The Mother Plucker’s Ramblings

Looking back in it, maybe opening a restaurant with no management experience the week after we graduated college wasn’t such a good idea. We thought we had all of our bases covered… we had our menu developed, we had hired some employees, we had a big wall menu, some door to door advertising pieces and since we were college kids who knew everything about everything, we were ready to open shop. Well, reality set in about 5 minutes after we were open. There are several lessons of business we learned very quickly that first week. If you are a budding restaurateur, read this very carefully before opening your first restaurant. No need for you to make the same mistakes we did. If you aren’t interested in ever opening a restaurant, congratulations, you are officially smarter than me and just have fun reading.

Mark and I had this brilliant idea of how we would run the store. We thought that we would hire some cooks, drivers and cashiers and we would be able to handle any problems and talk to guests at the front. So we went out and hired a bunch of our friends who were willing to help us out (for $4 an hour I might add) and hired some random people off the street through an extensive 5 minute interview that we conducted. Then we scheduled our first official employee meeting where we were going to train the staff how to cook the food, answer phones and take orders. This lasted all of 2 hours as we ran through our menu and fully expected everyone to understand what we wanted. We had no manuals, no tests and no previous experience training employees so what could possibly go wrong? Mark felt pretty good about everything because he had watched enough episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 and had seen Brandon Walsh move from a server to assistant managers to owners of the Peach Pit to learn what worked and didn’t work with employees.

Now I want you to consider that today each employee we hire goes through a minimum of three interviews, our employee manuals are 150 pages and to become a server at Pluckers, you have a minimum of 60 hours of training and have to pass at least 5 different tests. So you can see that we actually have learned a few things since the days when Ian Ziering was king of West Beverly High besides the fact that Ian was 30 years old playing a 17-year old kid. But this story is about back then and not now.

So we officially opened on July 23rd, 1995 and everything was going smooth until Vinny Palegie walked through the door. Now you may ask, who is Vinny Palegie? Well, Vinny had the honor of being the first official paying Pluckers customer. And by honor, I mean Vinny was the first person to realize that we absolutely had no f-ing idea what we were doing. I think his order was for 10 Wings Medium and fries and it probably took about an episode of The Simpsons to get his food out of the kitchen. After Vinny, the orders started rolling in. Pretty much every person we knew from college who still lived in Austin and all of their friends started showing up at the opening day of Pluckers.

I pinpoint the time that I realized we were in way over our heads at about 12:10pm CST. That was when Mark and I went back in the kitchen and realized that no one could read our handwriting on the kitchen tickets and even if they could, they had no idea what they were supposed to be cooking. So our official tenure as front of house managers lasted all of 70 minutes. For the next year and a half, I think that Mark and I personally cooked all of or most of every meal that came through Pluckers from 11am to 3am, 7 days a week.

With this change of plans also meant that we had to find reliable people to operate our cash drawer. As soon as the first day ended, we called in favors from every friends that we had in Austin and even hit up Mark’s brother Sean (our future partner) for his friends to come to Pluckers to help. Little did we know how true the old adage of “never work with your friends is”. Sure these were good people and they wanted to see us succeed, but that didn’t mean they planned on giving up partying in college. I can’t tell you how many “friends” I had to wake up at 10am in their apartments and drag them to work with a hangover to earn 4 bucks an hour…Josh Healy, I am still sorry to this day for slapping you awake.

Now it wasn’t all bad. Our first day we actually sold out of all of the chicken in the restaurant! We were so excited to be able to say that. Little did we know that it was probably as much due to our poor skills in ordering food as it was in the success of the restaurant. However, we did manage to bring in about $1300 in sales that first day. I can’t explain what the feeling of being 22 years old and counting that much money at 5am in the morning feels like, but I can tell you it was very satisfying. These days, we routinely sell more than $1300 in food an hour, but that first $1300 will always be the most special to us.

One of my favorite memories of that first week involves Mark’s mother. If you have ever had the pleasure to know Barbara, you know two things about her: First, she isn’t afraid to tell you her opinion and second, like most mothers, she isn’t afraid to tell you her opinion very loudly! I remember finally getting a brief respite from the kitchen to have a moment to talk to some friends who were at the restaurant and leave the cooking to Mark. Within 3 steps of leaving the kitchen, I hear this voice in my ear, “David, the fries are cold! David, the fries are cold!” Now this wasn’t an “inside voice”, but instead one that resonated until every guest in the place was getting a chuckle or two watching how the chicken wing genius was going to handle the situation. It seemed that Barbara had been visiting each table at the restaurant and finding out how the meals were. Unfortunately, the results weren’t that good. Even more unfortunately, everyone in the restaurant was able to find out that everyone else’s meals had also sucked.

Now mind you that I had probably slept about 10 hours in the previous 5 days and I could have handled the situation a little better, but I think I did what every self-respecting business partner would do, I sent Barbara into the kitchen to tell Mark. I was about to get my first lesson that Mark didn’t really like having his mother tell him what to do. Why that was, I couldn’t figure out because every 22-year old male loves having their moms get involved in their business. All I know is that we made damn sure not a single fry left the kitchen cold for the rest of the Greenberg’s visits. However, cold fries have always been a Pluckers specialty and are maybe the one food quality problem we have never been able to solve. So Barbara, maybe it was the fry and not the people frying them!

So who came up with the name Pluckers, a Warner Brother Character and other musings.

My guess is that there are many versions of this story, but the one that I remember goes something like this. Mark and I were working on a name sometime before the Chili Cookoff for our senior year. We had already been a big hit at the Chili Cookoff during our junior year and we wanted everyone in the Greek system at UT to know the name of our soon to be open restaurant. The only problem was…we couldn’t think of a good name or a good slogan.

