Baltimore restaurant blew minds a-plenty

A formula for success: Paintings of naked ladies, an 800-pound ball of string and a 300-item menu equaled 5,000 covers a weekend for an old Baltimore restaurant.

When I was a kid, my favorite restaurant was a place in Baltimore called Haussner’s. It’s closed, now, after a run of three-score-and-thirteen—but people still take tours of the old building, whispering reverently about the artwork that covered the walls, the amazing strawberry pie, and the cool efficiency of the waitresses in their starchy whites as they served 1,600 diners on a Saturday night.

For me, this love affair did not begin well. It took over an hour to drive the 20 miles from our house on the swampy wildlife refuge to the big city, and I would spend most of the ride whining. At the age of nine, my formula for menu appraisal was weighted heavily by the quality of the hamburger. Haussner’s scores were abysmally low, and I was approximately as discreet then as I am now.

Even without me—an excursion which I’m sure they devoutly wished they were making—the drive was awful. My father would open several secret chapters of his vocabulary every time we reached the traffic jam in the middle of the Harbor Tunnel, and we’d crawl back above ground starved and half-crazed, to spend a half-hour driving in circles looking for a parking place so we could go inside and wait an hour for a table.

Oddly enough, the waiting part wasn’t so bad. You’d think a young boy would be insufferable by now, but there was a lot to hold my interest. The waiting area was adjacent to the “Stag Bar” which was filled with very pretty paintings of very naked ladies, and downstairs was a ball of string that weighed eight hundred pounds or so, made from the strings around all the bundles of napkins that the restaurant had used in the last half-century. I was never sure which was cooler.

Still, all that driving and carping and cursing and waiting would bring me nothing more than some spectacular visual memories and a second-rate burger: I could do better with a stolen Playboy and a trip to McDonald’s. Exasperation finally led my father to tell me I wasn’t getting the (expletive deleted) hamburger tonight, I was having the baked rabbit. And this, as they say, was a life-changing experience.

I have always been fair about food. In the 33 years I have been paid to cook, I have had the opportunity several times to taste truly excellent food prepared by a person I truly despised, and my judgment of the food was never affected by my desire to see the person placed in a cage with an enraged orangutan. So, at Haussner’s, two and a half hours spent anticipating a crappy burger couldn’t keep me from recognizing that I was now eating one of the best meals of my short life. To my parents’ grim satisfaction, I mooned over the food as loudly and sincerely as I had whined earlier.

The hook was really sunk when Mrs. Haussner, the proprietress and widow of the founding chef, politely offered to give me a tour of the kitchen at work. I had never seen anything like it—you could have rented out the space as a 747 hangar. Around the pastry table, eight cooks were making strawberry pie (they may have made one or two other things as well, but I didn’t care). The hot line looked like it was staffed by a platoon. All of a sudden, the 300-item menu and the 5,000 person weekends came into perspective. There was more to this place than baked rabbit and art on the walls (the artwork, by the way, covered the walls. Covered. It was sold off at auction for more than $12 million, and the only thing I won’t miss is the marble statue of Hercules that I was convinced was going to fall on me and crush me to death before I got to my pie). It was as organized as a symphony, big as a brigade, and smelled better than either.

It worked so well because the personalities of the owners became the personality of the restaurant. Master Chef William Haussner was, according to his workers, “strict but fair,” and was meticulous in his attention to detail (he is reported to have told a customer who objected to a sprig of parsley that this was how his plates were garnished, and if the customer didn’t like it, he could leave). Mrs. Haussner, in addition to selecting the artwork and tying the napkin strings, was on the floor every night making sure the place ran right. And both of them built the kind of esprit necessary to any big operation—you can’t run it yourself; you have to have a bunch of people who all believe in it together.

And it ran so well that even now, eight years after the daughter retired and donated the space to a Baltimore cooking school, old customers still come back to invoke the ghosts of those strawberry pies.

Okay, I’ve given you a formula for success here. And did you notice that I didn’t say the word ‘branding’ once?