Closed // Open
with Klaus Wittrup - Gasoline Grill
At the age of 16, Klaus Wittrup deplaned at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, bleary-eyed and jetlagged. He’d arrived to take part in a study abroad program so his first order of business was locating his host family. Once in the car, they began their journey to his new temporary home, Indiana. Along the way they stopped for food. He didn’t know it then, but this simple roadside meal would inform his adult future in a profound way. He ordered a burger, his first American burger. Get him talking about it and he’ll tell you he can still vividly recall that experience. It stuck with him when he returned to Denmark. But once home, eating a burger just didn’t elicit the same response. He longed for something similar but he could never find an equivalent, so there was only one thing to do—open his own burger spot. “I wanted to have my own little piece of America here. I wanted to be able to get that great burger that I was missing.” Wittrup further distills the idea when he tells me that people often ask him how he came up with the concept. “I say to them ‘Gasoline Grill is not a concept. It’s a need. A need for the perfect burger.’”
Perfect is subjective, but the accolades and expansion suggest Gasoline Grill is doing something right. Their first location opened in 2016 and early sales were promising, but when a 2017 Bloomberg article mentioned them as one of the world’s best burgers, everything changed. Word spread, people flocked, lines stretched. Since then notoriety has allowed for expansion, culminating in two dine-in locations opening in 2019, new territory for Gasoline Grill, which had previously thrived on take-away only. But the pandemic quickly changed that.
I meet up with Klaus at his not-yet-a-year-old Carlsberg Byen location. He’s perched in the sill of a low window when I walk in. The location, housed in a historic building from the 1880s, is beautiful, but quiet. I imagine it must be bittersweet, knowing this next realization of his dream was forced to temporarily shutter during the crisis.
CS - Gasoline Grill’s trajectory reads like a classic tale of success. You started with one location, which had no dine-in option. Popularity dictated you open another, then another. Recently, you’d reached a point where it was time to take it a step further, opening locations that had a place for diners to sit and eat. Then, the pandemic changed all of that. How did that feel for you, seeing the gradual build of your business abruptly halted?
KW - I think for everyone the first couple of weeks were super scary. I was very stressed out. I thought “Am I going to go bankrupt? This is my life’s work, my true dream, just dying.” That was before there was any talk of the compensation packages. I wondered “What if my staff gets sick? We can’t be open. We’ll have to shut down, then we can’t pay rent, what’s going to happen?”
CS - This isn’t like anything you can be trained for, or that you can prepare for. This came out of the blue.
KW - No, not at all. I was talking to the bank a month before and they had mentioned corona but they didn’t think there was going to be any effect on us. Then, three weeks later, we get hit and it shuts down everything. It was surreal.
CS - When you heard the news that restaurants needed to close, what was your initial thought?
KW - The thing is, I was a little ahead I think. I have a mentor and I was talking to him a lot. He said to me that this could be serious, so right before, I started writing to all of my landlords and telling them this could be serious and asking if we could talk. And then it hit and the Prime Minister shut things down. I was certain this was going to be at least two months. That’s what was so stressful for me. We had grown our business. 2019 was an expensive year for us. We had our two biggest restaurants opening up, [which were] big investments. We had bet on them in a way. We had made some money in the past but we spent a lot in 2019. Like all restaurants here, we have that period from October until May where we don’t make a lot of money, so we had this long period of not making a lot of money but we could see the peak season, and then this comes.
CS - That’s a common refrain, that the industry here makes money in the summer to get you through the winter. This couldn’t have come at a worse time.
KW - Yeah and we had just paid VAT too, just before. It was really crazy timing. It was scary, but with the packages I think we’ll make it through. I think we’re at a good point, but, as you said, we’ve dipped our toes into this new concept [dining in]. With every location I’ve tried different things, to see what works. We have the location at the train station [Vesterport Station], smaller things, just to see what works for us. This was the next step, to see if we could have seated guests. I really wanted to have the dining experience, to have a closer relationship with our guests, to give them that experience. That was the idea with the two new places.
CS - When did this location open?
KW - In May of 2019. And the other [Værnedamsvej] opened in August of 2019
CS - So neither location has experienced a full year yet?
KW - No, neither. And these are huge investments. These two locations are not making any money, we’re losing money. And we won’t get any money from the packages for these two.
CS - Because it’s based on revenue from the prior year?
KW - Yeah, unfortunately.
CS - That’s a good segue, I was going to ask about the packages. What sort of considerations went into whether you closed down all locations versus keeping some open?
KW - The packages, when they came out, I thought it was so awesome to be in Denmark. We’re so fortunate. And to a certain degree, I still think that. But the packages, getting fixed costs covered, that’s not what it’s about for us. We’re growing, we have other costs. We have all of our staff, we have 75 people working in the low season. And although these people aren’t trained chefs, we train them and give them the skill sets in order to run a location. We can’t lay them off, and we don’t want to. When we open up, we need staff. So, we took the salary compensation, and we will take the compensation for fixed costs as well, it’s better than nothing.
CS - Those are separate?
KW - Yeah, they are.
CS - So initially you shut all down, or all but one?
