It’s a space with a lot of history, and we want people to feel that history, without it feeling like a museum. To us, that means classic American chophouse cuisine, with a contemporary sensibility. We’ll enable our guests to go light on the meat if they want — ordering one big steak for the table, say, instead of a filet for every person — and then fill out the table with vegetables, salads, and side dishes. It’s rare to find a chophouse where the salads and sides are just as exciting as the steak, but that’s what we want Gage and Tollner to be. 

The word “classic” is key here in terms of driving the design of the food. There's nothing being reinvented at this restaurant. The food will be rooted in the classic style but updated for modern tastes. Gage and Tollner always had a reputation for serving food that was straightforward and simple, but impeccably executed. We want to continue that reputation. Their menu didn’t change much over the years, and we’ll even showcase a few highlights from that menu, like mock turtle soup, crabmeat Virginia, and chicken Maryland. These are hundred-year-old dishes — what should they taste like today? That’s what we’re interested in finding out. 
We have great relationships with local farmers and great purveyors who sustainably run companies and source amazing ingredients for us to work with. So we’re confident we can do all of this and keep the price point relatively modest so that people don’t feel like Gage and Tollner is out of their league. We want to bring a lot of different types of people to the restaurant, not just the people who can afford the typical fine dining experience. Of course, if people want to spend a lot of money on big bottles of wine and steaks, we’ll make that easy too!

We are excited about various dishes. For most people, a chophouse is less meat-centric than a steakhouse. We will offer the best quality steak and chops but keep the meat very minimal. Instead of offering all different cuts, we’re focusing on three to five cuts. We want to have a classic mutton chop on the menu, a delicious ribeye, bone-in ribeye, and we’ll have an aging program on the premises. We will also have our big helpings of side dishes. There is nothing more communal and celebratory than having a large piece of meat to share with people and then getting a whole bunch of side dishes that are in season and prepared for everybody. An example might be creamed spinach. We will find the best representation through delicious fresh spinach and by making everything from scratch. Even though it's just creamed spinach, people are going to remember it.

Ben and Sohui are married, so that speaks for itself, but we’ve been friends for many years, from before we had restaurants. Back in 2002, we all lived in the same house in Red Hook that Sohui and Ben bought and restored. We did everything together — we threw big dinner parties in the backyard, we hosted weddings, we put on plays that St. John wrote...the three of us have been entertaining together for many years, long before we did it as a business.

Ben discovered Gage and Tollner about 10 years ago. He started researching it and was like, "Oh my God, this incredible, historic, beautiful space exists in Downtown Brooklyn, and it's not being used." He found out through my research that one of the owners along the way was a man named Peter Aschkenasy, who was one of my regular customers. He called him up and asked about the Gage and Tollner space. Peter said it’s a great place, but cautioned against trying to start a restaurant at the time. The economy was rough, and Beb had little restaurant experience. Peter was right; Ben wasn't ready then. 

Today, Ben and Sohui have been running the Good Fork for 12 years and St. John’s been running Fort Defiance for nine, and the time is finally right for Downtown Brooklyn. St. John and Ben accidentally stumbled upon the space again while looking at some other spaces in the neighborhood, so it feels like destiny. Gage & Tollner has been calling out to us for a long time.

St. John came up in the publishing world. He was working for Bon Appetit magazine in New York in the early 2000s and decided that office environment wasn’t the right fit for him. At the time, the cocktail renaissance was just beginning, so he jumped ship in publishing and got into cocktails and bartending, and he’s been doing it ever since. His restaurant, Fort Defiance, is a small place in Red Hook with 42 seats, but they’ve got at outsized reputation in the cocktail world.

Every great restaurant has a unique personality, one that evolves over time. They earn their spot in the restaurant space-time continuum.There are not many restaurants that get to this place, but the great ones do, whether they're fancy or not. After 12 years, the Good Fork is on its way to being one of those places. It retains its own personality in terms of the design, the food, and the culture. The people who work there care for it and care for each other.

Insa has its own vibe and personality. It’s a much larger business, so it's run differently than the Good Fork — it has a much more organized management structure, but there’s still a culture of respect and fun. Insa is a place to go and celebrate, whether that’s in the karaoke rooms, in our cozy red-velvet bar, or in the dining room, sitting around a huge table with a whole bunch of friends.

The bottom line is the three of us are atypical restaurateurs. We're not out there to conquer the world by building little cookie cutter restaurants. Fort Defiance, the Good Fork, Insa, and now Gage and Tollner are all passion projects. Each one is unique and has its own personality. We have the utmost deference to the historical value of this restaurant. We’re not trying to stamp Gage and Tollner with our personal brand, or bend it to our will. And we’re not out to reinvent the wheel. We want to polish the diamond that’s already there. And we're not looking for fame or celebrity. At Gage and Tollner, the restaurant will be the star, not us. And we know we have the chops to get it done. We know what we are individually capable of doing, and what we’ve done already. With our combined talents, it’s a no-brainer. 

