restaurant. Plus, Sam shares the story behind his hit restaurant, The Webster, how he ended up creating a new restaurant called The Paper Crane, and the number one mistake most first-time restaurateurs make when getting started.
I learned a lot, and I think you will too.
Sponsored by MidWestOne Bank, this is the latest edition of the CBJ’s Real Success with Nate Kaeding and notable Iowa business and cultural leaders.
Real Success with Nate Kaeding was named Best Business Podcast at the 2024 Iowa Podcast Awards.
Nate Kaeding: It’s a cold and blustery day of the winter season here in Iowa. What’s your quintessential perfect Iowa winter meal?
Sam Gelman: It’s a tough call. I’ve got two, but one is always a good French onion soup. I have memories of when I lived in New York City where I was sitting in French bistros in the window watching the snowfall and eating killer French onion soup. This kind of weather sparks that memory for me. The other is just some kind of roast, like a massive pork roast or something in the oven with vegetables and potatoes. I love that stuff. Before we opened our restaurant during COVID,we had a lot of time to spend at home and cook. I would do these Sunday roasts at home. I cook all day, every day now at work, so I don’t cook as much at home anymore.
That, for me, is winter right there. That’s one of the great parts of being here — the seasons are real. You get to experience that through food: The barren winters, the freshness of spring, the summer bounty and into the fall, and then it kind of starts to trickle off. It goes back towards our ethos of cooking and the ethos of the restaurant at The Webster, which is seasonal cooking. It goes hand in hand with local food and the seasons.
Nate: How do you describe Midwestern food or, more specifically, Iowa food?
Sam: I think it’s tough. I think there’s a ton of agriculture and food production that happens in the state of Iowa. Look at our corn production. Look at our soybean production and our cattle, eggs, and pigs. But none of that necessarily speaks to Iowa and Iowa cuisine. It’s hard to put a finger on it, because a lot of that product leaves the state. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with what Iowa has. The Midwest seems to have that “hardier” kind of cuisine, but I think the Midwest is certainly growing on the culinary map. There are some great food cities in the Midwest like Madison and Chicago and other great cities too, but I think it’s something that’s growing.
I think that one thing we try to focus on, like I said, is we try to cook with the seasons and what’s available, and try to do what we call just American cuisine. We take influences from all over. America, being the melting pot, is kind of where our cuisine that we focus on at The Webster comes from.
Nate: What was your initial idea like for The Webster? Where did that begin?
Sam: I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I left Iowa City in ’99 right after I graduated high school and was gone for 20 years. I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to come back and open a restaurant. For me, it was about finding the right timing for both us professionally and for Iowa City as a whole. When would the community welcome the style and type of restaurant that I wanted to open? I’ve always been playing around with ideas of what I wanted my first restaurant to be like, and taking things that I’ve done in the past and things that I haven’t been able to do in the past, and combining them into a restaurant where I could do whatever I wanted to do.
The biggest thing for us was just being able to cook seasonally, utilize local ingredients, and create something that was different from what was offered here in town. A lot of it is dependent on the space that you get. I’d come back on multiple trips to Iowa City to look at restaurant spaces, and I had looked at the space that we have now and was told it wasn’t available. Well, somehow it became available and we ended up scoring the location, which is great. The location holds a ton of sentimental value to me being that it was Pearson’s originally and I used to eat there as a kid.
We had another space picked out on South Dubuque Street that we were really close on. In retrospect, I’m kind of glad we didn’t do it. I’m super happy with where we are. A lot of it in a restaurant is the space dictates it. You have an idea of what you want to be able to serve, and then you just kind of make it fit the space, and then you start to plug things in and move things around, and then you figure out what you really can and can’t do.
Nate: How long has it been since The Webster opened?
Sam: Three and a half years.
Nate: How does it look different now than what you had in your mind when you first dreamed this up?
Sam: Honestly, it doesn’t. It’s about where I wanted to get to. It has taken a little while to get some things figured out, but we have a pretty amazing staff at this point. We have amazing connections with local producers. We are buying from fantastic farmers who are working with us year over year to grow things that we want them to grow and to also show us new things that we haven’t seen. We have a pretty amazing whole animal program we’re bringing in this year. I think we’re bringing in five or six whole cattle that we process and dry age, so that’s really neat. We buy whole pigs. We buy chickens locally. It is kind of all coming together. But it has taken some time to establish those relationships.
Nate: What is the most underappreciated part of owning and operating a successful profitable restaurant?
Sam: It is a ton of hard work. The guest sees the end product, they see service, they see the staff cooking their food — the flames, the smoke, and the show — but there’s a ton more to it than that. We’re here until two or three in the morning and we’re here at eight or nine in the morning the next day. The restaurant business is crazy, and finding that balance is always tough too.
I think that the average guest probably doesn’t have full appreciation for the sheer amount of work that goes into it. Then there’s the prep and the labor, and this gets into another thing about costs and prices. Food cost is out of control right now and has been for the last couple of years, but the labor side of things is huge too. The sheer amount of labor that goes into the food that we produce is huge. It’s a big chunk of the profit and loss.
