H Street NE

Last Friday we learned Clover Food Lab was looking to open two restaurants in DC – one possibly on H Street. After reading many comments they now update us on their plans:

“So a bunch of people asked for more detail about what we’re doing. So here’s a quick summary.

WHAT WE DO: We do so so much, but the heart of everything is making our food. We’re committed to making the best tasting whatever we make. So that means we do somethings and not others, we’re constantly trying to improve, we use a ton of organic ingredients (often tastes better), we buy a ton locally (often tastes better), we make everything from scratch (excl ketchup, mayo, and bread). We’re focused on plant-based foods, on a mission to make them exciting to the meatiest of palettes. So think of this as a new chance for fast food.

OUR FAVORITE REAL ESTATE: We do some massive volumes at our locations in Boston. 800-1,000 customers/ day at some of our trucks (DWY, PRK, MIT), more than 1,000 customers per day at some of our restaurants (HSQ, KND). 80% of our customers travel less than 5 minutes to eat with us. So to hit those numbers we’re loving very dense areas. We love to have huge impact, so we love the volumes. Daytime population greater than 10,000 within 5 min or high foot traffic. (developed site)

Lowest volumes we can operate profitably would be around 200 customers/ day. We do a few of these in the Boston area (BLV, HUB, BUR) (developing site)

Lunch accounts for between 40and 80% of our sales, like most fast casual. We have really nice dinners in some locations (HSQ), but most of our high volume experience is lunch. We love breakfast, at HSQ today we served about 200 people at breakfast, but they are low tickets and don’t generate a lot of sales/ profit.

RENTS: We can afford big rents, if the traffic is right. I haven’t heard of any rents in DC that scare me off yet (now LLs, please don’t take this the wrong way, we’re not out to make stupid decisions). Our experience is that it’s better to pay more for the right location and do really well vs. skimp on rent and location and work hard to make it survive.

We also do well just off the main drag, we’ve been known to operate in alley ways. So this helps us on some of our rents.

DC STRATEGY: Obviously there is a lot of detail and nuance to our thinking about how to enter our first every market that is not Boston. But the simple version is: (a) open a restaurant in a less developed area where we can afford to experiment, get to know a community, etc., (b) open a restaurant in a busy area where we can hit huge numbers. We’d love both to start off strong. We’re used to hitting profitability in our first month or two of operation. This isn’t a “let’s invest now hoping we’ll have a business in 5 years” sort of thing.

I’m so pumped about the response I’m going to start posting regularly about sites we’re checking out. I’m going to be down on Monday. Anything you’d have me look at?”

Stay tuned for more posts as their search starts next week.

1110 H Street, NE during H Street festival in 2012

Thanks to a reader for sending word:

“Looks like Clover is looking at the Newsom building. I live in the neighborhood and think this would be a great fit.”

On Clover’s website they have a post titled DC Real Estate with a photo of the once planned for Newsom building:

As you may know we’re trying to figure out DC real estate. It’s tricky. 1) We just don’t know it as well as we do Boston. 2) We’re going to be brand new. And there’s so much about what makes Clover special in Boston that has to do with our interaction with the community. We want to make sure we choose sites where we’ll be able to create that same type of deep experience in DC. So while prime office-area real estate is attractive from a sales standpoint, I’m nervous about our ability to build our brand properly in that market.

Based on advice from very experienced operators who know a lot more about DC than I do, we’re thinking it would make sense to open 2 sites: 1 that is in a more developing area, the other in an already developed area. That’s our rough thinking. We have a lot to do to figure out if this is the right direction or not.

A site became available on H street, near 10th. This is an area with an &Pizza and a Taylor Gourmet, 2 hot new chains in DC. I love the building, and there’s room to do some really creative stuff, and the trolley is just being added. Those are all exciting things. But when I shared this with a friend who knows DC really really well he said he thought it was much too gritty for us. Didn’t think it would be a good early location. DC-ers out there, what do you think?

For those not familiar with Clover, like me, they sound pretty awesome:

“Our food philosophy is driven by simplicity. I’d rather have you shocked by how delicious our turnip soup tastes than impress you with an exotic ingredient or fancy technique or flowery menu description.

We try to keep everything very simple, but very careful. If you eat with us for breakfast you know that we’re making the soup or salads in the morning and prepping for lunch. We don’t make ketchup. We don’t make Mayonnaise. We make just about everything else every day.

This is Fast Food. We’re obsessed with speed and constantly time ourselves. Our average serve times are around 3.5 minutes, which makes us a little slower than McDonald’s.

At Clover we:

– Have no freezers. In the entire company. Not one.
– Change our menu day-to-day to stay in sync with the best tasting seasonal ingredients.
– Cut food as close as we can to when you’re going to eat (e.g., tomatoes are cut when you order)
– Keep your money in your region. (40-85% of our ingredients are from the Northeast)
– Use an unheard of amount of organic ingredients (typically 30-60% depending on time of year)
– Don’t EVER use any preservatives, “natural flavors,” “flavor enhancers,” “artificial flavors”*
– Make food that will improve your health (no need to tell the kids, but that food is good for them)
– Allow you to see us making your food. We have no “back of house” anywhere in our company.
– 100% of what we hand you is compostable. OK, nothing to do with taste. But it’s the right thing to do.”

You can see Clover’s menus here and read a lot more background here.

822 H Street, NE – entrance on 9th Street

“Dear PoPville,

Just wondering: for the last few weeks, each time I’ve walked by Chupacabra (9th St NE between H and I) – whether early afternoon or evening, it’s been closed. Has it closed down? I didn’t check storefront for a sign, I must admit.”

Yup, there’s a sign out front saying they’ll reopen in March. It’s likely due to the weather turning cold and most of the seating being outdoors. Kinda like how Standard/Garden District closes for winter at 14th and S St, NW.