KW - One week in, or ten days in, we shut down all locations except for Landgreven. Landgreven was doing okay, the other locations, nothing was happening. But I thought, we’d get fixed costs for that and we’d be okay. And then a couple of weeks into this, I started to see people in the street and I thought “We don’t know what’s going to happen with the fixed costs and those costs are not enough for us. We’re a growth business and we need turnover.” And we needed to keep our staff. It’s fine that they’re at home, but these are young people. They might get bored, they might look for another job. For many this is a year off for them, or a part time job.
CS - So you wanted to keep them engaged and interested.
KW - Yeah, exactly. And, with Værnedamsvej, it’s part of a very local community. It just seemed weird that we weren’t open. I was at Landgreven one day and we had guests thanking us for being open. Even just for myself, I live near Værnedamsvej. I like to cook a lot, but once in a while you want to have some take out, you want to have a treat. [laughs]
CS - You have numbers, so have you noticed that you’re less busy? Or the same?
KW - Landgreven, the gas station, is its own beast. That one is doing fine. And we’re getting more local guests. In the very beginning, I was there every day for opening. We had so many regular guests, and we grew that over the summer. Then the Bloomberg article hit and we became a tourist thing. I was concerned about that. But then I went to Rome and went to [Pizzarium] Bonci and I thought “This is pretty cool, the pizza is pretty good, maybe it’s not so bad to be a tourist thing.” Being a tourist thing doesn’t have to be bad. So that’s what happened at Landgreven. It’s a place that every tourist interested in food has to go to. That place is always busy. But what I noticed is we started to lose our regular guests. The local workers couldn’t be in line for 15 minutes, then wait another 10 for their food. But they’re starting to come back and that’s pretty cool.
“I think for everyone the first couple of weeks were super scary. I was very stressed out. I thought ‘Am I going to go bankrupt? This is my life’s work, my true dream, just dying.’”
— Klaus Wittrup
CS - I recall the dine-in locations, Værnedamsvej and Carlsberg, going through what must have been daily discussions for you about how to move forward. First, chairs were spread apart, then phone order for take-away, then delivery, then ultimately closing. These are all business decisions you’re having to make in 24-hour increments, that all happened in a span of five days. What was it like, as an owner-operator, during that period of overwhelming uncertainty?
KW - It was crazy, and scary. But also exciting. Looking back on it, this shook us up. It was a wake-up call. We need to be sharp. We have to think of ways to reach more guests. In that way, it was exciting. Things like delivery, we’ve never done it. It’s been on my drawing board. I’ve thought if we could make delivery cool, I’m open to it. This process just sped up everything. You couldn’t sit and think about it and make plans, you just had to do it. That’s why we opened up the delivery. But it didn’t work for us. We probably didn’t give it enough time, but at that time I was scared. We needed liquidity. We couldn’t have a location open where we’re losing money. So we tested it for two days, it wasn’t working, so we shut it down.
CS - So every day you were evaluating and making decisions.
KW - Yeah, it was super scary.
CS - Has having the other locations remain open alleviated stress to some degree? That it wasn’t a complete and total shutdown of your business?
KW - Oh yeah, to some degree. Looking at Landgreven and seeing it was doing okay, bringing in some liquidity, made me think we could make it through this. But this isn’t over yet. We now have two open, one half open, and three locations not open. And one probably won’t. The street kitchen, out near the old Noma, probably won’t open. And that’s a big location for us.
CS - Some locations are closed, some are open for takeaway. How do you manage that, in terms of communicating to your staff? Who works, who doesn’t?
KW - Because of the packages, you have to send people home and they can’t work. And you can’t switch people around. Which is a bit stupid, to be honest. For us, in the beginning, we had people at Landgreven saying “We have to work? Other people are getting paid but they don’t have to work.” I told them that we have to think of it in another way. You guys are working for all of us. You’re working to keep a job, a place and a Gasoline Grill for all of us and we are all so grateful for that.
CS - Gasoline Grill is known for saying you’re “open until sold out,” a testament to the daily sales of your burgers. Have sales been impacted, or are you still selling out?
KW - Yes and yes. [laughs] We’re selling out every day, we always are. Luckily, we have so much data, in our minds, so we can adjust super quickly. We’re pretty good at assessing how many burgers we need to sell if we want to be open until 20:00. The only place that’s really truly sold out because of capacity is Landgreven. At that location it’s not possible to make more than we do. We make all the burgers we can and sell them. In the high season anyway, in the winter it’s another story. However, during this, we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to be sold out, but we didn’t want to communicate that. We wanted to have opening hours because we thought it would be too arrogant. For our colleagues in the business, struggling, I just didn’t like that, I didn’t think it would be nice. "Look at us, we are sold out!" you know?
CS - Finally, I’d like to focus on bright spots, positives. What have you been doing, personally, to keep yourself positive and upbeat during all of this?
KW - I’ve been in the kitchen a lot, at home. Cooking a lot. Baking a lot. And I’ve been enriching myself with knowledge, reading articles and books on different subjects. I’ve been fly fishing a lot. I’ve always done that, but didn’t really have time for it. But I’ve been able to do it lately.
CS - Is it nice to get back out there?
KW - It’s so awesome. And I’d never really done this before, but during the crisis, I’ve gotten up at four in the morning and been out at dawn. That’s just incredible and special.
“This was the next step, to see if we could have seated guests. I really wanted to have the dining experience, to have a closer relationship with our guests, to give them that experience.”
— Klaus Wittrup