Chris Koszyk In the end, a sense of both failure and accomplishment.

Start-Up Chronicle

Getting a restaurant off the ground.

Editor’s Note: For more than two years, Bruce Buschel chronicled his experiences creating a restaurant on this blog, from picking a name to hiring a chef to marketing a sustainable seafood menu. In a series of posts this week, Mr. Buschel explains why Southfork Kitchen will not be opening in Bridgehampton, N.Y., this season.

In 2009, I built my first restaurant, and my last. I didn’t think it would make a profit in the first three years, and it didn’t. It was one of my few projections that was right on the money.

I wrote about my experiences in this blog for two years. My last post was March 2012. My last night as owner of Southfork Kitchen was April 3, 2013. With a sense of failure, of accomplishment, of relief, shame, commencement and confession, I will tell you what happened while you were away. Restaurant people love to tell stories. Sometimes, that’s all they have.

In the beginning was the word, many words. I had just finished writing a book for Simon Schuster, and my wife said, “Get out of the house.” What, honey? “Get out. Go see how the real world works.” It was 2008, I was 62 and ill-suited for retirement, a notion that struck me as being enjoyable as a Caribbean cruise in the summer time, nothing but ennui and health hazards.

Leaving the house was a golden opportunity to investigate the realities of my restaurant fantasies. You know the fantasies. No foodie has ever enjoyed a few good meals, home or away, without wondering; what would I call my place, what music would I play, what food would I serve, how many stars would I get?

Having lived in Bridgehampton, on and off, for more than 30 years, I knew the breadth of the local bounty; outside of restaurants, one could eat and drink deliciously well if one had a bicycle and a little money. Within a five-mile radius of my house was a butcher, a baker, a honey maker, a mushroom grower, a seafood shop, a poultry farm, a dairy farm and farm stands galore. Tomatoes and corn practically leaped from the silt loam onto my kitchen counter. There were vineyards and vodkas and pickled vegetables. Scape pesto was a treat. Shellfish thrived in nearby bays and estuaries. The Atlantic Ocean was teeming with wild fish. And yet, there was not a single seafood restaurant in my neck of the woods. That’s the restaurant I wanted. A fish joint. With local veggies and all of the clichés you could fit under one solar-paneled roof: free range, organic, garden-fresh, homemade, artisanal, sustainable and healthful. Or, to coin an acronym, Frog Hash.

Though I knew nothing about the restaurant business, or any other business for that matter, I possessed three pieces of data: One, some of the best hours of my life had been spent at a restaurant table with friends and family. Two, the very existence of 10 million restaurants in this world seemed to suggest they couldn’t be as difficult as everyone warns. And three, next to writing, everything seemed easy. Laborious? Sure. Exhausting? Yes. Challenging? Fraught with danger and disappointment? All true. But easier than writing. And out of the house.

Rookie errors were inevitable, so I wanted to start in the minor leagues. I approached a coffee shop in Water Mill that closed every day at 5 p.m. and asked if I might extend the working hours until 10 p.m. with a dinner menu. Originally a gas station, the shop was funky without trying, had outdoor seating and was owned by the adjacent organic farm. I could shop next door and patrons could watch dusk settle over the fields that produced the food they were consuming. It was like a dream.

Figuring out how two restaurants would share a single kitchen was like playing Twister on phenobarbital. Negotiations with Mr. Coffee lasted a solid year, providing plenty of time to pick essential brains: third-generation baymen, émigrés from European vineyards and millennials wearing their hearts on their rolled-up sleeves. Desiring a meaningful, if alternative, lifestyle, they were determined to damage neither the planet nor its inhabitants. Counterculture took on a whole new meaning. Power to the people was delivered in food trucks. There are no Ponzi schemes in the restaurant business. You can’t sell mashed potato derivatives that don’t exist or lie about wine, not more than once, anyway.

I signed the Mr. Coffee contract on a Friday. Two days later, I was informed that the family that owned the shop, and the adjacent farm, and that had given its blessings at the start, had had, at the last moment, second thoughts about the imagined traffic and noise and headaches. It had nixed the deal. Withdrew  its blessing. Just like that. That dream was over.

Several old axioms were reinforced that day: fantasies are fragile, contracts are paper, partners are risky, locals have power. My mojo was in overdrive, however, and my stubborn streak had been tweaked. Which led to another conversation with my wife. This is pretty much how I remember it.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I went for a cup of coffee.”

“It’s been a year.”

“Service was slow.”

“You went to Starbucks?” she asked.

“No, I tried to buy into a coffee shop.”

“And what did you find?” she asked.

“If you really want a fish restaurant, you have to go whole hog, and you have to go it alone.”

“A fish restaurant? Whole hog? Who are you?”

“I’m about to find out.”

Tuesday: How I Got the Restaurant Open — and Why I Started Thinking About Closing It Down

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 24, 2013

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/how-my-restaurant-adventure-came-to-an-end/?partner=rss&emc=rss