They say the trendiest of the trendy are those who have a complete unawareness of what anyone else is doing, yet are instinctually on the very cutting edge of their industry.
If you point out to 28-year-old Greg MacLaren that the menu he created for his Twinsburg restaurant resembles, for lack of a more local example, nationally recognized Lola in Cleveland, MacLaren will look you straight in the eye and tell you that not only hasn’t he been there, but on the rare occasion that he does eat out, he goes to Luigi’s.
MacLaren is the owner and executive chef of MacLaren’s Cuisine, located in an industrial park on Darrow Road in Twinsburg. While unlikely, the location seems neither to have helped or hampered business for this 40-seat bistro.
MacLaren says that after only a year in operation, he’s booked on weekends, which he credits to word-of-mouth advertising and glowing reviews from Northern Ohio Live, The Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal.
How did you get your start in the restaurant industry?
I started out in the business when I was 16, taking out trash and moving kegs at Blossom Music Center, working part time during the summers and after school. I stayed in the business through college.
After college, I started working 80- to 120-hour weeks. I decided I had to make a change. This restaurant was the brainchild of me and my mother-in-law [Gayle Murphy, who died this year].
What is the most important thing you learned in your first year?
I always knew that restaurants were a tough business, but until you own your own, you don’t fully understand what a difficult business they are. The profit margins can be really thin sometimes, and we’re wildly open to [variables like] the effect of the weather.
You end up becoming a closet prognosticator — you’re back there saying, ‘Let’s see here, it was kind of cloudy today, so business was down a little, or the Indians are in town, so it seemed like we had one less table.’ You end up reading signs. It’s a crazy business. It’s a lot of work, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of it.
Have you met the goals you set for your first year?
I think we’re reaching them, but really my goals are beyond this, too. When we first opened, we weren’t doing as well as we had hoped. It’s kind of a weird location. But after we got our first exposure in The Plain Dealer, business really took off and it hasn’t slowed down since.
Our word-of-mouth is really good. That’s very important to restaurants. We have a lot of regulars and people say nice things about us, and that’s really helped. I’d say we probably ended up doing what we’d hoped we’d do, thanks to rallying in the end.
What are your plans for expansion?
It’s something we’ve talked about, but we’re going to wait to see what happens this fall. In August and September, things slow down a little bit with people on vacation. We chose this location in anticipation of greater growth in Twinsburg and Hudson, two really rapidly expanding communities.
I’ve always just kind of seen this as my first venture. When we expand, we’ll always have this, but we have a couple of other concepts that I’m going to start shopping around to expand into. A year from now, I believe that I’ll have opened something else. I’m looking at communities like Hudson. A venture that would be different from this, but mutually reinforcing. A way to spread out labor, spread out food costs.
Because that’s what you battle in the restaurant industry. We’d be looking at a different concept, but one we could put a smaller satellite kitchen into. We’d use this as a central location for all the preparation.
When you develop new ideas or concepts, how aware are you of what your competition in the industry is doing?
You can’t totally ignore industry trends, but what I try to do is to find food that means something to me, so it’s not just on the menu because it seems flashy or exciting. Food means a lot to me — it always has — so I try to find things or make up things based on my memories or my experiences.
You tend to see something great and you tend to assimilate it, but by the same token, you don’t want to be a clone. I’ve had people who are great fans of the restaurant and what I do here tell me not to go in places because they’re afraid it might change my style.
This is a tough business and it can be very difficult to succeed in, especially being independent with one small restaurant. As much as independent restaurants are becoming popular and trendy, by the same token, they’re always in danger of being stamped out by the national chains that are well financed and can go in anywhere they want. The saving grace of the small restaurant is the popularity of the chef, the new cult of the chef.
If it wasn’t for that, it would be a scary landscape. How to reach: MacLaren’s, (330) 425-7979
