November 2, 2024

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Cleveland Beer-Restaurant News From Cleveland.com Marc Bona – 4-22-21

Marc Bona, cleveland.com spoke to Bill about Sauce the City Cleveland food hall takes mentoring approach in former Ohio City Galley space – What’s Ohio favorite wine? State-by-state preferences revealed – NE Ohio businessman’s Whoa! Dough eyes expansion for ‘healthy, indulgent’ gluten-free snack

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Sauce the City Cleveland food hall takes mentoring approach in former Ohio City Galley space

https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2021/04/sauce-the-city-cleveland-food-hall-takes-mentoring-approach-in-former-ohio-city-galley-space.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio – When Vic Searcy decided to develop Sauce the City Cleveland food hall at W. 25th Street and Detroit Avenue, a single driving force motivated him.

“I kept it Cleveland,” he said. “I use ingredients (within a few) miles from here. We try to resource local farms, Rid-All (Green Partnership) off of Kinsman. We try to utilize all Cleveland. It’s like full-circle economics. That’s what we stand for. Even with the art in Cleveland.”

What Searcy is promoting is an incubator-style approach with an initial quartet of businesses, similar to the genesis of Pittsburgh-based Galley Group’s former Ohio City Galley. That rotational restaurant space, at 1400 W. 25th St., closed at the tail end of February 2020, weeks before the stay-at-home pandemic orders took effect. Searcy was an original tenant in the concept and wound up staying the full three years.

This month, he opened Sauce the City Cleveland and is wearing multiple hats of chef, business owner and mentor. Searcy controls the restaurant side of the space; the bar side is available. Parking has been improved through a shared lot with tenants.

“We’ve been trying to build this place since Ohio City Galley closed,” Searcy said.

While Searcy learned from the former Ohio City Galley concept, he felt the space needed a stronger Cleveland focus, and the bar side was too upscale for the area.

“I’m looking for Cleveland premier chefs like Tiwanna (Williams), I’m looking for different cultures. I want it to be every part of Cleveland in one building.”

What Searcy wants customers to have are “different taste experiences.” The range of offerings include Searcy’s Cleveland hot chicken at Sauce the City; Southern-style comfort-food at Pearl’s Kitchen, owned by Williams; Latin-Caribbean tastes at Twisted Taino’s; and pizza at Good Meal Jane, a ghost kitchen with online ordering only, for now. The underlying theme is quality fresh food at all the eateries, said Searcy, who sought advice from Eric Rogers at Black Box Fix and others, to learn the ropes of the restaurant business.

“I was blessed with the opportunity to be a part of the food hall,” he said.

But the food hall is more than just diversity in the dishes and a pro-Cleveland mantra.

“It’s not just cooking,” he said. “It’s payroll. You have to do budgeting, you have to do scheduling, inventory, ordering. A lot of people come in and said ‘I can cook so you need to give me a kitchen.’ It’s like, “Ahh, let me see your business plan.’ “

The incubator approach expands way past cooking tasty ingredients. It deals with social media, marketing, real-estate issues. The tenants don’t have to deal with overhead as they prove or test food concepts. And there’s no overlap; the restaurants have distinct menus.

It’s a similar approach Brandon Chrostowski recently announced he is taking with his revamped Edwins Too in Shaker Square.

“Maybe this is going to work out, maybe’s it’s not,” said Searcy, who is flexible with the lease terms for the culinary tenants but who wants to see some business sense.

“You have the opportunity to be in front of a real-live audience,” he said. “Then you can decide.”

“The main thing,” he added, “is to set up people for success.”

“It’s really like a launch test kitchen,” Williams said.

Williams would know. She and Searcy are both past winners of the Launch Test Kitchen competition, a culinary platform at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse with Aramark. The winner is considered for the pop-up style concession stand for arena events, giving them a chance to see if their creations are a good fit for the market.

In the arena, Williams sold her food and enjoyed the arena’s foot traffic, but the pandemic halted that. No fans meant no sales, obviously, but also no visibility for her young business.

“2020 was crazy,” said Williams, who also runs a catering business. “I think we all learned so much. I don’t think in my mind I ever really would be a restaurateur on my own. 2020 showed me I can’t have all my eggs in the events basket.”

“At the beginning of the pandemic Vic approached me. I was scared. I was ‘Listen, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m not in the position to take on that risk right now.’ … He said ‘I’m going to do some popups, give it a try.’ So I thought about it, and I am giving it a try.”

Williams might sound cautious but she’s taken leaps of faith. In November 2018 she left her career as a nurse.

“When the time was right, I just stepped away. It was one of the best things I have ever done because I was able to commit myself to the business and it’s grown in so many ways,” she said. “I don’t have any regrets.

“I feel like this is a new startup, a whole new business. … I want to give it a shot, I’m learning,” Williams said. “It’s super different from catering. Knowing how many people you are serving and it’s different from an arena because you have 10, 15,000 people a night. … I want to make something special that will last.”

Williams’ space near the front of the food hall has old black and white family photos, including of her grandmothers, inspiration for her cooking venture. The hall has a clean modern look and feel of a high-class food court. Instead of boring table tents in a mall, though, impassioned artistic creations from Christa Free Hands line the walls. One colorful piece riffs off the famed photograph of the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight in 1965. In it, Ali menaces over the fallen Liston. But among the restaurant tenants, there’s no infighting.

