From Start to Finish- The Story of The Common Grill, with Craig Common

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Richard Helppie

Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Rich Helppie, with our guest today, Mr. Craig Common of The Common Grill. The Common Bridge is available at substack.com. Please join us there, you'll get full video, access to our podcasts - which are still free by the way - transcripts, and most importantly, an opportunity to participate in our fiercely nonpartisan policy oriented discussion. Today, we've got a success story with lots of lessons, beginning with the rebirth of a town, the formation of an iconic eating establishment, and then through COVID, and now on to the next phase of life. So please welcome to The Common Bridge, Mr. Craig Common. Craig, glad you're here with us.

Craig Common

I'm glad I am too, Rich, thank you.

Richard Helppie

You're looking very well. How's retirement treating you so far?

Craig Common

Interesting. [Laughter] We're just slowly getting into it.

Richard Helppie

That's good, ease [into] it, no sense rushing things. Craig, of course, you're very well known for your success in the restaurant field. I don't know the background, so maybe tell our audience a little bit about yourself. Where'd you grow up? And what were some of your early experiences like?

Craig Common

Sure. I grew up in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. I went to Dearborn Heights Crestwood High school - we chatted about that earlier. My first job, I was 14 years old, I was a dishwasher at Boar's Head Inn. At that particular time, the Boar's Head was considered a pretty fancy restaurant. I was making a whopping $1.10 an hour as a dishwasher, working till 2:30 in the morning - no child labor laws back then. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I absolutely loved what I was doing. I worked all four years through high school there, ending up being a prep cook. I knew, as I told my buddies in high school, that I'm going to own a restaurant someday. So I went to school for a couple of years and that just wasn't for me. Then I went to Europe for six months, as a vagabond, just buzzing through Europe, came back and started working for Chuck Muer at the Hotel Pontchartrain [in] downtown Detroit. [I] worked my way up, I was a lunch broiler cook, and then I was a kitchen manager for the hotel. Then I was going to leave and get a job at the brand new Dearborn Hyatt Regency, and they didn't want me to leave. So they offered me less money to go to another restaurant. So I said sure, I'll do that. And I started at the Northland Charley's as a kitchen manager and then worked my way up through the company. At one point in time, I was a corporate chef in charge of 16 of the restaurants, of the 32 that they had.

Richard Helppie

That was such a great chain, the Muer system, wonderful seafood. I remember many times going to Bloomfield Charley's, searching the whole menu and ordering the scrod eight times out of ten.

Craig Common

It was a tremendous experience for me. I opened up 16 of the restaurants from the ground up; menu planning through everything. That really helped me understand what it would take to run a restaurant on my own. As I progressed through that company, I knew that at some point in time that was going to happen, it was just a matter of when. You get used to getting that paycheck and you've got a good company that you don't have to worry about if they had issues or whatever. But towards the end, the last couple of years, that's when I started looking around for a property, see if I could do my own thing.

Richard Helppie

When you're doing that kind of a job, you mentioned menu planning. Who gets to experiment with what's going to get on the menu and how do you know whether to keep something on the menu or take it off the menu? There's got to be an art to that and some science as well, maybe?

Craig Common

There's art, science, and gut, and listening to guests, and things like that. Back in the Muer days it was corporate chef, Chef Larry, who ran the show, and then he passed away suddenly, so it was myself and Chuck Rockwoods, who has Rocky's of Northville. We split up the properties and Chuck was leery on whether two young kids could really handle the job. So we did a lot of recipe development for them, for him, and his upper echelon, and he knew that he had a couple [of] guys that could do the job. (Rich: You had the chops.) We had the chops to do it, to do that.

Richard Helppie

Then as you got this phenomenal experience with the Muer chain and you always had this childhood ambition [that] you're going to own your own restaurant, was your first restaurant The Common Grill? (Craig Common: My only restaurant.) Only one! Okay, so I didn't know if you'd made stops. So here you are, you're getting a good paycheck, you've got a highly responsible job for a very well known group, you could have done really well there for a long time, and you decided, I'm going to just leave that behind, no guaranteed paycheck, and I'm going to own my own restaurant. Where did you think about opening your restaurant?

Craig Common

That's a comfort zone when you get your paycheck every every week, every two weeks. I started looking in Brighton at the time, and this was probably 1990. I was negotiating on a restaurant that sat empty for a couple years and nothing was happening. And then I started looking at another place, [an] old ballet studio in downtown Brighton...

Richard Helppie

Not to do ballet but to cook, right. (Craig Common: to cook.) [Laughter] Alright, just want to clarify that.

Craig Common

And that wasn't working. Then I got a call out of the blue from Bob Daniels, [who] owned the lumberyard, who was deeply involved in Chelsea. And he asked me to come out and take a look. Well, I had never been there before. So I had to get directions to downtown Chelsea. So I met with Bob and he showed me the town, introduced me to some people. We looked at the building and I fell in love with the building right from the get go. He had my designer, who I knew was going to design the restaurant no matter where it was going to be, come out. Obviously, he fell in love with the restaurant. Then I had a financial backer that was more interested in Brighton and so when I told him I found a building in Chelsea, he said, nah, that's not going to happen. (Rich Helppie: Oh my.) So I called Bob. And so Bob, he's out. He goes, give me the weekend, I'll see what I can do. [He] called me on Monday and he had a group of people that were willing to help out the situation. So we kept going, having phone calls, kept driving out there and then I took my family out there on a Saturday to see what downtown Chelsea was all about on a Saturday evening. So we went to a restaurant across the street - which was not Cleary's [Pub] at the time, [it was] something else - and had dinner, it was very nice. And we walked out about 7:30 and there was nobody. So the car was pretty silent on the way back, but as Bob continued to promote Chelsea and introduced me to Jeff [Daniels] and that he was going to have the theater open and all that kind of stuff, I made the decision Thanksgiving weekend of 1990 to go for it.