An Interview with Al Goldberg, Founder & CEO of Mess Hall
Al Goldberg, Founder & CEO of Mess Hall, standing in front of his building.
Al walks around Mess Hall full of energy and brings a wide smile to match. He has a lot of reasons to smile. He’s been building and running Mess Hall, a local culinary incubator for the last ten years which has undeniably been a success. When you think through so many of the great new restaurants in DC like Your Only Friend or Melange Foods Al and his team have likely been part of their story - either hosting them for their 1-day foodie event New Kitchens on the Block or as a permanent member of their community centered program.
Over the last two decades Al has been a key part of the Washington DC food scene and watched it transform through the arrival of the Michelin Guide, increasing access to farm-fresh food, and the ongoing passion the food community brings to The District.
Throughout our conversation Al offered insights into how challenging it can be to open and run a food business in DC, a city where some of the best chefs in the country often run into challenging regulatory hurdles that can shut a great restaurant down before it even starts. He also dove into some of the early challenges he faced and the process he went through to launch the very first culinary incubator in The District.
Perhaps most exciting, Al walked through the evolution of the one-day food festival, New Kitchens on the Block, he runs with one of his best friends—an event that attracts some of the city's most notable chefs including the acclaimed teams behind Maydan, Your Only Friend, and Oyster Oyster to a 1 day sampling event where visitors can sample food from a slew of DC’s best chefs in on day. What began as a simple celebration of local food culture has quietly become one of the city's most anticipated annual food-centered gatherings.
This interview has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity.
Al, I know it was a bit of a process to get to where you are today so let’s start at the beginning. How did Mess Hall come to be?
Right after I graduated college I immediately went to work at a catering company in DC and ended up staying there for 14 years. I loved it. It was a small business, I was able to wear a lot of hats and the owner was very clear about wanting to sell the business to his employees. It always felt like it was going to happen the next year, then the next year, then the next year and the owner just never went through with it or provided a pathway for that to happen. Eventually, after years of waiting, a couple of us who were long time employees decided to go out and try to start our own catering business. We were young and excited and really interested in advancing the food movement in DC. But after two years of desperately trying to find the right space we ended up deciding not to move forward.
It wasn’t for lack of trying, we had a Small Business Administration loan ready to go, we had an architect and food consultants but we just couldn’t find the right spot and finally we just decided we couldn’t keep searching forever.
After we decided to stop looking I remember commiserating with Jenna from Whisked. I had been one of her very early customers at the U Street Farmer’s Market and I asked her where she was baking and she was baking her cookies out of a small, cramped space from another caterer. From there I just kept on meeting small food entrepreneurs like Sarah from Soupergirl, Gordy from Gordy’s Pickles who were all in the same boat. They would be using places like churches to make their food and would show up and there would be a funeral that day and they wouldn’t be able to cook. It just felt like so many of us were looking for a space and didn't have one. I had been to an entrepreneurship conference and one of the speakers said something I really liked: “Find the pain point and create the aspirin.” I decided to solve for this problem. I ended up putting together a small business plan and then went to the bank with my idea and they said “okay, are there any others?” I said, “there's one in New York and one in San Francisco.” The bank came back and decided it might be crazy enough to work, loaned me the money, and told me to go find a kitchen.
So here we are in this 10,000 square foot mid century warehouse that we’ve converted into a series of four different kitchens. I always wanted to be more than just equipment and a roof - I always wanted to support and help people launch and build their businesses. We opened in October 2014 and have been here ever since.
You mentioned an SBA loan. Why did you choose a small bank loan instead of private equity or something similar?
The loan I took out is part of the Small Business Administration program and went through a small local bank called Eagle Bank. They were very supportive and it was just a simple path. My wife and I owned a home in DC and they told us that if we were willing to put the house up as collateral they would approve it. So we literally put the house on it. My wife is incredibly supportive and we just more or less bet the house.
I’m so impressed by your willingness to make that bet on yourself and your wife’s willingness to make that bet with you. But let’s talk through what happened from there - you get the loan and are in the process of finding your new home. Why did you pick this space?