We asked our friends, parents, teachers, classmates, etc. for their suggestions. I remember that I was pushing hard for Bubba’s Wings to be the name of our new venture. You see, I am from Georgia and I love a good bubba (definition: a good ole boy, usually from the southern United States who at the time loved anything to do with Billy Ray Cyrus, NASCAR, girls with big hair and would scream for “Freebird” at concerts even if Lynerd Skynerd wasn’t playing.) I had grown up with Bubba’s most of my life and it just sounded like a good name to me. How can you not like a guy named Bubba?

Well, I guess the answer to my question came from my mother who informed me that being a Bubba usually meant that you were a racist redneck as well. I guess that was a slight oversight on my part, but I am not one for political correctness so I kept pushing for it. I can’t remember many other good names we had for our new restaurant until a girl I was dating came up with “Cluckers”. Hmmm….that made sense, we were a chicken restaurant and chickens liked to cluck. Also, it sounded kind of catchy. The next step was running a check against all other trademarked names in the world. Unfortunately, it came back that there is a chicken chain out of New York called “Cluck U” and our attorneys said that it was going to be “deceptively similar” to Cluck U (that’s lawyer speak for don’t even think about using that name because you will get sued). By the way, Cluck U is still around and although I have never tried it, I hear they make some pretty good wings.

So we had ourselves a problem. We didn’t have any other solid alternative names for the restaurant. Mark and I, being brilliant UT advertising majors decided that there was only one thing that could be done to name our restaurant. We needed to drink! We surmised that in our drunken stupor, the name of our restaurant would magically come to us. Have you ever noticed that you can remember answers to trivia questions or people’s names you haven’t thought of in years when you are inebriated? Well, maybe that’s just me, but back to the story. So we put together our creative genius over either some Bud Ice or Icehouse, which one it was I can’t remember, but I do remember that the rage of “Ice” beers caused killer hangovers. If you don’t believe me, ask any kid who went to college in the early 90’s.

I think after a while of getting nowhere, one of us suggested just changing “Cluckers” to “Pluckers”. Aha….the light came on in our heads (or maybe it was the buzz from 6% alcohol beer) and we both agreed that was the answer. If you knew Mark and I in college, you would know that we usually took the easy way out when it came to things like this. We ran it by our attorneys and they told us that no one else had that trademark, so there it was….we had our name.

Now that we had a name, we needed a fun slogan and logo for our new wing joint. I was telling my dad about our new name and he suggested that we use his graphic designer to create our logo. Since we didn’t know any graphic designers and because at the time I thought my dad knew what the hell he was talking about, we paid some douchebag about $500 to come up with three different ideas for our logo. Essentially what this graphic designer (and I use that term very loosely) came up with was Foghorn Leghorn from the Bugs Bunny cartoon and superimposed him in a circle, a diamond and a square. Those were our three logo choices….get it….Foghorn in a circle, a diamond and a square. Brilliant! Are you freakin’ kidding me?

So we called up my dad and asked him how we were going to be able to use Foghorn Leghorn in our logo since our attorneys warned us about getting sued for using the name “Cluckers”. He explained to me that as long as there was a 10% difference between our logo and Porky Pig’s buddy that we would be all right. We must have spent a week studying our logo against Foghorn. Eventually, we concluded that his beak and neck could certainly be argued that they were 10% different than Foghorn. We also figured that if Warner Brothers wanted to sue us, they weren’t going to win any money, so we threw caution to the wind. We put him in a diamond in case you were wondering.

So we had our name, Foghorn as our logo and it was time for us to come up with a slogan. I remember that I was pushing for “Chicken is Chicken, but the Wing is the Thing”. Mark thought that was only average, but neither of us could think of anything better. So we went to our mothers for help. In case you haven’t ever met either of our mothers, you need to know three things about them. First, they are Jewish mothers. Second, they think that their creative genius is a very close second to the likes of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Richard Pryor. And finally, even if they have little to no knowledge at all on a particular subject, they think they are always right.

However, this time I think going to my mom for help actually paid off. For twelve years my mom contradicts this story, but I swear it to be the truth. I was on the phone with her throwing around slogan ideas and told her we wanted people to remember our restaurant in the future. There was a restaurant in Destin, Florida called Fudpuckers that had a great slogan “You ain’t been Pucked, til’ you been Fudpucked”. I wanted something like that, catchy and irreverent. So we started playing on words that rhymed with Pluckers (you can come up with a few of them yourself) and finally I think she said “If you don’t like our chicken, we’ll shoot you a bird!” I liked that and after a few minutes I tried morphing it into “If you don’t like our wings, we’ll give you the bird!”

Now she claims that she came up with the slogan we have been using for 12 years, but that is not the way I remember it. I could be wrong, but if you reference the above three rules related to our mothers, you will see that I have a legitimate argument.

I ran the idea by Mark and some friends and everyone loved it. The first unveiling of the new name, slogan and logo officially went out at Chili Cookoff our senior year. I can’t even remember who designed the shirts, but to this day, they are the best shirts we have ever made. I think there are only about 3 of those shirts left in the world, so if you have one, keep it as it may be worth something one day. It was simple….Foghorn Leghorn shooting a bird and saying “If you don’t like our wings, we’ll give you the Bird!” I think we printed about 100 of these shirts and handed them out to every hottie we knew on campus and some of our friends as well. Within minutes of the Chili Cookoff starting, the delicious smell of our wings and the harem of beautiful UT coeds had our booth hopping. Everyone wanted to know when the restaurant was opening. The only thing was, first we had to graduate…

To be continued….