“There’s camaraderie,” Williams said. “Everyone wants to win and do well.”

Weeks out of the gate, it’s a good fit. Searcy credits the flexibility of property-management company Snavely Group. Williams loves the neighborhood.

“We want to get this place back rolling,” Searcy said. “We’ve got the food side going; we just need the bar side. … then I believe this place will be one of the top places to be in the city.”

What’s Ohio favorite wine? State-by-state preferences revealed

https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2021/04/whats-ohio-favorite-wine-state-by-state-preferences-revealed.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio – What’s Ohio’s favorite wine? According to the folks at Hickory Farms, it’s Cabernet Sauvignon.

Hickory Farms – the gift-basket company founded in Ohio in 1951 – did a little research and came up with each state’s preferred varietal or style of wine.

A rep said Hickory Farms looked at its consumer-buying and industry trends to determine the most popular wines and create an interactive map and breakdown. (Here is the complete state-by-state list.)

A few findings:

• States selected 11 varietals and nine styles.

• In addition to Ohio, other states liking Cabernet Sauvignon are Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah. The dry red wine was favored by more states than any other varietal.

• Mississippi and Vermont like Port, the fortified, sweet wine served (usually but not always) after dinner.

• Alabama, Delaware, Minnesota and New Hampshire like to pop their sparklers, preferring Champagne, while Oklahoma and Pennsylvania like Prosecco, the approachable Italian sparkling wine.

• California and Iowa opt for orange wine. That’s made when skins and seeds are left attached during fermentation, imparting a different hue to the wine.

• Nevada is the only state that chose the often-sweet Italian crowd pleaser Lambrusco as its most popular wine, while Texas is the only state that selected Shiraz.

Hickory Farms moved from Toledo to Chicago in 2017.

NE Ohio businessman’s Whoa! Dough eyes expansion for ‘healthy, indulgent’ gluten-free snack

https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2021/04/ne-ohio-businessmans-whoa-dough-eyes-expansion-for-healthy-indulgent-gluten-free-snack.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio – It’s been said that necessity is the mother of invention. Todd Goldstein is proof of that.

Goldstein, a Chagrin Falls businessman, has created Whoa! Dough, edible cookie-dough bars that are made with ingredients that are gluten-free certified via GFCO, non-GMO Project verified and OU Kosher certified. They contain no dairy, soy or egg products. Flavors are chocolate chip, sugar cookie, sugar cookie with sprinkles, peanut butter, peanut-butter chocolate chip and brownie-batter chocolate chip.

“It really is out of necessity, finding an area of need in your own life and creating something that helps you and others,” he said, adding he was “missing that healthy, indulgent treat.”

That’s because 10 years ago, Goldstein was diagnosed with severe gluten intolerance. He and his wife have three boys. The oldest – born in 2015 and 2017 – have gluten allergies. The youngest, born last year, probably has gluten intolerance, he said. That’s where the necessity serving as the driving force came in for his culinary creation.

So he asked himself: “Is there an opportunity to create a better-for-you snack that everyone can enjoy?” he said. “Who doesn’t love cookie dough?”

Goldstein’s parents owned a restaurant growing up – “I used to eat as much cookie dough as I could and then I’d get sick,” he says – and he studied business management at Johnson & Wales University. In 2008, he founded LaunchHouse, a business-mentoring company that focuses on startups and entrepreneurship. After Goldstein’s diagnosis came along and his sons were born, he recalled how much he liked cookie dough.

“Oh my gosh, I loved cookie dough,” he said. “There wasn’t anything that resembled it.”

So he worked on the treat. And even though he has experience in the food industry – he is a partner in a food business and investor in others – he stumbled a bit before working out the kinks.

“I’m not completely foreign to it, but no matter how much you think you know, when you’re starting from scratch you don’t avoid the pitfalls,” he said. “You still get hit with every hurdle. You try to avoid the mistakes; you still make ‘em. That’s just part of the learning lesson.”

The result is the rhyming-named “healthy, indulgent snack” that officially launched in late 2020.

Each 1.6-ounce bar contains five grams of protein and are made from chickpea flour, a source of vitamins, minerals and fiber. Whoa! Dough is sweetened with allulose, a low-calorie sugar. The bars – which retail for $2.49 – have 140 to 170 calories.

Local distribution includes Heinen’s, Miles Farmers Market, Nature’s Oasis, Lucky’s and Plum markets. Deals with other local stores are in the works. Goldstein has his eye on broad expansion; the snack will be in Tops markets in the northeastern part of the country, and he even shipped his product overseas today, he said.

The goal, said Goldstein, who grew up in Lyndhurst and went to Brush High School, “is to bring healthy cookie dough to the masses.”

As much as necessity helped lead to the creation of the snack, a bit of nostalgia also contributed.

“That feeling, when baking at home, you’re typically licking the spoon,” Goldstein said. “When you have a gluten allergy it’s really tough to do that. The nice thing about our product is you can. It gives that feeling of being at home, licking the spoon.”

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