First off I just really liked the Brookland neighborhood and we're about a block outside of Brookland in a not so well known neighborhood called Edgewood. At the time we opened everyone was collecting in Northeast DC and there was a reason for that. The real reason is that's where the industrial zone neighborhoods are and we need a particular zoning that would allow for light manufacturing. That was always one of the big challenges with looking for catering places because zoning is always a factor. You have to think about places that have a high volume of electric capacity, lots of space for water, all of it.
The way that the floor plan came to be is a really, really great architect that we use named David Baker and Matt Carell, who are partners in an architectural firm called DBMC.
When I met Matt and David I told them that I had a firm I was already planning on going with and they came back and were like “well, just let us let us, you know, flex a little bit.” I thought they were going to send me a little sketch or something but three days later they came back with a formal CAD drawing that had measurements of the space and everything. They had such a great understanding of the functionality and the flow just made a lot of sense operationally. I’ve never had a regret from choosing them and we’ve done other work together too. I think the moral of that story is to always surround yourself with people who are really, really good at what they do.
“DC has this really great level of camaraderie where big chefs expect other chefs to stand on their shoulders and they go out and they support each other.”
You’ve mentioned the membership model - how did you decide on a membership model? Was that your approach from day one?
We've always only done memberships and we always have memberships for a minimum of at least six months. There's a few reasons for that.
First off we always wanted to feel like a community and never thought that that would be attainable doing some sort of hourly rental arrangement. I always wanted everyone here to get to know each other and I thought six months was a good starting point. And, to be honest, if you're not gonna give your own business at least six months, then you haven't given it any sort of a shot. Sometimes people walk in the door with an unrealistic expectation that they might start being profitable within the first week or six weeks. We always say, look, you have to plan for a ramp up period, if you only want to commit a month or two months how could you possibly judge whether your business is going to be successful in just such a short amount of time.
Second, a lot of the work that we do with the members is front loaded. We help people get their business license, which can be an onerous process for sure. There's a lot of paperwork and a lot of submissions to various departments including the Department of Health and so we want to help usher people through some of these municipal hurdles to help get them up and running as quickly as possible. Getting a business up and running is not necessarily an easy process in DC and some of the some of the things you have to do are pretty counterintuitive.
Was it hard to recruit your initial class?
We did a couple of things. First we did a competition called Launch Pad which was a business competition that manifested into basically like a live finale, which was sort of a “shark tank” pitch. But aside from that I was literally walking around downtown, going up to food trucks, saying, hey, my name is Al, do you need space? I remember going up to someone who became a member who had a food truck at the time. The guy almost got into an accident when I flagged him down - he was pulling away and then got so excited he forgot to put his food truck in park and then had to sprint back to put it in park. I felt like we were onto something and as I put the word out it was very much one of those if you build it they will come scenarios.
“They told us that if we were willing to put the house up as collateral they would approve it. So we literally bet the house on it.”
You’ve been in the DC food startup space for a while now, how has it changed over the last decade?
The DC food scene has just really popped in the last ten years. Part of the impetus for opening Mess Hall was a visit to the Brooklyn Flea in New York. I loved seeing all of the food makers that were up there. There was this incredibly burly guy who was all tatted up and was lobbing up giant pieces of freshly baked bread and ladling infused olive oil into a bowl and serving it up while the next vendor was serving fresh off the grill kimchi hot dogs. This was probably 2012 and DC just didn’t have that mostly because there just weren’t kitchens for production. So when we launched and then a few other shared kitchens also came to market we collectively lowered the barrier to entry for food entrepreneurs, many of whom have gone on to open up their own restaurants.
The other thing that is often credited for the burgeoning scene was the arrival of the Michelin Guide and some really excellent national recognition of restaurants in DC. I remember when we got Rose’s Luxury, Maydan, and Bad Saint and everyone was talking about how kick ass the DC food scene was. All the while those chefs were all supporting each other. DC has this really great level of camaraderie where big chefs expect other chefs to stand on their shoulders and they go out and they support each other.
Is there a trend that you think is coming back or something totally new you’ve seen pop up?
