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Owning a restaurant gives new perspective to a former food editor

I'd been in hundreds of kitchens and interviewed dozens upon dozens of chefs. I was a metropolitan newspaper food editor and I'd seen it all, or so I thought.

April Lisante and Christian Gatti own Avril, a BYOB they opened in 2009. Lisante, a former food editor, thought she knew the restaurant business. (Charles Fox / Staff Photographer)
April Lisante and Christian Gatti own Avril, a BYOB they opened in 2009. Lisante, a former food editor, thought she knew the restaurant business. (Charles Fox / Staff Photographer)Read more

I'd been in hundreds of kitchens and interviewed dozens upon dozens of chefs.

I was a metropolitan newspaper food editor and I'd seen it all, or so I thought.

Isn't it wonderful, chef, your recipe for coq au vin! Isn't it exciting, at 4 p.m., to see the amount of energy in the kitchen as you prepare for dinner. Let me pull out my pen and notebook and describe to our weekly food-section audience how you master this dish.

At 5 p.m., I'd walk out of that restaurant and back to the newspaper. Little did I know that the overworked, underpaid chef was probably waiting for me to leave, so he could take a handful of Motrin and get down to prepping for dinner, managing a staff, and praying that this week, somehow, he'd actually see a profit.

How do I know this? My husband and I are now living it every day.

I am a restaurateur these days, and a polygamist of sorts. I am married to a chef and to a Main Line restaurant we co-own. We opened Avril, a 50-seat, white linen BYOB in Bala Cynwyd, in August 2009. The day we signed the lease, we took the keys and thought: What did we just do?

I thought I was prepared for the business. As a food editor, I always found restaurants exciting. I would go to my husband's former restaurant and watch him work, and I couldn't help but compare the hustle and bustle of the dining room and the fast-paced plating of the food orders to a breaking story in a newsroom. You get the job done and get it done quickly, and you always know that at some point, there is an end to the adrenaline-fueled evening where you high-five your coworkers and pat yourself on the back for pulling it off. (Off the record, those evenings, for both professions, typically end in either a bar or a Wawa, hoagie in hand.)

But during my seven-year food stint at the Philadelphia Daily News, sitting comfortably behind my desk typing, I was never really in the trenches. I was never the owner of a small business.

Besides my husband and I, we employ just four others: A sous chef and three part-time servers. The week we opened our Main Line bistro, I felt like I was walking into a party. Greet and seat. Schmooze and open booze. What could be so difficult?

We were packed at first. Ninety people a night for the first few weeks. Ninety people along with a new staff finding its sea legs, no money to pay the exorbitant bills, my husband, Christian, at the helm of his first restaurant, and me, in a short amount of time, wide-eyed and panicked.

In this economy, not only has the panic not subsided, it has multiplied.

Main Liners come in, love the meal, and (you can almost predict it by the time their last bites of crème brûlée have disappeared from the plates) look at us with pity and ask the same question: "What ever made you open a restaurant in this economy?"

My answer is always the same: "I don't know."

We've seen a tremendous shift in our bottom line. BYOBs are great for customers who don't want to shell out $10 for a Pinot Grigio, but not so great for owners who could be making much more of a profit if they could sell alcohol. That's coupled with the fact that more and more families are dining at home, our regulars are less-regular, and easily half of our dinner sales have recently been fueled by online coupons and certificates.

This place has been all about blood, sweat, and tears.

When a giant refrigerator door fell off its hinges in the kitchen last summer and sent me to the hospital for stitches above my eye, we realized pretty quickly that our exorbitant, self-paid health-insurance plan covers almost nothing.

"You're lucky," said the nurse, "the scar will be right along your browline and will be almost undetectable." That and the $3,000 bill were both cold comfort.

We arrived one morning to prepare for a gigantic private birthday party and found the same refrigerator unplugged. The bill for that was $1,500 in lost food, and another $1,500 to replace it.

We're still here, but we've had to expand our horizons - and consider couples' counseling - in recent months. We've had to forego taking paychecks on many occasions to scrape together money to advertise much more than we did in the beginning, and we've opened the restaurant almost around the clock to make ends meet. We started out serving only dinners at first, and now we've added breakfast, lunch, and corporate- and special-events catering to the mix.

Restaurants are closing around us every day. You realize someone had a dream, a family to support, an opportunity for success.

But if there's anything I've learned it is: Enjoy the ride because - hopefully - one day this economy is going to correct itself and I'll have the next French Laundry.

Better yet, is French Laundry hiring right now?