Nate: Does the business side of operating a restaurant come easy to you? What are some key performance indicators that you track to know if the business is being successful?
Sam: I do enjoy the business side of it, and I’ve always been passionate about that as well. I’m probably more passionate about cooking because it’s more fun and more gratifying at the end of the day. But I started a lawn mowing business when I was in junior high school and had a couple neighborhood guys working with me. We’d go mow lawns, and I even set up invoicing and billing and all that. So I’ve always been keen on that side of things. I really do enjoy making it all work and looking at the numbers and figuring that out.
You have to have good professionals that you work with, like attorneys, accountants, and insurance brokers. Through my years of experience, I’ve found some great people that we work with now and it saves numerous headaches every day. But, at the same time, I think it’s important to note that you still have to know a lot about all of those things to get what you want. You can have a fantastic attorney but if you don’t understand what they’re doing, then you’re screwed. I mean, my accountant calls me out all the time, but I also call her out. It works both ways and it’s great.
In terms of the KPIs we’re looking at, we obviously look at the big ones. Any restaurant knows your labor and your food costs, or cost of goods in general, are the main things you’re looking at. But sales per labor hour is a big one that I don’t know if a lot of restaurants are looking at. I think that’s a great number. I can tell you just by looking at our sales per labor hour how our week was and how we’re going to perform financially in any given week. I mean, it’s pretty much a guarantee.
Food cost is huge, and we work very hard on that at the store. It helps that we’re buying locally and buying whole animals, and we get really fair prices with our local affairs. I think that’s huge. But labor is the big one. Labor is the driver for us. We are able to be agile enough to charge what we need to charge to make food costs, but it’s always labor that is hard to factor and hard to control sometimes.
Nate: Would you say that’s the number one mistake of a first-time restaurateur that may struggle with the industry?
Sam: I think the biggest mistakes that I see are people that have the passion but don’t have the know-how to do it, and then don’t ask for help or don’t do the research and don’t understand it. Restaurants have extremely thin profit margins and there are a lot of things that have to be controlled in order for everything to work.
That’s the thing about food. People are passionate about it. You can go, “I love to cook. I have made these great dishes. I’ll just open a restaurant.” Awesome. You have one small piece of the puzzle. That’s the fun part. People put too much reliance on that sometimes and don’t have the business acumen behind them to be able to create a successful business. That’s why you see restaurants fail all the time. They don’t get it. It’s unfortunate because they might have the best dish in town, but then they just can’t make it all come together and work. There’s a lot of moving parts and you have to have a plan. There’s too much competition and there’s too many other people out there that know what they’re doing.
Nate: You recently opened your second concept, The Paper Crane. What was the inspiration for that?
Sam: The whole restaurant was based off of an employee of mine who is now a partner of mine, Edwin Lee, who worked really hard at The Webster and demonstrated to me that he had a passion for ramen and for soups. With my background in New York being somewhat related to ramen shops, I didn’t really have any desire to open a ramen shop. I like to eat ramen, but I kind of didn’t necessarily want to cook it myself. But Ed was like, “This is my thing. This is my passion,” and that kind of spurred the discussion.
We started looking for spots in Iowa City. Some were too big, some were too small, and nothing was quite right. The whole time we were looking, this space, 121 North Linn, had just been kind of staring at me. It was sitting built out as a restaurant but not operating. It just kept calling to me. It’s another one of those places that I have fond memories of as a kid. We would go to eat at the Linn Street Café, which was kind of one of Iowa City’s first fine dining restaurants, if you will.
I wanted to be able to bring that space back to something that was contributing to the north side. So I finally was able to reach an agreement with the guy who had the space and we designed this ramen shop with our designers, which is what we were looking to do. Then the cocktail component came along with it. Riene and I wanted a place in Iowa City that was kind of more adult-oriented that people could feel comfortable going to on the weekends. Downtown Iowa City right now might not be the place for everyone. So we wanted to create somewhere special that people who didn’t want that could feel comfortable going to and getting a drink after a show or whatever.
So these two things kind of melded together to become The Paper Crane. We wanted to create this space with two concepts in one and have them tied, but also have them be separate. I think you’ll see that both in the design and the feel of it. There’s materials used in both locations that are similar, but they also feel like very different spaces. There’s this high energy neon light vibe going in the dining room, and then there’s this kind of dark, secluded vibe going in the cocktail lounge. It creates two really unique spaces where you could have multiple unique experiences.
We’re really excited about it and really excited to see what it can become. Ed is doing great things with the food and we have two separate menus in the lounge and in the dining room. We have fantastic cocktails. Another longtime employee of ours, Dan Ramirez from The Webster, is running the cocktail program over there and doing fantastic stuff. It has given him a space of his own that is a little bit more cocktail centric, and he is really shining with that.