Q&A with Molly Gunn of The Porter Beer Bar and Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand

By Christy Simo

Owned by Molly Gunn and her husband and chef Nick Rutherford, The Porter Beer Bar, which opened in September 2008, has received nationwide accolades for its craft beer selection and food. Nestled in the heart of Little Five Points in Atlanta, the restaurant was one of the first on the craft beer scene and features more than 30 beers on draft and 400 bottled beers.

A native Atlantan, Molly grew up in the Toco Hills area of town. She met Delia Champion, well-known as the founder of The Flying Biscuit, and the two later opened Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand in East Atlanta in 2011, a quick-serve concept serving small-batch sausages and patties using Springer Mountain Farm chicken and spices sourced from South Georgia.

Restaurant Informer talked with Molly Gunn about opening her own restaurant and working with her husband, beer trends, and what it’s like to run two restaurant concepts. Here are  highlights from that conversation.

RI: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in the restaurant industry.

MG: My family took a trip to Italy when I was 16, and I simply fell in love with food there. I had never really shown an interest in it, but when I came back, I was interested in cooking, I was interested in restaurants, and I thought I wanted to be a restaurant critic. That sounded like the most fun. So I started working in restaurants to learn more about how they operated and what would be the most fair way to write reviews. And, of course, I fell in love with it and realized I didn’t want to be on the outside of it, I wanted to be in the middle of it. So one of my first restaurant jobs was bussing tables at Babette’s Café on Highland Avenue. I just fell in love with it.

RI: What was it specifically that made you say, I don’t want to be a food critic, I want to be a part of the industry itself?

MG: I loved the mild chaos and the fact that you were always fighting the mild chaos.  I loved interacting with people. That was so much fun. And my interest in food continued. Eventually, as I moved up the ranks, the business side of it was interesting for me as well. I was very lucky in that I was one of those people who was interested in the right thing at the right time. It’s hard to run a business if you’re not interested in business.

RI: Tell us a little bit about your experience at Seeger’s.

MG: I was one of the captains on the floor — essentially a highly glorified server. That’s where I met my husband, Nick, who’s chef at The Porter. That was a fascinating experience, because it’s the highest level of fine dining. You’re dealing with people who are from all over the world. For some of those people, they have so much money that this meal, it doesn’t mean anything to them. And then there’s other people for which this is the most special occasion – they’ve saved up all year or for several years just to come and dine at Seeger’s. So it was always a delicate balance, of feeling out your guests and trying to understand how comfortable they were with the formality. If they weren’t comfortable with the formality, I would try to be more casual and warm people up to it. It was a challenge. There were definitely people who expected very traditional French service, in which you barely talk to the guests at all, but most Southerners want a warm and friendly presence to reassure them that they’re not ordering poorly or they’re not making a bad wine decision or whatever it may be. I mostly filled that capacity there, in trying to make what could be a cold experience a warmer one.

RI: What was behind your decision to open The Porter Beer Bar?

MG: I had wanted to open a restaurant for years. Once I got into the restaurant industry, that was my dream and my goal. I looked at all different kinds of concepts. I wasn’t married to any one particular kind of idea at the time. I knew I wanted to be intown; I didn’t want to open a restaurant in a strip mall, and I knew I didn’t want to open a 300-seat restaurant or anything massive. I wanted to open the kind of restaurant—which I think everybody does—that they want to go to. If you’re going to spend 90 percent of your life there, it might as well be something you like.

Nick and I had bought a house in Inman Park in 2006, so we lived in the neighborhood and had always been casually looking for spaces. I went through a period of time where I had investors … it kind of all fell through. And we had walked past this space a number of times. It had originally been a Bridgetown Grill, then it had been a breakfast restaurant. We ate there twice and knew that it was not going to be there long. Nobody is awake in Little Five Points until about 3 in the afternoon anyway. Breakfast is not the concept that we’re strong on.

