This dealer introduced us to the Comtec Pie Press. With the press of a button on this miracle laborsaving machine, we could stamp our dough into the pie pan, fluted border and all, in two seconds! Prior to that, we often felt as if we were spending our entire lives rolling dough by hand. We used to stand side by side in front of our worktable and have rolling contests set to music—Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, and some rock and roll—to help pace us and get the work done a little faster. The pie press was revolutionary for us. The dealer also sold us two twenty-quart mixers, and so, finally, we graduated from our original kitchen Mix Masters (with ten times the capacity). Every single thing he sold us was secondhand and reconditioned, but it all worked just as if it were brand-new. He also taught us a lot about the bakery business, pointing out where we could go to find potential new customers and for better sources of supplies, as well as encouraging us to raise prices a bit.
What we had going was still embarrassingly rudimentary, however. We did start keeping records several months in, but they were just running lists that we jotted down on whatever paper we could find.
We called our receivables “owables,” our term for “those who owed us”! Of course, we had no “payables” because we had no credit and had to pay for everything up front. Nevertheless, we were coming up on the end of our first year in business with a grand total of $23,597 in gross sales! On our tax return we showed our cost of labor for the year as being $222, so we must have paid somebody for something, but for what, I can’t recall. We were still unaware that our own labor even counted; we were just feeling our way.
Up to that point, even with Jill’s and my discounted labor of $0 per hour, we still had no profit. Businesses exist to make a profit, not to fill up the day. We had yet to figure out that simple tenet. (About that time we hired a young accountant fresh out of school. Ours was considered a “shoebox business,” one in which all receipts, sales, purchases, employee records, notes, etc. were kept on scraps of paper in a small box that we would hand over to him at the end of the year. It was our hope that he would make some sense out of it all.)
Nevertheless, some patterns began to emerge. At first Jill and I generally shopped, baked, and developed new products together, but little by little, Jill became more the inside person holding down the fort, and I became more the outside sales “expert.” By now we were paying our friends for their time, and Jill did the payroll each week. As she confided to me recently, at that time this was an agonizing learning curve. Still we continued to grow, and the garage began to get really crowded. We were in the second half of our first year, a transitional period for us.
At that point we were still selling only quiches and pecan pie in about equal amounts, but we were definitely ready to add to our repertoire. We started by adding other desserts. We would try out our recipes on our friends during the weekends to see which ones they liked best. This was a lesson in learning from your customers! We started producing a delicious cheesecake in a nine-inch pie pan because that was still the only pan size we had, and then we added a few apple slices to make an apple cheesecake. One day we dropped an entire pail of cheesecake batter on the floor, but we had all these lovely apples prepared already, which prompted the accidental birth of our Swiss Apple Tart. There was just enough cheesecake batter left in which to bathe the apples, so—voilà—our third product! I assume that we added a chocolate dessert shortly after this, too, because there was still chocolate on the ceiling in my kitchen for the next fifteen years until I got around to redoing it.
Keystone Kops antics kept up all throughout the early days. First, we experienced what we termed our great Pecan Pie Disaster. Classic pecan pie filling is extremely dense, and if there is the slightest flaw in the crust, the batter will seep through during baking and the crust will rise to the surface, just under the pecans. The result is upside-down pecan pies—not exactly salable. (Even we knew that!) As usual, we found this out the hard way. Once was bad enough, but when it happened a second time, we needed to do something about it. We laid out all thirty of the ruined pies on the table and started picking off the pecans to see what was just under the surface. To our dismay, it was the crust, not the filling. We started absentmindedly eating the caramelized pecans, one by one, until we had eaten at least two pounds each. Not a very good thing to have done. We didn’t quite get sick, but we examined the prepared crusts a lot more carefully after that, closing any gaps before filling them with batter. Unfortunately a few errant pies slipped through, prompting our very first customer complaints.
Then there was the Pâté Disaster. In our desire to round out our offerings, we started producing a very elegant liver pâté for our very first account, the Windmill supermarket. But we had only a bakery license from the state; to make products with meat, you need to be USDA inspected. Our bakery inspector went crazy when she came in for a visit and saw the pâté in the fridge, and we went running to the Windmill to clear it all off the shelf. The inspector gave us a pass, but we should’ve known better. We did use bacon in the quiche, but after the pâté fiasco, we were careful to keep it to less than 3 percent of the total weight so that the USDA requirement wouldn’t apply to us.
We still had no scales; everything was poured by eye. I suspect, now, that we always gave more, not less, so maybe that’s one of the places that our hoped-for profits went. It should have been easy to figure out by the sad lack of growth in our bank account. Our friends still kept coming to help us out as we grew, and our kids still had to show up after school to help out. It was about then that my housekeeper, Bridget, my regal sidekick from my dinner party days, started spending a few hours a day in the garage with us. She was Bonne Femme’s first real employee, even if she was only commuting from inside the house. She was our efficiency expert and would point out obvious ways to speed up our methods, making us feel somewhat silly.
