If you want to take over for a legendary local institution, your first responsibility is to…read moreunderstand your clientele, understand why they come to the establishment, what they're after, and most importantly, change as little as possible. You have a giant pile of goodwill and credibility you've inherited! You have a team that knows how to deliver it, night after night, just the way your regulars like it! All you have to do....is keep doing what's been working brilliantly for decades. Hungry Harry's didn't sell the place because of problems with the food, and reliably every night, the little parking lot was packed with regulars.
What the hell went wrong, here?
Portions halved. Sides, once mountains of golden-brown, artery-punishing Southern hospitality, became dingy little half-sized groupings of mixed burnt items scraped from the bottom of the fryer, and the meat, also halved in portion, arrived lukewarm. They had some sauces, they thought. You could ask. They'd see what they had in back. The once-legendary brownie sundaes became dull bricks of diluted Duncan Hines mix, with a small scoop of ice cream atop.
I hear you, Yelp reader. I hear you saying "Is it all about the portions? Aren't you fat enough already?" Well, my cardiologist thinks so, but I urge you to frame this differently. This is supposed to be a great big heaps-o-stacks-o-comfort-food Southern hospitality party; that's what a barbecue joint *is*. It's a meat orgy. It's shirt-button-popping, belly-stretching TOO MUCH TOO RICH TOO GOOD excess. It's an entire Goddamned Mardi Gras in your mouth, without the drunk, vomiting college kids. Food should be indulgent, piled to the sky, and stick-to-your-ribs-and-arteries filling, Every flavor should sing. It's okay if those flavors sing off-key, they just need to sing with passion and conviction. This is "Happy Birthday, Dear Tastebuds," not rocket science.
This is what a barbecue joint is. It's where your fat uncle with the awful Dad jokes actually says "Oh I couldn't possibly eat another bite" and for one in his gluttonous life, actually means it. It's a giant warm happy Southern night in the yard with the family where nobody goes home hungry. It's meat and fried things and butter and desserts that you're going to regret tomorrow.
And all H&H had to do was *keep doing this*, damn it. Too expensive? That's fine, up the price, we'll pay!
But what we got was a sad, stressed place with the owner yelling at the crew in front of the guests more than once, his wife walking the floor scowling darkly at guests for reasons I cannot fathom, the poor old crew from Harry's looking like they were halfway through a tour in an active combat theater, and...the sort of food I could easily ruin myself at home. The joy was gone. The indulgence, the plenty, the lifted spirits were gone. The treat-your-tongue-and-fill-your-belly goodness was gone.
That's your job, H&H. Your job is to pile plates high with warm, smoky meat and heapin' helpin's (omitted 'g's essential) of the sides that have worked for decades, served up with the biggest Goddamn smiles since Disney opened parks in Orlando and an atmosphere of "your cousin's house on feast night."
You had this. You had it and you decided it "needed changes." No. I'm gonna stop you right there. No, it does not "need changes." It needed to be exactly the winning ticket it was, the day before you bought it and decided the menu needed pho, for some completely inexplicable reason. You needed to show us that you understood us, and understood your role as a provider of food, food-adjacent-experience, and probably also diabetes.
What you showed us was that you wanted our money, and wanted to see how low the quality bar could drop before your most patient regulars walked. Don't tell me you "didn't understand the business." All you had to do was *not change the existing, solid, working formula*. Don't alienate the crew who knows how to run the place. Don't alienate the customers that provide you with regular income. *Do what pleases the masses, again and again and again, just like last time*.
You had just one job, H&H. "Continue Harry's." You had the location, the customers, the teams, the recipes, the process, the equipment.
A similar tale can be told of Babe's Pizza, down the way. Their new owner decided the place with the two pizzas stacked in a gastronomic fever dream, "garlic bread" made by slathering a hot dog bun in butter and cheese, and the evil mutant death baby out front needed to be "fine Italian dining," then, instead of holding out to sell it to someone who understood that they had an institution to uphold, announced they'd sold to a group turning it into a 24-hour diner, and then frantically tore down the post after being bombarded with vitriol for it. You don't inherit an institution and then disregard the institution. Start over fresh, if you're going to do that.
H&H "Family Bay" is not Hungry Harry's. And that's a damned shame.
