Inside a tasty New Mexico success

by Elliot Essman

Mark Bernstein beams with pride as he hands me what appears to be a flyer for a boxing match. “We’re on Starbucks’ radar now,” he tells me as I finally make the connection. The flyer — a private joke — for “The Heavyweight Java Challenge” has cleverly superimposed the heads of Bernstein and Howard Schultz onto the bodies of obviously well–built boxers. Despite the similarities in age (they’re both 49) and borough of origin (both were born in Brooklyn, NY), Schultz, in addition to being taller and heavier than Bernstein, operates more than 5,500 Starbucks locations worldwide compared to Bernstein’s four Flying Star Cafes and three, soon to be four, Satellite Coffee stores in Albuquerque. “When the roasting gets tough, the tough get roasting,” spouts a super–tough image of Bernstein. Looking beyond the obvious humor, you can believe it.
The locally–owned Flying Star restaurant and coffee shop chain is nothing short of an Albuquerque phenomenon. In a state that can be a black hole for local business start–ups, the Bernsteins have more than bucked the bleak trends. They’ve grown from a single store franchisee (remember Double Rainbow?) to a burgeoning business — all in the face of serious competition from a heavy–weight corporate competitor. In the process, they have become probably the most successful, non–Mexican, locally originated food chain in the state.
Jean Bernstein puts her own stamp on the Starbucks rivalry: “Everywhere we were, Starbucks came. There’s no question that Starbucks ringed our stores originally when they came in and drained off our coffee business,” she said. Starbucks now has 18 stores in Albuquerque, and Jean believes the company targeted the Flying Star stores specifically. “It’s their business strategy,” she said. “They know that if an established operator has created a territory, the market has been developed and will work for them.” As a result, coffee is no longer as big a part of the business at Flying Star as it once was. “The question then becomes, what do you do to handle the challenge,” said Jean, who was quick to answer:
“ Without being resentful or sitting around whining about it, we went on to build more Flying Stars, and what we did was evolve into more food. We built bigger kitchens, we expanded our menu, and it paid off very well for us. We hired a better chef. We spent a lot of time and money on pushing Flying Star away from depending on the coffee and pastry business, though we still do a very healthy pastry and coffee business now. It took a lot of work to change it around.”

A growing strategy
Flying Star didn’t appear on the radar of any national restaurant chain when it began as a Double Rainbow Ice Cream franchisee in 1987 on Central Avenue in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill. “Double Rainbow began in the early ’80s in San Francisco as a kind of West Coast Ben and Jerry’s,” Jean relates. “We ended up buying a franchise from them and refusing to pay royalty fees because they were so poorly run.” The Bernsteins learned early to go with what works. “We started as an ice cream and coffee place where people read newspapers and hung out,” Jean said. “People started to ask for sandwiches. Over a period of time food and pastry began to outflank everything. We evolved and followed our market.”
The Bernsteins split with Double Rainbow in 2000 (although some people may always refer to the Nob Hill store by its old name) and decided to rename their restaurant chain, which by that time had grown to three stores: the Nob Hill store and two in the Heights. They were to learn that choosing a new name can be a sleep–depriving experience.
To come up with the new name and theme, the Bernsteins hired the local design firm of Vaughn Wedeen and began to comb possible logos and art motifs. “We decided that we had to stay somewhere up in the sky and that we had to have a little bit of fun with it and it couldn’t be terribly serious,” Jean relates. “Many names we liked were unavailable. Flying Saucer was a good fit, but was already taken by a chain of bars in Tennessee. We wanted a name that was ours.” After considering more than 300 possibilities, inspiration finally come. “At 3am one morning, I was looking at a book about the artwork on Chinese firecracker packages. One of the illustrations featured a little boy riding a rocket. That was it.” The boy made a metamorphosis into “Rio Chan,” the cowboy who rides Flying Star’s rocket.
The Bernsteins were opening their fourth restaurant, this one in the North Valley, just as they were changing the signs at the other three locations. They were able to protect their trademark for Flying Star, but the Bernsteins had a little trouble cementing the rights to use “Satellite” for their new line of coffee and quick–bite shops. Sara Lee Corporation had a previous claim to the Satellite name for a brewing system they planned to sell to large commercial food service operators. On the advice of their lawyers, the Bernsteins sued Sara Lee; after considerable legal delay the judge ruled in their favor since Sara Lee hadn’t actually used the Satellite name for 11 years.

