After building your career in New York and Philadelphia, what has surprised you most about operating a restaurant in a town of fewer than 3,000 people? How has it changed the way you think about everything from menu development to staffing and marketing?

We spent nearly four years frequenting New Glarus before Canter Inn opened, getting to know the town’s amenities and finding our favorite nearby spots to eat, so we had a good sense of its rhythms. As we explored potential locations in the area for the project, we always knew the physical space had to be compelling and would ultimately inform the identity of the business. When that space turned out to be a 1902 Queen Anne Victorian home with an established lineage of husband-and-wife-led fine-dining restaurants, we wanted to stay true to that history and only add value to it.

New Glarus is already both a growing hub for surrounding small towns and a tourist destination for visitors from Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and beyond, thanks in part to its Swiss roots and New Glarus Brewing Co. Our business model flows from that: to provide a space where our team can care for and delight local guests and tourists alike, whether it’s a sleepy weekday in the dead of winter or a bustling Saturday night in the sweltering heat of July.

In reality, the way we approach menu development and marketing hasn’t changed much since Cadence. We always try our best to maximize the tools—ingredients, equipment, physical space and staff—that we have, while recognizing where we need to balance priorities. For example, we have to build time into our days for things like laundering linens, shoveling the sidewalk, mowing the lawn and walking to the post office to check our mail.

What business advantages have you found in a smaller market, and what trade-offs should operators realistically expect?

Operating in a smaller market has its limitations: tighter turnaround times and fewer opportunities for deliveries; a smaller pool of potential diners; seasonal tourism, which is vulnerable to factors like weather and travelers’ fuel costs; a smaller labor pool in the area, along with a corresponding lack of housing for hospitality workers; and fewer year-round attractions to draw tourists. When one of those attractions closes for renovations, for example, it can have a significant impact on the number of visitors coming to town.

The advantage of starting from a baseline of these limitations is that, because there is less critical mass of first-time diners than there would be at a new restaurant in Philadelphia or even Madison, we know we have to make the best possible first impression. That mindset disciplines us to ensure that everything, from the food we cook and the service we provide to the volume and tempo of the music filling the room, is contributing to building trust with every guest. Our hope is that those first-time local diners become regulars, that guests from surrounding towns consistently choose us for special occasions or attend our special events and that seasonal tourists return every summer. Most importantly, we want all of them to tell their friends and family to follow suit.

You've worked in acclaimed restaurant groups and owned an award-winning restaurant before opening Canter Inn. Which operational systems or leadership practices have proven just as valuable in a small-town restaurant—and which ones didn't translate?

We were fortunate to have good mentors and peers early in our careers, and we learned how to maximize resources to fuel and constantly innovate within the complex machine of a rapidly growing restaurant group. When scaling down to Cadence and now Canter Inn, we’ve focused on the things that have an outsized impact and stressed less about the rest.

Our goal hasn’t been to take specific food preparation techniques or systems from another context and impose them on this menu. Instead, we adapt to the resources we have and can sustainably maintain, and we’ve learned how to prep and staff both the front and back of house around the unique rhythm of New Glarus. We continue to be on the ground, doing the work ourselves and hopefully setting an example for our team.

We may have a small team, but we take the time to teach and put our trust in our staff to represent the business while still bringing their own personalities to it. We work hard to be transparent, take care of our team and listen to their feedback so we can continue to improve. Because our volume can be unpredictable, yet we always want to be prepared to provide a stellar experience for our guests, we do our best to work with our servers to ensure that the shifts we offer are worthwhile for them.

With national recognition already behind you, how do you define success at Canter Inn? Has your approach to growth, profitability or hospitality changed now that you're building a restaurant designed to serve a local community first rather than chase accolades?

Restaurants are always a game, no matter the location. As much as we’d love to say we can serve the local community first, we also understand that many potential diners learn about us through national press and accolades that can filter down to local news and social media. Because it’s naturally harder for us to get people to make the trip out to New Glarus, having that reinforcement through a publication or voting body’s stamp of approval only helps.

Meanwhile, our costs and profit-and-loss goals are nearly identical to those at Cadence; we’re simply relying on a smaller pool of guests to achieve those goals. The main difference in our specific scenario is that we own the building, as opposed to renting, as we did in Philadelphia. That means we have more control over our fixed costs, and we can use the entire physical space to remain nimble in responding to fluctuations in market demand.

Ultimately, in order to achieve our goal of becoming deeply woven into the local community and contributing to it, we need to be financially viable first.

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