Café Society
‘MOTOWN MOMENTS,’ MACARONI AND MUDCAKE
The most inventive dish on that particular Manhattan menu? “It Takes Two,” pairing fried chicken with a Belgian waffle at $12.95. “The breading was good and crispy, too,” judged the food critic in question. About another offering, “Smokey’s Ribs,” they were reckoned to be “so tender they fell off the bone.”
Otis Williams of the Temptations was sufficiently taken with the restaurant that he showed up at the groundbreaking of the Las Vegas branch, in the company of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor, no less. Later, he materialised on its menu, his name attached to the $7.50 mudcake (with ice cream), together with the likes of Melvin Franklin’s apple brown betty ($5.95) and Ali-Ollie Woodson’s strawberry shortcake ($6.25).
Diana Ross opens the Motown Café, flanked by Tracey Jordan and Brian Daneman (photo: AP/Alamy)
Not everyone was impressed. At the eaterie’s Florida version, the Orlando Sentinel’s restaurant writer reckoned the mudcake “was a severely dry, flourless cake, and the apple brown betty had hard apple slices with a sugary coating, not exactly a classic betty.”
And you thought record reviewers could be cutting.
Yes, it’s the Motown Café. Or, more accurately, it was the Motown Café, long gone since its five year-run on New York’s 57th Street from 1995-99 and the shutdown of siblings in Vegas and Orlando.
“It was a special place,” says one of the company’s onetime senior executives, Lawrence Fish. “I’m biased because I was involved, but it was more than a theme restaurant.” Robert Strand, who directed the Motown Café’s merchandise business, agrees. “There was a joy about the place, and [customers] wanted to take a piece of that joy home.”
Diana Ross was a believer, too, when she officially opened the Café in Manhattan on September 6, 1995, cutting the celebratory ribbon. “We never thought we’d start where we did,” she said of the Supremes, adding with a laugh, “and end up in a restaurant.”
Ross not only ended up in a restaurant that day, but with a piece of it, too. She and several Motown stars had equity in the Motown Café, incentivising them to patronise and promote it, to encourage their fans to enjoy and support it, and to sustain the brand which they had helped to make one of the most recognised in the world.
28 FEET OF ‘STOP! IN THE NAME OF LOVE’
“The official owners/partners were Diana, the Temptations and the Four Tops, Boyz II Men and Queen Latifah,” recalls Fish, who was the firm’s chief financial officer, “so we were mixing the old and the new.” The artists did not invest in the Motown Café, he notes, but were given founder equity, “to be the face of the Café.” Also a key player: senior VP and creative director Tracey Jordan, who had previously held high-ranking posts at MTV Networks and Motown Records.
Other stars were supportive, as retail division director Strand remembers. “Jermaine Jackson walked through the merchandise store [at the opening] and said, ‘This is really cool, I could actually wear some of this shit.” The so-called “Motown Moments” were another popular element. “Every 20 minutes,” says Strand, “we’d have a girl group to come out and sing, and on another day, there’d be a guy group. Everyone in the Café would sing along, and there’d be sweet potato fries flying out of people’s mouths as they were doing it.”
From West Grand to West 57th (photo: Black Star/Alamy)
The Café branches were steeped in the sound and imagery of Motown, of course, including such striking components as the 28-foot “Stop! In The Name Of Love” disc which hung over diners in the Manhattan branch, and the bronze-like statues of various artists, including the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops and Martha Reeves. The merchandise was similarly evocative, whether T-shirts or leather jackets, backpacks or baseball jerseys, magnets or keychains (my Motown Café watch still keeps good time).
When he joined the business, Strand was informed by chief operating officer Brian Daneman that there was a severe surplus of Motown-branded microphone bags. “I thought, ‘Who can make me a gummy microphone?’ I put gummys into those microphone bags and got rid of the whole lot in 18 months.” Clearly, his experience as a buyer at retail toy giant FAO Schwarz paid off.
Then there was the food, sealed with Motown connections on the menu, whether grilled items (“Heat Wave”) or seafood (“Too Many Fish In The Sea”), beverages (“You Beat Me To The Punch”) or desserts (“How Sweet It Is”). As hinted above, critics had different views of the kitchens’ quality control. “The Southern fried chicken was too heavily fried for my taste,” offered a visiting reviewer from Washington, D.C. about the New York menu, “but was paired with a delectable macaroni and cheese.”
By several accounts, the idea of the Motown Café was first cooked up 30 years ago, following PolyGram’s purchase of Motown Records in the summer of ’93. A major player in that deal was venture-capitalist Boston Ventures, as Larry Fish recalls. “They way they packaged it for the sale to PolyGram was, ‘You’re not just buying a catalogue or a record label, you’re buying one of the top five internationally-recognised brand names and trademarks.’ ”
CHRISTMAS COMES IN JUNE
Moreover, the 1990s were a time of success for theme restaurants in the U.S. and beyond, sparked initially by the Hard Rock Café, followed by Planet Hollywood (for which Fish was finance director), the Harley-Davidson Café and others. European-owned PolyGram saw virtue in exploiting Motown in that way, while tapping the talents of Tracey Jordan from the record company. “She was the heart of Motown within the Motown Café,” says Fish. “Also, she had relationships with all the artists, and she was good friends with Berry. It couldn’t really have worked without Tracey. If it wasn’t her, it was just a bunch of white guys. She was authenticity.”
The Café in Manhattan opened during the autumn of 1995, with the second unveiled in Las Vegas – complete with the Temptations performing – some 16 months later inside the New York, New York Hotel & Casino. “In Vegas,” says Robert Strand, “Christmas comes in June. I dreamed up that we should have a Motown Christmas shop with lime green Christmas trees and disco ball ornaments. People loved it. I can’t even tell you how many disco ball ornaments we sold.” He also speaks highly of the Motown Café team at all the locations – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a Facebook group of those employees to this day.
Motown Café ‘statues’ in storage (photo: Elliot Schwartz)
Former CFO Fish says the business generated “five or six million dollars a year in revenue,” but that proved to be less than the $10m-$25m which COO Brian Daneman had predicted publicly. In addition, its operating costs were substantial. “The entire theme restaurant industry was exploding at the time, and I believe the market got oversaturated,” adds Fish. “The Motown Café wasn’t late to the game, but it wasn’t early.
“The industry didn’t do well at 60 percent occupancy. They were built to run at high volume, on every level. Not only did they not operate well at 60 percent occupancy, they weren’t fun. Nobody wanted to go to one when it was empty. And when the merchandise component as a percentage of sales started decreasing, that really affected the profitability.”
The final blow was the 1998 acquisition of PolyGram – Motown included – by Seagram, which went on to merge the business with its Universal Music operation. Strand remembers it well. “In that acquisition, it was, ‘What? There’s a theme restaurant? What’s that again?’ ”
Clearly, the new owner had no enthusiasm for that, and the then-imminent debut of the Motown Café in Orlando was delayed. “That triggered our entity being dissolved,” says Strand, although the branch subsequently opened at Universal Studios’ CityWalk complex under different management, and operated until 2005.
Perhaps there was another warning sign. Days before Seagram bought PolyGram, there was a fashion event (“The Dogs Get Down at Motown”) at the Motown Café in New York. OK, so it was a charity fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, but when the stars of a show at your restaurant are a Yorkshire terrier and a miniature collie, it’s surely time to call it a day.
Unless they’re Diana’s dogs, of course, and the owner is present.