“We design the places to be hangouts”
It’s clear that the Bernsteins are not bashful about taking on immense multinational corporations. Though they may be ready to call in legal firepower when they need it, the true “secret” to their success in creating an Albuquerque institution rests on a pinch of creativity, a good deal of daring, and an appetite for extremely hard work. Their business philosophy is simple: “We design the places to be hangouts, to hide and get lost in,” Mark tells me. “We don’t tell our people to call everybody by their names. We let our customers keep their privacy.”
“ We believe you have to run your business the way you would like to be treated,” Jean adds. “I was working the counter and a woman came up and she ordered four coffees and one cookie,” she giggles. “I asked her if I could get her anything else. She said, ‘No, no, this is one cookie that the four of us are sharing.’ She’s probably our age and worrying about calories. That’s what she wanted.”
It becomes easier to understand Flying Star if you view the chain as being run not by restaurant entrepreneurs but by dedicated “foodies” — not just the Bernsteins but the whole cadre of chefs and menu designers. “Basically we pick menus based on what we want to eat,” says Jean. “Lots of people bring in suggestions or make requests. Sometimes the chefs just traveled somewhere and had something they really loved and want to try it.” The regular menu has typically–American selections like hamburgers and sandwiches, but it’s augmented by some Asian and New Mexican dishes. And then there are the specials. “It’s been a fun format to experiment with when we see food directions and trends, just to see if something will work in Albuquerque,” says Jean. In May, for example, the experiment was Cajun, which began with a shrimp ‘Po’ Boy.’ “The chef has a burning desire to do it,” relates Jean. “He devised his own homemade mayo–based relish for it. Then he decided to do a New Orleans–style Muffaletta sandwich — he brought in all the different kinds of meats that you need to do that and added a homemade olive relish. We’re also doing shrimp étoulfée, which worked out wonderfully too, with crawfish, that everybody who tasted it liked.”
Flying Star does extensive testing — occasionally using a panel of tasters — and sometimes they must reluctantly jettison a “brilliant” idea of two. “I just rejected a ‘Yum Nee,’ which is a Thai beef salad. It was good, but it has too many ingredients and the flavors just didn’t click for what we think is our customer base.” The Bernsteins try to stick with dishes that aren’t too complicated — or prone to error. “We want something cooks can do well, again and again.”
If Flying Star has rules, and no restaurant operation can succeed without them, they are basic, and all too rare for those of us who choose to eat away from home. Jean spells them out: “Free bread. Good bread with real butter. That’s not always the way it is. Bread costs money, so does butter, but that’s what you should get if you’re buying food. You should be able to refill your coffee cup yourself so you’re not mad at the server; it should be good and hot and fresh. You should be able to make your own decisions about the menu and have it organized in such a way that an average person can always find something to eat on his or her own terms. We’ll customize it, change it within the options that we allow. You should be able to stay as long as you want, read your newspaper, bring your laptop, use us like your living room. The service should be noninvasive.”

Corporate condescension
National chain operators of sit–down table–service restaurants have swarmed into Albuquerque. Applebee’s alone has nine Albuquerque locations; Chili’s has five; nearly every other chain operator from Romano’s Macaroni Grill to Mimi’s is represented. “The chains have decimated the market here,” says Mark. “Over the last five years, at least 5,000 restaurant seats have been added in Albuquerque — all national chains — in a market in which, in the same time period, independent operators have been able to add perhaps 200 seats.”
But most chain restaurants treat their customers in ways both Bernsteins find reprehensible. The key sin seems to be “over–servicing.” Jean switches to her best server imitation: “Welcome to our restaurant,” she squeaks, “can I help you?” The point hits home. Jean continues with real passion: “I asked a girl one time, ‘Are they going to fire you if you don’t recite an ultra–perky script to your customer?’ We want people to be themselves.”
Periodicals that cater to the chain restaurant business frequently discuss the concepts of “head turns,” “per–check averages,” and “strategic upselling.” The Bernsteins subject me to a crossfire of chain restaurant stories: how at several restaurants, managers are trained to “touch” patron’s tables to make them feel welcome; how at another the server goes through the ritual of writing his name in crayon on the disposable table cover. Servers are programmed, they tell me, to ask “What wine would you like with your meal,” or say “I hope you left room for dessert.” Servers are trained to be artificially friendly with patrons, to move the meal along, and to get patrons the check so the table can be freed as soon as it becomes apparent the party will not be ordering more.
“ Ultimately,” Jean stresses, “we only care about being the best. If you really go and pay attention to the ways the big chains design their menus, they’re designed structurally and psychologically to try to get you to spend more.” The Bernsteins freely admit they’d be happy for patrons to spend as much money as possible at their restaurants; they like to think they do it by making you feel that you’ve gotten a good meal value without pressure so you’ll become a steady customer.
The concept of “noninvasive” service begins at the beginning: The customer gives their order to a counter person. The order taker will then instruct the customer to proceed to a certain cash register to make payment. If the customer has chosen something that can be served then and there, like a pastry or coffee, he or she will be served by the order taker, and can then simply choose a seat. If the item must be prepared in the kitchen, the customer receives a numbered table marker; when the order is ready, a server brings the dish to the customer.
Flying Star didn’t actually engineer its serving format in advance; it evolved from much simpler days when the restaurant served mostly coffee, ice cream and pastries. “As we grew, we thought about changing the way we served,” says Jean, “but then started to think: If people sat down, and had to be approached by a waitress, they would feel pressured to order a certain amount. It was important to us to let them continue to choose whether they wanted just coffee or a whole meal.” In the early days, Flying Star met some resistance to the format. “But now that it’s become so common,” says Jean, “with lots of other chains doing it — Souper Salad for example — it’s become a more accepted format. We’ll never please everybody of course,” she said.
“ I do occasionally meet clients at Flying Star,” comments an Albuquerque realtor, “but there’s something in me that dislikes waiting in line to order, especially when the line reaches into the vestibule. If I were seated at a table I’d be able to curl up with the menu and take my time deciding on what I wanted, after I’d put all my things down.”
Still, noninvasion may be the key to Flying Star’s popularity as a place to do business. Groups of all kinds meet at the restaurant on a regular basis; university study groups are about as easy to spot as blind dates. You’ll see “Wi–Fi” Internet users speckled through the clientele, their laptops open, their gazes transfixed. You don’t imagine they would relish being disturbed by a server who, in classic “restaurantese,” has been programmed — above all other considerations — to ratchet up the check.
“ Most of the chains like Starbuck’s are charging for Wi–Fi,” Mark explains, “but I feel that it’s going to eventually be free wherever you go, so we went with the free service rather than thinking that we should charge. It’s tough to tell whether it brings in business; it definitely spreads laptops all over our locations. They do take up seats, but we think that’s the way coffee houses should be. I want to create an environment and a hangout, a ‘third place’ other than home and work.”