Putting Quiche on the Map
After our first year in business, things started to accelerate at an almost dizzying pace. Our quaint little kitchen business, which hadn’t even been my idea in the first place, was taking on a life of its own. For me, a former bored housewife, the process of growing into something big was exhilarating.
One of the most important steps in the process was meeting Marvin Paige. He was a well-regarded New York City restaurateur, and the brother of my college roommate was kind enough to introduce us. Marvin looked just like Santa Claus, had an outsized personality, and was very giving. He didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, but he had the patience to spend countless hours on the phone teaching me all about the restaurant business before we even met in person. Meeting him changed everything!
Marvin introduced me to the manager of O’Neals’ Baloon, a highly visible establishment across from Lincoln Center, and I was able to convince him to try my quiche as a lunch special to be served with salad. It proved so popular that it went onto the regular menu.
The rest is pretty much history. Pub after pub tried out our quiche and started ordering from us. Restaurant managers all over the city shared their ideas, and Bonne Femme picked up many more accounts, all by word of mouth.
I was running all over the city hawking my wares, and almost everywhere I went, the restaurant manager would try out our quiche. We were still the only quiche company around, so we had a head start before the field became crowded. This was between 1973 and 1974, a recessionary period during which you could shoot a cannon through a white tablecloth restaurant and not hit anybody. We, of course, did not invent the quiche, but we started the trend that popularized it as pub food. Jill and I began to realize that thanks to Marvin’s introductions and the relative novelty of our product, Bonne Femme had a tiger by the tail.
We were still operating entirely out of my garage, and I was still delivering in my car, driving as fast as I dared, my trunk still stuffed with newspaper (my secret insulating material). I was making sales calls between deliveries, up Third Avenue and down Second. I had this ridiculous paper sign reading “DELIVERY—
5 minutes—BONNE FEMME” that I would put on the windshield of my Chevy. All the police in the city must have been scratching their heads—“Who is this crazy lady?” But I never got a ticket, not even once!
The success of our quiche in restaurants across the city marked the beginning of the end of the Keystone Kops Quiche Factory. By now we had fifty or more accounts between New York City and Nassau County, where we started. We found ourselves out of space again, with no place to keep our finished inventory, so we started stashing it in our friends’ freezers all over the neighborhood—a logistical nightmare.
Our fame was growing, and I was on the road at least three days a week. At this point Jill and I were definitely defining our roles and dividing the labor. And it looked as if we would reach almost $65,000 in sales by the end of our second year, maybe even $75,000.
I smile to myself when I recall the names of our original accounts, some of which are still going strong and have become icons in the city; others that are now known nationally and internationally, with many hundreds or thousands of units. More and more restaurants were trying out the quiche and our desserts. I already mentioned O’Neals’ Baloon, which was owned by my new friend Michael O’Neal and his late brother, the actor Patrick O’Neal; there was Charlie’s, P.J. Clarke’s, J. G. Melon, the Wicked Wolf, Puffing Billy, Proof of the Pudding, the Grand Central Oyster Bar, and the iconic Copacabana nightclub. Another was the Peartrees, owned by Michael “Buzzy” O’Keeffe, who went on to open the River Café, today considered one of the finest restaurants in the country.
And then there was T.G.I. Friday’s, long before it was sold and became the omnipresent global chain it is today. Besides Friday’s there was also a Tuesday’s and a Thursday’s, also owned by Alan Stillman, as he began his long career as a successful restaurateur. I remember the delivery to Thursday’s was really frightening, located as it was in the bowels of a building on 58th Street with dark, endless corridors that never ceased to scare the daylights out of me. I also remember with a smile that the manager of Friday’s told me he always kept one of my pecan pies at home on top of his refrigerator; every night when he got home at three or four in the morning, he rewarded himself with a slice before falling into bed.
Our packaging was still quite rudimentary. We did not yet have boxes in which to pack our products since we simply would have had no place to store them. So we were still using plastic bags—and, I am embarrassed to admit, in some cases tinfoil. How I carried them into the restaurants I cannot imagine, but I am quite sure it must have made me look pretty foolish and unprofessional, which I, most definitely, still was.
During the process of our initial expansion, I learned one of my very big lessons in business. We were selling our newest product, a Chocolate Mixed Nut Pie, to a restaurant called Gertrude’s on East 64th Street. It was one of those restaurants that was very hot—all the celebrities and beautiful people flocked there almost before the expression “beautiful people” existed. I got a call from Gertrude at one in the morning telling me she needed four more pies right away.
“Gertrude, do you realize what time it is?” I asked wearily.
“You have to, Susan!” she said. Of course, she was right, and it only took me a moment to realize it. Even back then I began to understand that customer service is as important as the product. I dragged myself out of bed, packed up the pies, and began the hour-long drive to Gertrude’s.
By then I was getting some help with my deliveries; hardly anyone in our neighborhood left for the city without making a delivery—even people we hardly knew, friends of our friends.
