DINING OUT DMA and dani get a divorce

IT LOOKED JUST LIKE LUNCH ALWAYS does at 1717: The discreetly understated design by Paul Draper, the art patronly clientele, and the properly attired tables all looked like business as usual at what has come to be thought of as one of Dallas’ premier dining rooms. When dani catering announced about 3 years ago that it was opening in the Dallas Museum of Art, it sounded like a dream combination of Dallas art and Dallas heart, the perfect marriage of class and glitz, the ultimate place to see and be seen-fine dining presented by one of Dallas’ premier chefs in the DMA, a place with undeniable cachet. And the new restaurant received unanimous critical acclaim and lots of catering contracts. It all seemed so successful.

But on this particular day the menu seemed more abbreviated than usual, and the dishes certainly sounded less baroque than dani Chef Kent Rathbun’s signature layered sensory sensations. Still, it read better than it tasted. The plate of barbecued “Cobb” duck salad was presented to me with cold duck chunks, on cold lettuce, with cold barbecue chunks on a cold plate. It was a salad that sounded good but seemed pre-assembled. Maybe parts of it had been waiting for me a little too long. A true kitchen artist would have, maybe, warmed the duck, perhaps concocted a subtle, Asian-style barbecue sauce instead of the sticky Kraft-like concoction that coated this meat with the mystery scent of leftovers, garnished the plate with something crunchy and starchy to contrast with the stark meat and greens, and given me some reason to believe a cook had paid attention to the plate right before it was delivered to me. Even basics such as tortilla soup and Caesar salad seemed flat and unimaginative.

Could this be dani’s food?

In a word, no. After three years of splashy balls and high-profile parties providing bold-faced copy for the society writers, dani left DMA last May. Actually, dani dissolved-owner Robert Hoffman (co-chairman of Automated & Custom Food Services, LP), Rathbun, and chefs George and Katie Brown plan to open another restaurant on McKinney Avenue next spring. And the Museum’s contract went to another bidder.

Hoffman is the mind behind dani whose money and imagination fueled fine dining in the Museum from the beginning. Before he had his bright idea, the Gallery Soup Buffet was all that was available, a Junior Leaguish cafeteria line manned by volunteers. Hoffman, longtime Museum trustee and lifetime gourmet, bought dani catering right before its founding chef, Nick Barclay, left the company to open his own restaurant (the subsequently successful Barclays). Hoffman’s idea was hashed over with dani’s new chef, Kent Rathbun. Rathbun respected Hoffman’s knowledge and taste level about food, and mainly, he realized that their ambitions dovetailed.

Hoffman wanted to extend dani’s DMA involvement beyond catering. He wanted to join fine art with high cuisine in a restaurant in the Museum building.

Rathbun wanted to prove that catered food could be as great as restaurant food.

“If you can succeed at catering, you can run a restaurant,” he had declared to me one afternoon in the deserted afternoon dining room. “People perceive catered food as less than restaurant food, but the organizational skills it takes to run a successful catering operation are unparalleled.” Rathbun wanted to close the gap, make catered food as fine as individually prepared restaurant plates. “My goal,” he said, “was for no one to think my catered food was any less than the food I made at the Mansion or the Melrose.”

So dani took over the old Gallery Buffet and put in a temporary menu until a new menu and staff could be fully developed, That was in the fall, the on-ramp time to Christmas catering madness. In February, the Museum’s food operation closed down while Draper renovated the space. Meanwhile, dani was committed to fulfilling the Museum’s entire catering obligation from its Northwest Highway location.

It sounds like a caterer’s dream-a built-in clientele, automatic bookings (everything Museum corporate patrons wanted catered, all on-premise events, and all Museum fund-raisers were turned into dani event orders, plus there were the Museum’s public relations coattails to ride). But there were difficulties and extra costs hidden beneath the obvious homefield advantage. Seventeen Seventeen quickly outgrew’ its location-the Beaux Arts Ball in 1996 amassed 1.200 people in the Museum, making dani’s on-premise catering off-premise catering. The cost of mounting an event like this-with walkie-talkies, herds of waiters, and massive amounts of rental (dani’s rental department could only provide for a crowd of 500 people; after that, everything had to be rented from the outside) presented a profit problem, not a profit.