I do think food trucks might be making a comeback and I would be very very happy to see that. We’ll see if downtown DC can support that and I know there are a lot of eyes on people returning to the workplace.
The other trend, which isn’t new, is that people in DC are always trying to use fresh local products whenever possible. Freshfarm Markets has had a really great wholesale program that they've rolled out to better connect local farmers with small producers which is a very nice alternative to some of the broadline producers. If you’re a chef and you can connect those dots to have a more direct line of sourcing to small producers or local producers why wouldn't you use them? I think we'll see more of that than probably ever before, in good part because of programs like that.
Anybody who's ever dreamed of opening up an independent restaurant always has the sort of ethereal vision of rolling down to the farmer's market in the morning and filling up their apron with handpicked produce. So when you have programs like this, and I'd like to see more of them, putting local farmers' produce into the hands of super talented chefs who just happen to own small restaurants with a few seats then I'm all for it.
I'm curious why you feel rooted here in DC.
I'm not from here but I have always loved DC. DC was just the right size city for me. I settled down here and met my wife here and she likes it as much as I do. When we were looking at the catering company I didn't want to open one in Virginia or Maryland. It wouldn't have been hard to do that but the population density in DC and the maker community here is amazing. Stacey Price, the woman who owns Shop Made in DC was always a mentor to me. She was running a nonprofit at the time when I was thinking through where I wanted to be and whe just showed me so much of the community here and I loved it and have never left.
So, let's talk about the job itself - what’s one high and one low of the job?
I mean, you can't meet the people who walk in the door with the vision of their soon to be launched business and not just love it. It's so exciting. When we hear the stories of people who come in with the food that they learned to make with grandma, or something that they found while traveling that they need to bring here, or in many instances a food from someone's youth, having grown up in another country and immigrated to the US to bring some treat to DC that we might not have otherwise ever been able to try. These are the amazing moments for me and also imagining what their next steps might be to come to fully launch it and bring it to the populace. So that's undeniably, you know, a real high.
I think one of the worst moments I had here, which probably made me devolve into a full-out panic attack, was the moment that I learned that my general contractor had hired a lackluster electrician to wire this entire building. None of this came to be known until we were nearly open and our brand new walk-in coolers were dying and crashing as was the ventilation system that we rely on and our HVAC system which was brand new. I called my mechanical electrical plumbing engineer (called MEP engineer) and they said that shouldn't be happening, you bought all new equipment. They came down and they took picture after picture after picture just showing how things had been done incorrectly. We had already had the wall closed in and had all of our inspections done. None of that was ever flagged and we had to rewire the entire building. It was quite literally already painted.
You probably didn't sleep for a couple of days, right?
I didn't know what to do with myself; I thought the whole project was gonna be dead. One of the worst days of my life I would have to say,
It’s also not uncommon. With the folks who graduate from Mess Hall we stay with them and help them open up their spaces. I'll go and do visits at their places and help flag certain things that they might want to look at before inspectors come through so they can stay ahead of it while their contractors are still on site.
You've been running this business for 10 years and I am sure some days it still feels like a startup in some ways. How have you grown alongside Mess Hall, and then as part of that is there anything you would have done differently?
First off, I have definitely grown to be a much more even keeled person. When I started it I was very much a hothead and felt like I had a lot of emotional responses to a lot of things. Perhaps at that time rightfully so since we had bet the house on the business and there was just a lot riding on the program. If we didn't launch the business because of the electrician for example we wouldn't have had any revenue and then I'd lose my house, right? I had two young kids at the time and my wife put her full faith in me. Any time something went wrong it felt like the Titanic. Now most things don't really faze me very much. For better or for worse as an entrepreneur I do think that you get desensitized to things. On the one hand, it's good because maybe you can roll with the punches better. On the downside, there were times during maybe the middle part of our of this whole journey that it was also hard to feel joy because you would feel like you just become desensitized to things. So that's really hard and I think a lot of entrepreneurs experience that but probably not a lot of people talk about that.
Do you feel like you reclaimed that joy?
