Opening during a pandemic means innovation, Broken Arrow owners find
Courtesy / Broken Arrow
Broken Arrow, which opened at the end of October at 547 Congress St. in Portland, hopes to offer a full menu and indoor dining in the future, but has modified its menu for takeout. The restaurant connects with producers through the online platform Forager.
Broken Arrow, which opened on Congress Street in Portland in October, is the latest buyer and only restaurant to sign on with the rapidly growing Forager online platform.
The restaurant features "regional classics," ranging from oysters to beans. So when it came to supplying local food, owners Holly and Lyle Akers saw Forager as the best way to connect with local producers.
Broken Arrow opened at 547 Congress St. the last week of October, in the corner site most recently occupied by West End Deli.
At first, the restaurant offered socially distanced indoor dining only, with a menu that had been pandemic-modified to one meal option that could be ordered in four, six or eight courses. As the pandemic has surged in the last few weeks, the menu has been modified to be more take-out friendly.
Broken Arrow is the only restaurant among Forager's 40 buyers, though Forager does work with food service customers that include prepared food departments in retail stores and institutional food service programs in hospitals and corrections facilities.
Holly Aker said the app is great for the restaurant's model. "If family can be who you chose, so is your community, and we are thrilled to be a part of this one," she said.
The restaurant is the latest buyer on Forager, which has clients in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Iowa and New Mexico. It also has more than 400 suppliers in those states as well as Vermont and Kansas.
The online platform went live in 2017 accounts for $250,000 to $400,000 a month in local food volume, according to founder David Stone, who estimates that it’s used for 5% of Maine’s local food transactions. “COVID hurt us in the beginning, but now it’s opening up new markets,” he told Mainebiz last month.
Aker said that the app makes it easier to connect with suppliers and communicate and plan with them.
"We shape our menus off what's available and Forager helps lay that out for us," she said. "You also have the option to work with a different set of producers who might have smaller inventories. I liked the model, I liked the suppliers selling on the site and I liked the mission of the company."
The restaurant sources ground beef, pork, eggs, dairy, Maine cheese, greens for its winter green and citrus salad, Maine grown beans, "and all the vegetables we can get," Aker said. "You can tell them what you need and they help you source it locally. We could also identify farms that we want to work with and they help connect us and figure out delivery."
Opening during a pandemic
Connecting with suppliers has been one of the easier challenges for the restaurant in 2020, which had been in the planning stages for three years. The Akers got final license approval, including one for outdoors dining, from the Portland City Council in February. While they've been lauded for opening during the pandemic, Holly Aker said they didn't have a choice.
"We had to open, just like some places had to stay open," she said. "Walking away was not an option for us, but we needed to figure out how to open in a way that was going to give us some sort of a chance." Initially they were going to open in early summer, but had to put the brakes on in March and reset.
"There are so many bills, and although the work stopped in some ways, the bills did not," Aker said. "Then restarting our contractors, getting the products and inventory we needed, and figuring out a timeline as cases are going up and down was all very difficult."
While neither of the Akers is originally from Maine, and they met in Chicago, they got engaged at Sebago Lake. "We made the decision that day this is where we wanted to plan our life," she said.
The two have spent their careers in hospitality, and Lyle has owned two restaurants in Chicago.
"Hosting and entertaining is at our core, it's a lifestyle we chose," Holly Aker said. "We are privileged to do that in Maine, which happens to have the most amazing resources, not only in the farms and sea, but in the people we get to work with."
She said the restaurant's team, as well as the farms and fishermen it connects with, and its customers, are all included in that.
The original plan was to open with a full menu of regional classics. Normally, the restaurant would seat 47, with an additional 17 at the bar.
To adjust for pandemic service, they modified the menu and refined the choices to limit the products they have in-house to better control inventory. Customers buy tickets online for their meal. The tickets helped the restaurant estimate what was needed both product-wise and staff-wise, Aker said.
The plan worked out well, keeping waste and excess down. But it had to be modified again as cases have risen in the past several weeks.
"Portland is not dining out right now, understandably," Aker said. The latest menu modification works better with take-out.
"We are still focused on regional classics but we have taken a more rustic approach, something more comforting as we get into winter," she said. "We are blending an a la carte menu and our dining experiences. We still want to offer something for those who want to dine in. but we want to keep elevating the 'experience' for those who choose it and keep a tight limit on how many people are in the space."
Keeping the doors open
Opening in a pandemic had challenges that people not in the business may not even think about.
"It's not just Lyle and I," Aker said. "We hired a staff, we took on a chef with a family, we have a team with bills, we made commitments to local suppliers and farms to support them."
The pressure is "unbelievable," she said. "We are trying to keep the doors open not just for us, but for them. This is a challenge for everyone with a business right now."
Since they haven't been opened for a long, they also don't qualify for any restaurant grants or loans or COVID-19 support. "We have no pre-COVID sales records and no 2019 reports," she said. "Obviously we are not alone in this, anyone who has opened a business during this time is facing the same challenges, there are few options for new restaurants."
And, of course, "Opening was also not quarantining, which means our parents can't visit and we can't be around anyone high-risk and there are no short cuts with our own safety."
Aker said she's so comfortable now with safety precautions, "I am the person wearing a mask alone in the car."
Despite the challenges, she said they are proud of how the restaurant has done. "The food is incredible, the space is beautiful, we created the ambiance we wanted, but we have no idea if we will survive to share it. There are people who have been involved in the process that can't visit yet."
She said there's no clear plan on how things will look at Broken Arrow after the pandemic.
"I don't think we know what next week will look like," she said. "When people want to dine in again, we would like to create an incredible experience that feels like an occasion." She said they might keep the tickets model.
At the heart, they're hospitality people and this is what they do. "Everyone is struggling," Aker said. "I see it and I understand. It's our nature to want to pour you a drink, cook you dinner and try to make it a little better. If only things were so easy right now."
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