The proof is in the pastries
Since I go to a restaurant to escape from my computer, Wi–Fi didn’t exactly press my button, but as a patissier by training I was more than impressed with the level of the cakes and pastries. “For the desserts we have,” Jean beams “you’d have to sit at a white tablecloth restaurant and spend a lot of money. We still remain true to our bakery roots. Everything is baked fresh every day, in–house. There are no mixes or frozen products. We have a Dutch pastry chef who runs the show and a French sous chef — he’s our bread man. We do all our decorating work in a separate air–conditioned pastry room.”
Flying Star’s bakery is still so tiny (at 2,000–square–feet) that it has to be kept running 24 hours a day just to fit the people in. Jean talks of expanding to a 10,000–square–foot operation in the near future. Baking, it becomes clear, is her passion. “For example,” she says, positively glowing, “we just put out a Boston cream cake this week with a profiterole on top for each slice. My cholesterol levels are hopeless because of this. This week we’ve got a bananas foster cheesecake. We don’t skimp.”
Flying Star’s success, of course, relies in large part on its staff. “I think we have the best bakery staff in the state,” said Jean. “We have been very fortunate in that people want to work here. We also pay market or above with full benefits like any major national chain: vacation, health, disability, 401k match plans. Also we have such talent that people who are interested in the business come to us to learn. We’ve had some of our bakers for ten years or more.”
Flying Star does offer Southwestern–themed items like enchiladas and breakfast burritos, but it is not the menu that links the restaurant with the city where it began and came to thrive. I ask the Bernsteins to help me determine what makes Flying Star Albuquerque. None of us question the connection, but the explanation eludes us a few moments as we grope for ideas. Flying Star is a “loose fit,” “low key,” a “good value,” “laid back.” The true connection, Mark finally volunteers, is that “Flying Star is varied, just like Albuquerque, which is quite diverse.”
There is no questioning Flying Star’s motivation to expand significantly. The newest location will be downtown at 8th Street and Silver (scheduled opening is November 2004), in the former Southern Union Gas Company Building (designed by famed regional architect John Gaw Meem, who also designed UNM’s Zimmerman library). Expect to see more Flying Stars as the company scouts appropriate locations. Satellite Coffee, however, will be the main push. There will be six locations by the end of 2005. “We’re packed,” Jean tells me, with a combination of frustration and pride. “We can’t service everyone. We have to grow because we can’t fit them in anymore.”
It’s a certainty that Flying Star does not want to direct their overflow to the nearest Starbucks. “When we were ready to go into Riverside Plaza at Montaño and Coors with a Flying Star restaurant,” Jean says, “the other tenants, like Defined Fitness and Great Harvest Bread Company, thought we’d be a great addition to the mix. This was before Satellite Coffee. But Starbucks had exclusivity clauses with the developer, and they didn’t want us around because technically we also serve coffee to go, though we’re primarily food. They’ve never minded coming close to us, of course.”
Starbucks used all its contractual clout to win the round. Flying Star, after making an unsuccessful request for the space, had to retreat to their corner and wait for the next opportunity. Call it a knockdown, but hardly a knockout. Starbucks undoubtedly knows how it wants to handle Albuquerque as a part of its larger, multinational strategy. Flying Star has its own strategy, perhaps closer to the ground, but ambitious nonetheless. CW

This article first appeared in Crosswinds Weekly, July 8, 2004 and is used with permission. Text copyright by Elliot Essman, photo copyright by Randy Siner.