Food, theater and sustainable architecture

Kim Bartmann ended up in the restaurant business because she needed a job. Her unemployed status—and a small fib that she told about being a vegetarian—landed her a cooking gig, and from there she toured a number of local kitchens before leaving the business to work at a sundry of odd jobs, including a stint as a parking attendant. “I vowed I’d never work at another restaurant again,” Bartmann says.

But just when she thought she was out, an intriguing spot in Uptown pulled her back in. “I drove by the Café Wyrd spot and thought that it would be a good place for a coffee shop and opened that in 1991.” Café Wyrd came on the scene prior to the explosive java spot overload that swept the country in the next five years and attracted an eclectic crowd of Left Bank-feeling folks. Bartmann ended up opening the Bryant Lake Bowl in 1993 after touring the old bowling alley and deciding that it was the ideal spot to do an unaffected wine bar. She teamed up with a friend who wanted to open a theater and the unlikely combination of a restaurant with a bowling alley and performance space was born. By 2001, the restless restaurant entrepreneur had tired of Café Wyrd and wanted to do something different in the space, so she closed the coffee shop and opened Café Barbette, which she claims has at last found its own identity after some hits and some misses over the past seven years.

A similar description could also be attributed to Bartmann, who now in her mid-forties, exhibits the relaxed confidence of someone who’s been doing it her way for long enough to grow into it. Her somewhat ADD approach to finding and opening restaurants makes it unlikely that she’ll ever be accused of creating concepts and yet, her success in the business she wanted to get away from not all that long ago, means that she is, indeed, a restaurateur. Her life encompasses not just food and restaurants, but a number of wide-ranging passions that are on display in each of her locations as well as the projects that she’s scoped out over the years (anyone remember Siren?) such as a love of theater. The most recent example is the Red Stag, one of only a handful of LEED certified restaurants in the United States.


Going green at the Red Stag Supper Club

Bartmann and her sister, Kari, trolled for a spot in Northeast for a while before finding the former mechanical contractor’s building and seeing great potential. “The Bowl’s lease has been under threat for some time, since about 2003, so since then I’ve been looking to find another spot,” Bartmann says. “I went through a lot of different projects before I finally settled on the Stag, and because of other stuff I had been engaging in on the sustainability front, I decided that since the restaurant was going to be a full build out, it was worth doing it in a sustainable way.”

Bartmann discusses supporting local economies, providing her employees with health insurance and tosses off statistics about energy efficiency that, despite her low-key delivery, displays that she not only walks the walk but that she’s also a fairly studious expert on the topic of sustainability and environmental impact—or, as Bartmann says, “I consider myself an environmentalist and now I have a great story to tell.”

It’s more than just a personal dogma that made the Red Stag work, though. It’s also good business. “Building something or engaging in business in any other way is less profitable, less productive and bad for the environment,” Bartmann says. “I’ve dramatically lowered my operating costs reducing energy use by over 50 percent and water use by 70 percent. Restaurateurs can affect our other operating costs only incrementally, so these are big numbers.” One example where the massive reduction in energy costs comes from is the use of a Melink hood system with an optical eye that measures heat as it comes off the grill and slows fan speed down in real time. The Stag also uses low flow fixtures and on-demand water heaters rather than tank water heaters, which save a lot of water and gas.

The project wasn’t without its fair share of headaches, including hunting for materials and educating contractors but the payoff is evident in the end product. Plus, according to Bartmann, there’s a nearly immediate return on the investment. “There are a lot of skeptics who will say it’s not worth what it costs. I have nothing that doesn’t pay for itself within 18 months. I have water heaters that will pay for themselves in the next few months and that’s real money that can get spent on some other element of the business.”

Ever the restless entrepreneur, Bartmann’s already got her eye on a couple of new projects, including doing a little remodeling at the 15-year old Bryant Lake Bowl. When asked if she’ll incorporate the same practices that she did at the Stag into the remodel, Bartmann doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. I’d never do another project that didn’t.”