So we walked by and thought this would be a really cool space. We called the broker and looked at it, and just fell in love with it. It’s a very quirky space. It’s an old building. It was all the things that we loved, and we knew we could try to make it our baby. Despite working in fine dining and wine mostly, we both always drank really good beer. The Brick Store was our favorite place to hang out. We didn’t live in Decatur, but on our days off that was our place to go.

Spending time in Little Five Points before we signed the lease, we said, let’s eat at every single restaurant in Little Five Points. Hanging out at The Vortex, we noticed that they sold a decent amount of Delirium Tremens. That’s what gave us the idea that maybe Little Five Points was ready for some good beer. So we were at the very beginning of the trend. When we opened, it was the Brick Store and us, and that was it. Now there’s beer bars everywhere, which is so great. So we got very lucky in that we were kind of in the beginning of that. And the Brick Store has always been helpful to us, very friendly competition. They’ve always been wonderful.

RI: What is it like partnering and working with your husband?

MG: It’s definitely a challenge in some aspects. In other aspects it’s the easiest thing in the world. It would be hard to partner with anybody else. He works incredibly hard. I never have to worry about how hard he works. And that’s really the difference between an employee and a partner — you know they are working just as hard as you to pull this concept off. And when you’re married, it’s all kind of assumed. So in some ways it helps make it work out.

We complement each other really well. He knows my weaknesses. If you don’t see me write something down when you ask me to do it, it’s not going to occur. I’m very disorganized in my head, so I compensate highly on the outside to remain organized. And he’s very organized in his head, but he doesn’t love to manage people. So I’m the person who does the sit down with the employees and handles all that stuff, which is not his favorite thing. We balance each other out.

RI: Have you seen any new trends in the beer industry? What are you seeing now?

MG: In the beer industry specifically, I think that as the beer industry develops this wider base … we’re going through another growth phase right now. It’s rare these days that I meet people who have not tried craft beer. Intown I see that we’re going through this growth and most people are very interested in learning and exploring. As this younger generation of beer drinkers gets a little bit older, I think we’ll see more interest in vintage beer. Because when I go to Europe, when I go to Belgium, that’s what I see these bars have figured out that sets them apart from each other, being able to age beer properly and keeping it in the right conditions. It almost becomes like wine at that point. It’s tricky to know what beers will age, and you have to try them periodically. And it’s a huge capital investment. So that will be what ends up separating the “I feel like carrying craft beer today” type bars and then the serious beer bars.

RI: What are some of your best-selling beers?

MG: We have a lot of regular hopheads, so we sell a lot of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. Bell’s Brewery is going through an expansion right now, so they keep running out of it. But any hoppy beer sells well. In the winter, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout is amazing for us, as well as La Chouffe from Belgium. In the summer people love wheat beers, Weihenstephan does great. How can you not like it? They claim to be the oldest brewery in the world.

We have so many great local breweries now. I guess that would be the one trend beyond the vintage beer. There’s so many people who want to open their own breweries, so we’re seeing this huge upsurge in people contract brewing, meaning that they have their own recipes and they want to make their own beer, but they don’t own a brewery – that’s very expensive. So they’re going to other breweries that are not working at full capacity and saying, “hey, would you make this beer for me?” That’s how Wild Heaven [in Decatur] is made. And that’s how Terrapin got their start. They contract brewed out of a place. That’s how a lot of great breweries get their start. I think there’s a lot of people right now trying to do that, and it will be interesting to see who survives and who doesn’t. I don’t think the market can support that many kinds of contract brews. But maybe they’ll all flourish and be fantastic.

It’s really expensive [to invest in a brewery]. But that’s why I’m excited to see people like Jailhouse and Red Hare, places with physical locations start to pop up.  I think we’ll see that in the next couple of years, then the market will correct itself. There will be a bubble.

RI: Why did you decide to open a second concept with Delia Champion, especially so close on the heels of The Porter opening?

