SPILL IT!

Interviews with NYC business owners who have created something quirky, unique, magical or all of the above in their little corner of Gotham.

Grey Dog’s Coffee – June 11th, 2008

The wonderful Pete Adrian is co-owner of The Grey Dog’s Coffee, a restaurant and full-service catering business he founded with his brother Dave in 1996. Recently voted a West Village business landmark by the City of New York, Grey Dog specializes in amazing food, laid-back, low-key atmosphere and a rabidly loyal clientele. I grabbed 30 minutes with Pete at the Carmine Street location to get the scoop on their bestselling java, the importance of philanthrophy in business, and why Mary-Kate and Ashley keep coming back for more.

The coffee at Grey Dog really put your business on the map, right? That’s what I remember hearing about first.

We started winning awards for “Best Cup of Coffee in New York” on Zagat’s, CitySearch and a few other places, so yeah, that’s what I guess made press.

Where does the coffee come from?

A roaster in Westchester named Joe. The coffee is a South American blend, half-Colombian, half I have no idea. He’s ridiculously consistent, if it’s one degree off in his roaster, he can tell the difference.

How’d you find him?

It was actually a nice surprise when we opened. There were six or seven different places that found us and came to us and said “We want to be your coffee supplier,” without knowing who we were or what we were planning on doing, I guess that’s how the industry works. They get you set up, they gave us everything we needed and we paid for nothing, in exchange for undying loyalty, which is not a guarantee either. So they came in for us and brewed samples, and Joe’s was fantastic, so we decided we had to go with this guy. He’s our oldest vendor and we’ve never once entertained the thought of bringing in another coffee supplier.

I’m not a big coffee person at all, I drink coffee from maybe two places, and this is one of them.

I can’t drink it anywhere else.

You’re that stuck to the brand now?

I can, but it’s not an enjoyable experience. There’s a Connecticut Muffin down the street from my house; theirs is stomachable.

Do you see Grey Dog as a potential heir to the Starbucks throne, or would that by definition go against the “small coffeehouse/big city” model you’ve worked to establish?

We’ve had people entertain us on wanting to franchise, but we do too much to be that big, our menu is vast. Starbucks is moron-proof. You see any idiot behind the counter at a Starbucks, all you have to do is press the right button. We’ve had trouble duplicating our formula just at the 11^th St. place, so no, I don’t ever foresee us being at that level. If somebody wanted to come in and buy it, that would be great. But Dave and I don’t have the mental capacity to think on a grand scale like that. Big for us is three restaurants.

Do you think it is possible for both ideals to exist in one company?

If you look at a chain that does a lot of different things, like for example Olive Garden, there’s a million of them, and they have a pretty wide variety on their menu, but it’s run by a textbook. There’s a general manager, and no personal touches to it. Everything has got to be up to the code of central headquarters, so yeah, there could only be a lot of Grey Dogs if they were all independently owned – it couldn’t be run the way we run it from a central location. I could be wrong though.

The Grey Dog’s Coffee has what you might call a “pronounced hippie aesthetic.” That’s the impression I always got when I came here, and I mean it in an incredibly complimentary way. Was that a conscious creative decision to make your establishment stand out in the urban landscape, or was it more of an evolution?

It’s really just what Dave and I are into, that kind of country, Cape-Cod, Northern California-type thing. If you look at our apartments, they kind of look like Grey Dogs. Same color scheme, same artwork style, same shabby-chic thing, although not as contrived as that. Most of the décor looks like you’re driving through the country, and you’ll find one of those antique places that’s in a barn, and you go in and find this great oar that looks like it’s 100 years old and chipped on the end, and you think “hey, that would look awesome on the wall.” I described it to someone once as “what you would expect to find in Vermont, but can’t.” The décor definitely has a city sophistication to it that you wouldn’t find in the country unless it was done by someone from the city who moved to the country.

Where would your dream New York City location be for another Grey Dog’s Coffee?

Irving Place at Gramercy.

Any special reason why?

It’s pretty. No, seriously, what makes Grey Dog work here in terms of business, is that it’s got a great mix of corporate and residential, almost 50/50, and we do a great business with catering because of NYU and all the ad agencies down on Hudson Street. If you go down across Varick Street, it’s a corporate jungle, almost no residential out to the river, it’s all small businesses and high-end businesses. And then you cross over Varick Street and it’s all residential, and you get to NYU and it’s just a little microcosm of every possible aspect, whereas if you open a store in midtown, you’ve got business during the day and you’re done at 5. Here and at University Place you have both, and you have both at Irving Place. We did notice though at University Place that the residential crowd is a very upscale residential crowd. Here you’ve got crappy studio apartments full of kids fresh out of college who just want to live in the Village, scrambling to make their $1800/month rent. At University Place you’ve got families living in brownstones and they’re assholes. The staff complains about it all the time, they don’t tip well, they’re rude. We’re just so accustomed to people in this area being great. Irving Place would probably have a lot of assholes too.