The DMA staff didn’t seem to quite grasp Hoffman and Rathbun’s agenda, either. Rathbun still remembers the first event order he received for DMA catering, where the amount of food to be served per person wasn’t specified. He was just supposed to “make enough.” That kind of non-calculation pretty much capsizes food costs. Rathbun resolved to take the low prices higher by starting gradually, educating clients about fair pricing and corresponding quality. It’s a simple proposition-you get what you pay for. But somehow, with catering, people find it hard to believe. On dani’s catering wine list there are wines you’ve probably never heard of, not just because they’re so good, but because a caterer’s best trick is to offer stuff the consumer can’t get any other way. After all, how can you charge them $30 a serving for a filet when they can buy a whole tenderloin from Kuby’s for $30? Clients tend to forget that when they buy the beef from Kuby’s, they’ll be cooking it, and probably not with a Shiner Bock glaze, sided with apple bacon, cabrales, and cabbage tart.

The small facility at 1717 is the only hot kitchen in the Museum-but dani catered everything for the Atrium Cafe downstairs, too. “You have to remember,” says Rathbun, “that though 1717 and the Atrium are in one building, they’re two blocks apart. Receiving is another block away, and you have to hire really smart, trustworthy people in receiving that are not under your supervision. And you have to pay them enough to make them more trustworthy so that shrinkage won’t be a problem and they know to refuse delivery on a case of brown lettuce or bruised strawberries.”

Adding to the complication, the rental department was in the basement of the museum building, and the catering offices were on Northwest Highway. “Of course, every place needed faxes and phones, so we got the double overhead bingo,” Rathbun explains.

The sure way to overcome all the hidden costs is to cut costs on the actual product, but that didn’t fit his or Hoffman’s vision. “I’m simply not willing to compromise quality,” says Rathbun.

“My early price concessions came back to bite me,” he figures now. “I was at the Flora Awards last spring, and Stanley Marcus made a speech where he said, ’Never apologize for pricing. There’s always a place for people at the top.’ 1 really understand that now.”

After three years of success but no profit, Rathbun decided he’d had enough and told Hoffman he wanted to get out of the catering business and do what every passionate chef always means to do: start his own restaurant. “Mainly I regret that I won’t be going to the Museum for lunch as often, but we’d done what we could there,” Hoffman says philosophically about his food and philanthropy effort. “The museum is better off than it was. We gave the museum a kitchen, a reputation for food; we made it a destination, and now it’s someone else’s turn.”

The question of whose turn it was was up to the museum. Rathbun’s are big clogs to follow.

Nancy Davis, director of marketing for DMA, says it was easy to screen out many bidders. “It’s tricky to have a restaurant in a museum that’s open beyond museum hours. There are a number of restrictions and security issues to deal with,” she says. Like no helium balloons, and no votive candles for decoration. The museum quickly narrowed the field to three companies; one of them was Culinaire International, which runs food operations at Belo and the Meyerson.

“Mostly we eliminated others because they didn’t have the capacity to handle large crowds,” Davis says. “We needed a company that was experienced with staffing for large crowds and had (he financial wherewithal.”

At the final stage, each contending caterer presented a tasting for senior museum staff members-Kim Bush, head of operation; Erich Ephraim. associate director in charge of financial: Randy Daugherty, assistant director for development and membership; and Charles Venable, DMA’s acting director. Not exactly culinary experts, but remember, they were also selecting their lunchroom for the forsee-able future. The contract went to Wynnwood, not quite a catering company, but a “hospitality services management company” that provides food and beverage for the Mary Kay Building as well.

More and more hotels (and at least one museum) are outsourcing their food and beverage, making their money on the rooms and leaving room service to an outside contractor who manages all food service. This is what Wynnwood does.

Rene Cameron, the catering director for dani who was hired by Wynnwood in the same capacity, answers the obvious question; How can Wynnwood make this contract profitable when dani failed?

“Wynnwood has more facilities-their corporate dining for Mary Kay has 700 employees, and they’re in the formative stages of opening several bakery bistro concepts in Piano and McKinney,” Cameron says. “So the company has increased buying power and more room to negotiate prices.” There’s an understanding that success in this location means more than a firm bottom line- Wynnwood’s executive chef is Raoul Orosa, and the executive sous-chef is Manny Pose, formerly at the Crescent Club. Recently, Wynnwood hired a new pastry chef, also from the Crescent. But the culinary goal isn’t as haute as dani’s.

Wynnwood, according to Nancy Davis, has some innovative food service ideas to make DMA’s food more “accessible” to museum members. The food is more kid-friendly. Wynnwood, she says, is better for “normal” food. It turns out that those who appreciate fine art don’t necessarily have an equal appreciation of fine food and that dani’s version of 1717 was actually more restaurant, in terms of food, than the Museum really needed. “It’s been a seamless transition for the museum and for visitors.” says Davis.

“Lots of people don’t notice anything is different.”

Some do.