There are all sorts of different pieces to it, and they're all important, but it all has to start with love. When you walk into a place where people really care and put love into their work, you can feel it — it’s something that hits you to your core and makes you feel comfortable and happy. When you create a culture of love and care for others, you attract good staff and good management, which is really the key to success. Of course, it's not enough to go into it with all these great feelings and then burn out after a little bit. It's like a theater production — you have to be able to repeat it over and over again, night after night. The ability to do that has to do with systems, organization, and communication. You have to have a romantic heart as well as a mind for business. Put all of those things together and the money comes. 

Over the last 12 years, we've seen dozens of restaurants open and close around us. We're survivors. And not only have we survived the competition of the New York restaurant world — all of us survived Hurricane Sandy when it happened five years ago, and we thought that was definitely the end of the Good Fork and Fort Defiance and maybe even the whole neighborhood, but we made it through. We've all been putting out really good products and making people happy for 10 to 15 years now, and we’ve done it without the benefit of big money behind us. We opened our places on shoestring budgets with private loans and investment from family and friends. We're basically doing the same thing with Wefunder that we've done in the past, but on a bigger scale. We are reaching out to people that already know us and want to be a part of what we're doing next. We have a lot of faith that those people will be there for us.

As opposed to a business like Hopsters, which was funded on Wefunder and looked like a great pitch, Gage and Tollner is not a scalable business. We won't be opening seven locations in the greater Boston area in the next three years, but there is a chance for investors to literally be part of the restaurant history in the greatest restaurant city in the world. We have a private dining room, which is a great source of income for a restaurant like ours, and a heavy focus on the cocktails. We're mitigating risk in that way.

All the restaurants in this city battle a lot of political issues, changing laws, and financial burdens, like the rising cost of labor, and the rising costs of just doing business in the city. Add to this the fact that restaurants are a small-margin business at the best of times, and the smallest problem can throw your business model out of whack. That's why restaurants are known as risky businesses. Recently, this already difficult business has gotten even harder. 

Restaurants are like the beach. Every night, a lot of money washes up on shore, and then every day, a lot of money washes back out. The little shells and seafoam that are left are what you make in profit. How big those waves are determined what you're going to end up with.

The biggest risk is that the volume we need to succeed just isn’t there. This is a pretty large-scale restaurant, so we're planning on doing somewhere between $4.5 million and $6 million in sales annually. But once we open those doors, how many people are going to walk through? It's pretty basic, but of course, that's the biggest risk. 

We’ve done the research and we believe in the amount of business that is emerging in Downtown Brooklyn. It seems like every developer in Brooklyn agrees with us, with all the residential towers going up in the area. We have every confidence in the product that we're going to put out, and we think the business is there. But it's still a risk because it's a restaurant and you just don't know until you do it. It's also what's exciting about it.

All three of us are well-connected with the press — St. John still writes about spirits and cocktails for Men’s Journal and other magazines. A lot of our friends are writers and editors for the top magazines and newspapers in the city. It’s a very fortunate position to be in — to have all of these people in our phones! We can’t guarantee that they’ll write about us, but we can call them, and they'll be very supportive of anything that we do.

Sohui published a cookbook two years ago and has another cookbook coming out this fall. When Insa opened two and a half years ago, Ben and Sohui worked with a PR agency. Through that kind of work, we've made even more contacts with the media. The three of us are constantly asked to participate in conferences, interviews, and stories.

Besides all that, Gage and Tollner is a historic landmark space. Its reopening will attract national attention regardless of who’s behind it. And after we open — obviously, we're not going to rest our laurels. We will work with a marketing and PR company — we have a budget set aside for that. We want to do a lot of local outreach, because 60,000 people work within a few blocks of the restaurant, and there are a few big hotels, and more on the way. We want to earn the loyalty of the people that live, work, and stay in the area. 

What better way to have outreach than to have a large community of investors? They're all rooting for the restaurant to be a success, so they’re going to come to the restaurant and tell their friends to come to the restaurant. Crowdfunding is using modern technology to reach people who might want to be involved in the project beyond our personal network. We also believe in the democratic way Wefunder allows people with less money to be involved in financial ventures.

We realized over the last six months that we don't know anybody who can give us half a million dollars, but we do know thousands of people who can give us $1000 each. Once we realized it was possible to reach all those people through Wefunder, the choice was obvious.