The University Place Grey Dog is located down the block from what used to be Cedar Tavern, one of my favorite places in New York. Every time I walk by the site, my heart kind of shuts down. Do you have any favorite city spots that are no longer part of the landscape?

I don’t do enough to really miss anything, but there are some places that closed down around here that I’m happy are gone because they brought the area down. There was a pasta restaurant across the street. It was a chain of them, about five or six in the city and there was some prick that drove around in his Ferrari just stopping at each restaurant to collect the money, and they had their big obnoxious ugly neon sign, so I was delighted to see them go.

It’s true, even if you’re making a lot of money, there has to be a sort of perfect storm of a good product plus customer traffic and loyalty for businesses to thrive in New York because it’s changing so quickly. So you think that this neighborhood is changing for the better?

It is changing for the better. Carmine Street is a much nicer street now than it was 12 years ago. It’s also a much more expensive street than it was 12 years ago. The demographic changes kind of go along with the asking prices for the restaurants and the apartments, so yeah, I think it’s a better area. I don’t know anybody here anymore, but still.

Were people priced out?

No, they just moved on. People got married, they moved to the suburbs, different time of life.

Just curious, what’s the most popular item on the Grey Dog menu? I have a personal favorite, the grilled tuna salad, I don’t know what you put in that dressing but you should bottle it, it’s unbelievable.

I’d love to tell you what’s in it but I don’t know either, it changes with each head chef. The most popular item at University Place is the seared tuna tacos. Here it might be the chicken press, it’s a chicken mozzarella pesto panini.

Can you dish a little about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen? I understand they were fairly frequent visitors when they were attending NYU.

Oh yeah, there was one here this morning.

No kidding! Which one?

I don’t know the difference between them. She smiled at me, which made me happy.

Are they nice?

They are normal customers here sitting down next to other normal customers. They come here because nobody gives a shit. Nobody comes up to their table or treats them special, so I think they dig that. Their bodyguard sits out front with their big truck that they drive around in. Rarely do I see them together.

I’m not surprised they feel so comfortable here. Anyone else interesting?

Monica Lewinsky was an everyday regular here for a while. She’s a really cool person. We have a pipe upstairs that goes through a bench, and she did the fabric design on it, it says, “Made for you especially by Monica.” Holly Hunter is a regular over at University Place. She’s this big (holds up thumb and forefinger). Michael Strahan was here two weeks ago with his girlfriend. She’s pretty hot.

You guys get cool celebrities!

My brother just wants Willie Nelson to walk in here one day.

So where do you see Grey Dog in five years?

Probably exactly where it is right now.

Doing exactly what you’re doing and doing it well.

I don’t know how much longer I have in my tank. Both Dave and I would love it if somebody bought it one day from us, but it’s not a terribly salable business right now. Our asking price would be enough for us to retire. I wouldn’t want to retire right now, but I would want to go to some beach town and open up another café, and if it doesn’t work, whatever. But we would each need to walk away from here with at least two million bucks in our pocket. For someone willing to buy that they would need the forethought of gross expansion and the bank support of gross expansion. But to tell them as if they were just going to buy two restaurants from us, and own them like we do? Then guess what, you’re going to spend hours here past closing time. You’re gonna get dirty. You’re gonna have staff not show up. You’re gonna end up flipping burgers and taking out the trash and mopping the floors and driving around doing catering. Which I like, but it’s not a good sell.

Plus, you guys are Grey Dog. I couldn’t imagine someone just walking in and taking it over without you being there.

I’ve actually got a meeting with a guy who wants to open a Grey Dog in Montreal and they would own it. They would pay me, not exactly a franchise fee but a sort of renting the name fee and they would buy probably two years of consultation where I would fly back and forth to Montreal once a month and make sure that they’re doing it right and achieving what they want to achieve. That’s the closest thing we’ve got right now to expansion in that way, which is great as far as I’m concerned; it costs me nothing, I get to go to Montreal, and I get a check every month.

I have to mention that Grey Dog has been an incredibly generous corporate sponsor to my non-profit organization SWiSH, but it’s been fairly informal. Would you ever want to formally partner with a non-profit?

I don’t know if I’d ever want to do it formally. I was dating someone a while ago who was involved with the Susan G. Komen Foundation and started doing catering for all her events, and now it’s just kind of something where if I can help an organization, I will. I help you specifically because I know you and like you and we’ve had a professional relationship for years; I don’t say yes to everybody. There’s method behind it to a slight degree, but not really. Whatever good karma I can get, I want.

The Grey Dog’s Coffee, 33 Carmine Street (take the A, C, E, B, D, F, V to West 4th or the 1 to Houston Street) and 90 University Place at 12th Street (take the 4, 5, 6, N, R, Q to 14th Street); 212-242-8166, www.thegreydog.com