MG: Delia’s a long-term friend and mentor. I met her while we were both consulting on a restaurant in Midtown. Or re-met her, rather. I grew up eating at The Flying Biscuit, and so I had always sort of known her. I was that annoying kid with all the questions about food and how she made whatever. I’m sure she rolled her eyes at me, but I had no idea.

So we reconnected when we were both consulting on a restaurant in midtown, trying to help somebody out who had never run a restaurant before. Then I came and worked for her while she was starting to franchise with Raving Brands. I got a lot of great experience out of that. So when Delia said “I want to open a concept around my chicken sausage.” I said, “I love your chicken sausage. I’d love to help you.”

Once again, Delia and I balance each other really well. She’s got a lot of characteristics like my husband Nick – very organized in the head. And she loves the kitchen and the food. And that’s great, because I love to handle the people and the front of the house. It’s definitely a simpler concept in some ways. But you always delude yourself when you tell yourself that running a restaurant is going to be easy. It doesn’t involve an inventory of 500 beers like The Porter, but there’s still a lot of moving parts. We still roll out specials and all kinds of things going on. And we still want to do a food truck. It’s kind of gotten farther away as you get bogged down in the details of running another concept.

So I signed on because as Delia puts it, “Life is too short not to have fun.” It was a way for us to hang out and have more fun together, running another restaurant.

RI: What’s it like running two restaurants?

MG: It was definitely a challenge when Delia’s opened, because The Porter had been open for two and a half years and it was great, I had a great team in place, everything was going smooth. And the new one is like a baby. You can’t just leave it alone, it’s going to swallow something.

So I was definitely over there way more when it first opened, which was challenging, because at The Porter, people expected to see me there every day; a lot of my regulars were like, where are you? And my staff felt disconnected. Eventually Delia and I worked out our places. When I turned to Delia to say, “Hey do you need me?” she was like, “No I got it!” So she’s over there definitely way more than I am, and I’m happily back at The Porter. But it was a great lesson to learn. I’m really great at opening restaurants. I got to open the first 10 Flying Biscuit franchises, which was awesome.

RI: Why did you choose the location for Delia’s?

MG: We felt like there was so much fast food on Moreland. We wanted a location with visibility, but we also felt that it was the right size. It’s very hard to find small spaces in Atlanta. That’s why we have so many big restaurants in Atlanta; people want big restaurants. We wanted to bring something that was healthy and fresh and put it on the same row with the fast-food restaurants and see how far we could go with that. We also loved that community. East Atlanta Village is like Little Five Points’ younger brother. I felt the connection with it, and I think Delia did, too.

RI: Why is living nearby and being a part of the same community as your restaurant important?

MG: It’s incredibly important. When we first opened, it was during the gas crisis. So I literally knocked on my neighbors’ doors and said, “You can’t drive anywhere, you might as well come get a beer at my bar.” And they did. When we had the ice storm last year, it was one of our busiest weeks on record, because people could walk to The Porter. It’s important for the community to have places you can walk to, to be a truly vibrant, intown community. It makes it safer when people are walking everywhere.

When I go to Little Five Points’ business association meetings or Inman Park’s neighborhood meetings, it’s easy for people to voice concerns about whatever is going on in Little Five Points, and I’m here. I’m reachable. I’m not living in Alpharetta and commuting in. We’ve had all sorts of issues at The Porter when I’ve been at home and gotten a phone call in the middle of the night, that the alarm is going off and they don’t know how to turn it off or whatever it may have been. Just being there is incredibly important. Then also being able to support the community. When The Porter donates money to Horizon Theatre or Inman Park Security Patrol, it’s not only helping the businesses, but helping the community that I live in. It’s very cyclical.

RI: Who is the most influential person to you in the restaurant world?

