Café Blue Founder Pete Clark: Innovation Comes From A Sense of Humor
Pete Clark never intended to open a restaurant.
“I didn’t want to be in the restaurant business,” he says. “In fact, I was kind of afraid of it.”
Clark—who today operates four highly successful restaurants in Austin, Texas—began his career not in a kitchen, but on a boat. Clark founded Just For Fun Watercraft Rentals on Austin’s Lake Travis in 1987, renting pontoon boats and party barges to locals out enjoying the water. Clark spent his days working along the breezy waves of Lake Travis, soaking in the atmosphere of lakeside living. It was the lake that eventually drew him into the restaurant business: Just For Fun happened to share a dock with Carlos’n Charlie’s, one of Austin’s most famous lakeside restaurants. When Carlos’n Charlie’s came up for sale, Clark gathered a group of lifelong friends as partners and took on the challenge.
“If you can learn Carlos’n Charlie’s you can learn anything,” Clark says with a laugh. “I was the guy that was on site most of the time, so I learned the ropes pretty quickly. It was big and cumbersome and had a lot of moving parts, but it was really a lot of fun.”
As Clark’s team became experts at serving up fajitas, margaritas, and live music, other lakeside venues took notice. “Other lake people started approaching me saying, ‘We want you to do the restaurant at our marina,” Clark remembers.
So, he did. In 2008, Clark opened the first Café Blue restaurant location at a marina on Lake Travis. The small eatery—all outdoors, with only a kitchen staff and no executive chef—would be just the beginning of Clark’s restaurant career, which today spans a family of three different restaurant concepts in Austin, Texas: Café Blue, which has locations in the Hill Country Galleria and downtown Austin area, Sundancer Grill in Lakeway, and Captain Pete’s Boathouse on Lake Travis.
Café Blue’s original location on Lake Travis, in 2009.
Café Blue’s current location in the Hill Country Galleria.
All of the restaurants feature fresh seafood like fish, shrimp, and crab, along with a laid-back dining experience. Lauded Executive Chef Ben Nathan helms the kitchens at all three.
So, with all of those restaurants, how do Clark and Chef Nathan keep coming up with new ideas?
At Sysco LABS, we build the ecommerce platforms Sysco customers like Clark use to shop for their restaurants’ ingredients online. Every day, we’re striving to push the restaurant industry forward through technology. We’re always curious to learn from the most innovative restaurants about what helps them succeed.
In this interview, we asked Clark to share three pieces of advice for restaurant owners looking to become more innovative, creative, and playful.
Have a sense of humor
Kick Ass Seabass
Eggs Benedict Arnold
Clark finds inspiration for his restaurants from diverse sources: “Originally, the concept for Café Blue was a collection of favorite items that we’d had on tropical vacations,” Clark says. “It was about doing Caribbean and tropical dishes from different parts of the world, like Mexico, the Virgin Islands, or Central America. I find my inspiration at little beach bars on crazy little islands in the middle of nowhere. I also like to go out to other restaurants and find competitors that might have something good that I can do and put a little twist on it.”
But for Clark and Chef Nathan, one source of inspiration has proven more valuable than others: sarcasm.
”We’re kind of really casual people, and to some degree we’re a little smart aleck-y,” Clark says with a laugh. ”For example, one of our signature brunch items at Café Blue came out of a smart aleck comment I made in the test kitchen at Sysco. We had just developed a redfish pontchartrain dish, and I made a joke that we should pour that pontchartrain sauce over a poached egg and a crab cake and call it Eggs Benedict Arnold. It’s still on our menu today.”
”We have another item on the menu called Kick Ass Seabass, and again it was just a smart aleck comment I made. I tasted Chef Nathan’s sea bass dish and said, ‘Wow, that’s kick ass!’ It’s been on the menu forever. There’s a lot of brainstorming that happens where we go back and forth, and turn things upside down, and try to do things differently than everybody else. Every now and then there’s some off-the-wall comment that turns into something real.”
2. Know Your Core Values
For Clark, one important aspect of running a restaurant is knowing what you stand for.
“We have certain core philosophies we tend to use,” Clark says. “We come up with these one liners that we live by. They’re simple things like, ‘One plate at a time.’ We believe you make a plate of food, and you make it so you’re proud of it, and then you put it in front of the guest. You don’t throw masses of food out there without taking time and care for each one.”
”Another one we use is, ‘The plan needs to be to have a plan.’ Most people go through life without a plan, and things just happen to them. We’re okay with a plan that doesn’t work out, as long as we had a plan.”
Simple one liners keep everyone aligned on the mission of the company, Clark explains. No matter how creative your menu is, or your concept, or your design, some core beliefs should hold the restaurant together.
”That’s how we believe in operating,” he says. “We believe in assembling a team of good people, and we want good product. We’ve been successful doing things the way that we do them, so we tend to hold on to those core beliefs. The core still stays there.”
3. Value Your Partnerships
For Clark, partnerships have been a key piece of his business’ success.
”Our representative with Sysco was consistent from Carlos’n Charlie’s all the way until just recently when he retired,” Clark says. “I met with him every Thursday for 30 years. Mainly because we were friends, and we just wanted to visit.”
It was Clark’s Sysco representative who introduced him to Chef Nathan too, Clark says. “He referred this chef to us, and Chef Nathan came out and cooked for us in a live interview and we were blown away by the dishes and hired him immediately. Now, he’s a partner.”
The value of good partnerships can’t be underestimated, Clark says. At Cafe Blue, it’s the combination of consistent values, loyal partnerships, and a great sense of humor that create the restaurant’s culture.
”All of our restaurants have personality,” Clark says. “They’re not boiler plate. We have our little touches of humor. It’s fun to see a couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and they’re giggling about the sea bass in an environment where people normally wouldn’t be giggling about the food. That’s what we’re about.”
Want to learn more about the intersection of food and innovation? Explore careers at Sysco LABS today.