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Mar
24
2006
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Business Profile: Watercress |
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by Dan Veaner
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Friday, 24 March 2006 |
 In September a new restaurant joined the Lansing landscape when chef Hans Butler opened Watercress in the former location of Billy Bob Jack's near the Pyramid Mall. Watercress is what Butler calls a "fusion restaurant," with dishes influenced by a variety of cultures.
His menu is influenced by Spanish, Eastern European, Mediterranean, Greek, Thai and Southern French cooking. "That's more of the peasant style," he says. "I don't like the hoity-toity French." The menu is varied with such choices as linguini with squid, jerked pork tenderloin, grilled mahi-mahi and Tandoori-style lamb shank.
"I like to use a lot of fresh herbs," he says. "Heavy on the mint and basil, thyme and rosemary. All fresh. I cut them to order before they go on. It's about the smell when it gets to the table, you want it to have the full flavor, the full effect." He gets all his herbs from "Fingerlakes Fresh," a local company that grows hydroponic herbs and greens. The company is part of Challenge Industries, and Butler says he's decided to use them exclusively. "It's a good product and it's also local," he says. He also uses organic beef, specialty produce and ingredients.
 Watercress Dining Room
The walls are lined with framed art on display by local artists. Currently David Young's photography and paintings by Mnetha Warren are on display. The restaurant gets a small percentage of sales, but Butler doesn't charge artists to display their work. "It's nice. They help me out and I'm helping them out," he says.
A Lansing native, Butler started cooking when he was quite young. "Basically I got into cooking through my Mom. Being encouraged and given the freedom to try cooking home made meals for the family. As I got older it became more fun. I realized I could be really creative. It was really nice to do things from scratch, too, rather than buying it pre-made."
Butler got his first restaurant job at age 14 as a dish washer and food chopper at the now defunct Greystone Inn. "It wasn't exactly a model restaurant," he recalls. He learned from the negatives as well as the positives. "I realized this was an extreme I didn't want to get to if I ever owned a restaurant," he says. "The thing I did like was the diverse people you got to work with. It was different from going to school." He continued learning through a string of Ithaca restaurant jobs, eventually going to TC3 while working in restaurants at the same time.
"I wanted to stay in restaurants, and was starting to think about culinary school, but not too seriously." He got more serious when he got a job at Dano's on Cayuga and was taken under the wing of chef Dano Hutnik. "I told him, 'Honestly I've never been taught anything correctly. Just show me what to do.' Hutnik did. Butler worked his way through the various tasks in the restaurant until Hutnick encouraged him to go to culinary school."
He ended up in an accredited culinary school in Houston. "It's like any school: what you put into it is what you're going to get out of it," he says. As before, he continued to take restaurant jobs. He worked at Eatzi's, a gormet market with an open kitchen and a restaurant attached that had four restaurants around town. He did every job, working his way up to a supervisory position where he was responsible for the catering department that did nearly a million dollars of business per day. He didn't like it, in part because it took him away from actual cooking, but he stuck with it for about a year.
Butler says his restaurant jobs gave him a better education than he got in school. "90% of the students had never worked in a restaurant. They'd never washed dishes and they had this idea in their head that they were going to be some five star superstar TV personality when they graduated." He says that the school was most useful in teaching him about the business side of running a restaurant.
After graduating Butler moved to Kalamazoo and got a job as chef at Cosmo's Cucina. "It was a fusion restaurant, an interesting place with a beautiful building. The owner had O'Duffy's pub on the bottom floor, with a lot of Irish influence. The restaurant was on the second floor." The menu changed about once a month, which presented a challenge for Butler and the other chef there. The food had an Italian influence with some Spanish and Portugese.
When the opportunity to get his current location became available in Frbruary of last year ht flew home to check it out. Originally the idea was to work with Billy Bob, but instead he decided to strike out on his own. "I thought, I'm crazy but I'm going to go for it." He came back about six months later to get the restaurant ready. "I almost gave up a dozen times. It was hard, because I was the only one doing it." Eventually he got help from friends who taught him construction tasks, and he hired people to do some of the work including the painting.
 Chef Hans butler in a clean kitchen
Butler did a lot of the work himself, including cleaning, regrouting the kitchen floor, constructing walls, rebuilding tables and a lot of cleaning. He is obsessive about cleanliness. He says a lot of the places he worked in were filthy. "I have a big problem with that." It took three tries to get the kitchen up to his standard of clean.
Nine employees currently make things run smoothly, including a baker, three dishwashers, five wait staff and himself as chef. "They're really good," he says. They help out wherever they are needed. Everyone helps clean up at the end of the day and get the restaurant ready for the next day. "I don't run it like a normal kitchen," Butler says. "In a normal kitchen there's a lot of screaming and yelling. It's already stressful enough. I'm not going to add to it."
Butler plans to add a liquor license in the future, but for now diners bring their own wine if they want it. Watercress is open for lunch and dinner from 11:30 until 3, then 5 to 9 for dinner, 9:30 on weekends. While the hours are long, Butler says he doesn't mind the hard work. "My philosophy is that you need to do what you love to do. You shouldn't be doing it if you don't love it."
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