Former Wall Street banker transforms Arrows Restaurant into The Velveteen Habit
Photo / Tim Greenway
Benjamin Goldman of The Velveteen Habit in the dining room. The name alludes to “The Velveteen Rabbit,” the story of a stuffed animal's quest to become real.
Last year, after a decade of working on Wall Street, Benjamin Goldman realized his lifelong goal of opening a restaurant. He bought a four-acre property that for 25 years housed Arrows Restaurant, a fine-dining destination that closed in 2013.
Goldman, 33, and his team transformed a 250-year-old farmhouse near Ogunquit into The Velveteen Habit, a rustic farm-to-table restaurant with a focus on cocktails and wine. An edited transcript of a conversation with Goldman follows.
Mainebiz: How did you go from investment banker to restaurateur?
Benjamin Goldman: My mother's family is Italian, my father's family is Russian and Jewish, so our home was a melting pot of crazy smells and flavors. In New York I became interested in wine. In 2008, the finance world shifted and the job I enjoyed really changed. I frequently visited a friend in Napa Valley, and that's where my love of wine took off. I got a sommelier degree from the International Culinary Center, and Level 1 and 2 certifications from the Court of Master Sommeliers. This property had been a white tablecloth restaurant with formal service. We saw the potential for it to be something more contemporary and metropolitan. My parents live in York. I spent summers and vacations here and my wife and I wanted to get back to New England. We are young. We have good career backgrounds. We figured that if there was a time to take a chance, it's now. It required pretty much everything we have.
MB: How does your Wall Street experience translate to what you do now?
BG: The dining room is just like the trading floor in many ways. You have different pieces of information coming to you from every direction. You have to deal with it all calmly and not get freaked out. It's all about triaging and multitasking. In a dining room, there's so much energy and emotion and camaraderie. If your staff feels that, your customers read right into that and it's great.
MB: What have been the biggest challenges?
BG: It's the unexpected disasters that have to be fixed immediately and suck up a ton of time. When we were doing construction, the boiler went out. The pipes froze and burst. There were ceiling leaks and floors that had to be fixed. These were huge expenses. This summer, our ice machine broke. The oysters need ice, the bar needs ice, the kitchen needs ice and customers need ice for water. It took two weeks to coordinate the plumber and electrician, so we were going to Cumberland Farms at 3:30 p.m. every day to buy 50 pounds of ice, which was absurdly costly and not what you want to be doing before you have 100 reservations.
MB: Has being in Arrows' former spot impacted you?
BG: If Arrows hadn't been here, I don't think anyone would know this building exists. People are glad that the tradition of this property got carried on, and it didn't just sit idle. But people come here expecting Arrows. The No. 1 question is, 'What's your dress code?' It's challenging to convey that it's a different concept. We play Bob Dylan and the blues. We want people to come in during the week for drinks and dinner, and not have it be a big production. We can't be everything for everyone. But we can do everything we can to make people happy.
MB: How have you gotten the word out?
BG: We can do a good job of giving diners a high-quality experience. But how do we do outreach? We're two miles from Ogunquit's main strip so people won't find us by walking by. We have to play to our strengths. We have an acre of lawn. And we have a garden that at its peak provides 85% of the restaurant's produce. We can do events of up to 175 people, so we've had weddings here. We're doing private holiday dinners. We had 125 people for a Memorial Day pig roast. We had 75 people for an Oktoberfest with Allagash Brewing Co. These events are fun and show the property in a whole different way.
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