MG: That’s a tough one. I have to mention Delia. Delia was the one who really pushed me to open The Porter. And she was the one who said, “You have enough money to do it, go do it! Stop waiting. Quit standing on your toes and just go do it.” I also had a great mentor in Boston, Christopher Myers who ran a bunch of restaurants with a chef named Michael Schlow. And he also had an unbelievable amount of confidence in me. I served as his personal assistant for a while, and I was a manager at one of his restaurants. And he was like, “The second you have that money, if you turn around and open that restaurant, you’ll be fine.” The confidence that my mentors have had in me has been incredible and very humbling.

RI: What are your favorite restaurants in Georgia outside of the ones you’ve worked at?

MG: That’s so hard. Living in Inman Park, we are blessed to have lots of good restaurants. I would be lying if I didn’t say I spent a lot of time at Sotto Sotto. I also love Rathbun Steak. It’s definitely special occasion, that place. In terms of casual restaurants, I love Farm Burger in Decatur. I still love the Brick Store. I love their new concept, Leon’s. They did a great job with that, making it kind of similar, but kind of different. And yeah, on my day off, I still spend it at the Brick Store.

RI: How has it been different working at someone else’s restaurant versus owning your own?

MG: I think it’s very easy in your head when you work for somebody else to say, “Oh, I wouldn’t do it that way. I would do it so much better.” I think that’s always what drove me to open my own place, to see how others would manage somebody. And then in my head, I would think, “I would have been nicer.” Or “I would have handled that totally differently. I would have listened to the staff.”

So it was very humbling when I did open to say, “Oh, now I understand why that manager acted that way or why he had that rule.” But I do think it’s easy to say that and not understand how hard it is to run a restaurant.  In working for someone else, you can say, “Well, I don’t want to do it that way,” as opposed to when you’re working for yourself, it’s only you who sets the standards. I’m lucky in that my husband and I both push each other. I push him to be a better manager, which he doesn’t love to do. And he pushes me to be more organized.

RI: What is your philosophy about managing people, then?

MG: My philosophy is definitely do unto others as you would have them do to you, as well as walk the walk, don’t just talk the talk. I think those are the two guiding factors. When I opened my restaurant, it was definitely one of my goals to be one of those places that people consider one of the best places to work at. So every year on  our anniversary, we try to add a benefit, something that helps our employees improve their quality of life.

For example, this year we rolled out a 401K plan for all employees, which was exciting, because a lot of places are not helping employees save for retirement. I would love to offer health insurance, but there’s also a fine line between being able to extend everything and not being able to afford it. I offer health insurance to all my managers, but the reality of offering it to all my staff is that The Porter would lose money every month until I have a trust fund (laughs).

That’s not the way to run a business. So we try every year. We offer paid vacation to all of our employees, and that was something we rolled out our second year. We just want to keep improving. And we’re very lucky in that way. Over 25 percent of our staff has been with us since we opened. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually is a lot of people.

When people don’t change jobs, it makes my life easier, it makes their life easier. It means people are happier, there’s more stability. What do you do when you have somebody new? You have so many experienced people to train them. So for me it makes sense to make that the highest priority, to try and keep your staff in place.

That’s not to say that if somebody is not working, they’re out the door. I hire very slowly and I fire very quickly. But once the right people are in place, it makes everybody’s job so easy.

RI: If you weren’t in the restaurant industry, what do you think you’d be doing?

MG: Now that I know how much I love business, I probably would be running some other kind of business. Something social with people. I got my degree in cultural anthropology. My parents said I had to have a backup plan. I’m not sure that they meant that (laughs). But some cultural anthropologists end up working in advertising and doing market research and things like that, so may be something like that.

RI: If you could decide your last meal, what would it be?

MG: Oh wow. My last meal would probably be champagne with caviar. And then I love crab legs or lobster with a great pale ale like Founders Pale Ale. You know, where you dip it in the butter sauce and you’re eating it on newspaper. So caviar, crab legs, then something amazing and decadent for dessert. I love carrot cake and Cakes and Ale makes a great spice cake in their bakery. Something like that, with amazing coffee.