We still had no real profits, but our reputation was growing, a fact that began causing problems. It got to the point where we had lots of retail customers driving up to the house to stock up on our products, and large delivery trucks were pulling into the driveway to bring us ingredients all week long. Once again, desperate for space, we also began a slow creep back into the house—back through the kitchen and into the dining room, the library, the sun porch.
Our neighbors were proud of us, and very protective, but the village was another story. We lived in an exclusive residential community, and finally we got the letter I had figured would show up eventually. In not-so-polite language, it suggested that the village thought it was time for Bonne Femme to move its operations elsewhere.
The next leg of our journey was about to begin.
Chapter 3
Becoming Love and Quiches (1974)
I didn’t fail the test; I just found a hundred ways to do it wrong.
—Benjamin Franklin
With pressure from the village to move our burgeoning business elsewhere, we started to look for our first real space. We wanted a small building close to home, preferably somewhere our children could walk to after school and help us out. It had been just a little over a year since Bonne Femme got off the ground as not much more than a whim, but by April of 1974, we had located our first little shop.
The place we found was on Franklin Avenue in Hewlett, a small street across from the local firehouse and next to the train station. It was six hundred square feet of space, plus a big basement, and it was less than five minutes from where we both lived. Plus, the rent was only a few hundred dollars a month. To us it was pure paradise!
We actually had a little business going. We had a good starting base of customers, we had all of the New York metropolitan area open to us, and we were excited to see where we could take it. Jill already had a few misgivings—the amount and scope of work we were putting in was a bit more than she had bargained for—but I did not. I was all in.
Since we didn’t want to sign the lease personally, we went to incorporate under the name Bonne Femme. Much to our dismay, the name was already being used by a beauty shop; as a result, our application was automatically turned down by New York State. We needed to think of another name—fast. Jill’s aunt had bought us a gift of something she had run across in an antique shop; it was a framed embroidery sampler simply saying “Love and Quiches” in a lovely script. As a joke, and because we had to act very quickly, we decided to incorporate under the name Love and Quiches. We actually loved the name, so that was that. (We also recognized that this was a great name, and so we trademarked Love and Quiches in June 1976 when the company really started to grow.*) Jill and I each invested $6,000 to outfit the store. That might not seem like much, but it’s amazing just how much you could buy for $12,000 in 1974. We certainly could have used more equipment, but what we already had would have to do for the moment. We designed the place on a scrap of paper, just like we kept our books, but we now had a little front office and retail space, a decently sized work space with a seven-by-eleven-foot walk-in freezer, a second Blodgett convection oven, a second big double-door Traulsen fridge, a small scullery, and storage space. We brought our pie press machine with us from the garage, and though I can’t swear to it, there is a good chance that secondhand machine is still in use for small runs at our plant to this very day. We also bought two forty-quart Hobart mixers to complement the two twenty-quart mixers we brought with us from the garage.
We decorated the front office by ourselves—even sewed up the curtains—but I must admit that our effort was pretty feeble, with no real style. Not exactly high end, but at the time we were very happy.
Some of the first visitors to our new shop were the firemen from across the street asking if they could get some “quickies.” After a few bewildered moments, Jill and I realized what they meant. Quiche was not exactly a household word at the time, so there is the possibility that they were serious and not being snide. As we started getting our first walk-in buyers, mostly commuters on their way to or from the nearby train station, we picked up some other comical pronunciations; my favorite was the customer who kept coming back to get some more of our delicious “qui-SHAYS.” We also sold “kwishes” and “knishes”!
In the shop we had only one desk, which Jill and I shared, but at first we had it facing the wall, with our backs to all the
action. We sensed our error, and with one quick turn, a whole new world opened up! Now we could keep an eye on everything while we worked. Next, my father insisted that we buy an adding machine with a tape; without it, I always had to add everything twice to make sure of the numbers. Of course I resisted, like I resisted all of his advice, but he won that round, and my accounting work was cut in half. This was long before the age when computers came into universal use. Businesses at the time used the general ledger to keep their books. But we hadn’t even gotten that far yet.
What remains a mystery is how we kept it all going. Though business with our restaurant customers was brisk, we still had no clue how to price our products properly, there was no profit, and a salary for each of us was out of the question. Every penny went to keep Love and Quiches afloat. Regardless, our little start-up seemed to take on a life of its own and we grew. What we should have invested in was some solid professional advice, but that never occurred to us. We just kept baking, and I continued to run up and down the streets of Manhattan collecting more customers for our quiches, pies, and cheesecakes.
Encouraged by my taking his advice about the adding machine, my amazed and proud father started hanging around almost nonstop as my accidental business developed. One day he would suggest we concentrate on only a few products, and then the next day he would come in with a huge folder spilling over with articles, recipes—everything from muffins to raspberry cakes to pizza—and new product ideas. He was disruptive and sometimes a nuisance, but welcome anytime.
With Love and Quiches Page 4