Very much so. I do feel like we're in a really good space. The pandemic helped me recover a lot because it forced me to be home with the family when I otherwise would likely be working away from them. We make a point of having dinner together every night and try and go to all the kids' performances, sports games, anything and everything. I found that by becoming very close with the family that just brought me a lot of relief from work.
One other thing that actually really helped get me to a better place was hiring good people here who could be trusted with taking more off of my plate. That's another thing that a lot of food entrepreneurs struggle with on the early side is giving up roles and delegating things. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially first time entrepreneurs, are inherently reluctant to shed responsibilities that they deem to be crucial. Sometimes it's for a good reason because you've been burned by people or someone's messed something up that was a costly mistake. But ultimately you have to learn to be good at hiring people and then good at delegating responsibilities. That was hard for me at the beginning and once I got better people into positions here, which is a skill set in and of itself, things just got easier. It just makes for a much more joyful experience as an entrepreneur too.
I’d love to hear a bit more about New Kitchens On the Block!
My best bud Nevin Martel, who's a food and travel writer and cookbook author and I team up usually once a year, sometimes twice a year, to give the general public something that they wouldn't ordinarily have: The opportunity to try the next hottest restaurant before it even opens. We identify some 8 to 10 different soon to be hot restaurants and invite them to come create a signature dish to share. People come in and experience the behind the scenes for one day only where the chefs are cooking everything in front of them and getting to tell the people what they might expect for their upcoming restaurant and why the guests should be excited about it.
We’ve hosted it 10 times now and the chefs for many of them have gone on to be some of the most popular restaurants in town like Maydan, Salt Line, Rasa, and Oyster Oyster.
I love doing that event. It really challenges me because we have to set up a way for ten concepts to put their best foot forward and it’s my job to make that happen. Mess Hall is uniquely poised to do that because we have kitchens, space and equipment and refrigeration. But even still, you know, we landed Amy Brandywine who is such a talented chef. She came in before she opened Piccolina and she told us that she would need a wood fired pizza oven to properly showcase her dish. We went to the guys at Timber Pizza Company and asked them where they got their pizza oven and learned that they are produced locally by a company called Marra Forni in College Park, MD. So we rolled down one of their beautiful pizza oven trailers, lit it up with a big blowtorch and Amy was able to get started just in the nick of time.
There’s always someone who needs something crazy to be able to pull off what they are thinking and it’s just super fun to be able to do something like that and really get to know the chefs.
Okay, last question - how can DC lower the threshold for small businesses to get started?
Opening a business in DC is inherently complicated from a licensing standpoint. Some of the confusion comes from the nomenclature that's used in certain departments but not others. So let's say you make pickles. You would get a catering license because you prepare the food in one place and then it's sold elsewhere. There's no manufacturing license in the District of Columbia except for maybe ice cream manufacturing which is a whole other conversation. However, a catering license costs $3,000 whereas having a restaurant license is closer to $300. Something happened and we don't know what happened along the way but in that sense DC has not kept up with the correct licenses in a way that makes it an understandable and tangible process. A lot of people set out to launch a business in DC and quit before they even start then end up moving out to Virginia or Maryland.
So we continue to believe that the help we provide people here is essential because absent that, there's just too many businesses that give up before they even start. I do wish there was a lot more transparency and I wish that people in the government in some of these government agencies would look at things more holistically from a logical standpoint instead of a checking off boxes standpoint. All too often people are made to fit into a certain box that they don't necessarily fit into and that can cause a lot of confusion and frustration. Again, it might mean that what would be fantastic small business never launches which is just a shame and antithetical to our mission here. So the easier that we could make it administratively to launch the better it would be.
Al’s “Best Of” List
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Sushi Taro is always going to be at the top of my list. It’s my go-to birthday spot, I just love it.
I love Tonari and Daikaya which are sister restaurants and right next door to each other. I am a huge pizza fan and thing what chef Katsuya has done with wafu (Japanese style) Italian noodle dishes and pizza.
Then I realize I’ve mentioned it a lot already in our conversation but I have to shoutout Maydan. I love the vibe, I love the food, everything they do is great.