One of those New Haven residents is Sherman Atkins, a pot washer and prep cook. He was the man in the chicken suit. He said that about 100 people came in for lunch during the grand opening, compared with the 50 or 60 that the restaurant usually sees during the week. Owner Alberto Giordano said he started the restaurant for many reasons. Prime among them is his desire to bring healthful food to the masses.“There’s such a misconception about food,” Giordano said. “People think healthy food is boring or doesn’t taste good.” His customers challenge this belief. Kathryn Garre-Ayars said she loves the variety of foods – especially the whole-wheat pasta and sweet potatoes; she is president and CEO of the Healthy Eye Alliance, an organization located a few floors up in the same building as the restaurant. And Anne Benowitz, a New Business Development Executive at the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, dubbed the food “fabulous.”
Giordano grew up in the restaurant business. His parents owned restaurants, and he earned his keep washing dishes, cooking, and waiting tables. His interest in healthful food specifically started when he was a teenager. Giordano grew up in Milford, and in high school started to play jai alai, a Spanish sport popular in Connecticut at the turn of the century. Players take turns hurling a ball slightly smaller than a baseball at a wall, and trying to catch and return their opponents’ throws. Giordano noticed a correlation between what he ate and his athletic performance.
“When I was young, like every other teenager, I ate fast food,” Giordano said. It made him feel heavy and sluggish. So he decided to experiment cleaning up his diet. “I was amazed at how much better I felt,” he said. Giordano kept playing jai alai while attending college part-time. He got a degree in manufacturing engineering at Central Connecticut State University, but he didn’t do anything with the schooling. He played amateur jai alai in Orlando and Dania, Florida while in college, and moved on to the professional leagues in Milford in 1989 when he graduated. Giordano said that he made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but he didn’t get more specific.
Giordano knew that a career in jai alai wouldn’t last him his whole life—it’s a physically demanding sport, he said, and professionals often retire young. He sought a career that would support him in his future, so he went into the financial industry. He got certified as a financial adviser and worked for a few different companies. But he didn’t like how people were treated in corporate America. He said big companies fail to care about their employees as people. “At the end of the day, I’m with a big company, and I’m just a number to them,” Giordano said. He said that he has seen many colleagues sacked “as quickly as you can blink an eye” for underperforming after years and years of good service. He is still working at a financial services company, PrimePay, as he gets his restaurant up and running. Giordano said he hopes to treat his employees better. He has nine – two cooks, two managers, and five people who prepare food for customers. Atkins, who wore the chicken suit for two and a half hours Monday, said that Giordano is inspiring and “always on top of his game.”
Giordano came up with the idea for Chick-Lets back in 2009. He shared the idea with his family over a dinner out at Carmine’s, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. “My daughter was on board,” Giordano said. “The rest—‘Are you kidding me?’” But Giordano said his family’s original skepticism has turned into staunch support. Now, he said, they are behind him 100 percent. Chick-lets originally opened in Bridgeport last summer to test out the business concept, said Tyler Gianakos, a manager who owns 25 percent of the company. (Giordano owns the other 75 percent.) Giordano hired Gianakos as an intern in Bridgeport. Chick-Lets still served organic chicken in Bridgeport, Gianakos said, but the clientele there wasn’t that interested in organic food.
“People used to ask for chicken without the organic,” Giordano said. Chick-Lets served some fried foods back then, but Gianakos and Giordano said that type of cuisine wasn’t what they wanted to do. So Chick-Lets moved to New Haven, which Giordano considers a more health-conscious area. He cut fried foods from the menu—a tour of the kitchen revealed no deep fryers and only two small bottles of cooking oil. Giordano found the 135 Church St. location, the former site of the deli Roly Poly, while walking downtown during a snowstorm in January. He jumped on the opportunity—he made a presentation to the owners of the building, who liked his idea. So he started renovating the space. He had to install more ventilation, plumbing, and electrical systems to support all of the kitchen appliances.
“It was a challenging space,” Giordano said, but he’s grateful for the location. The restaurant sits right next to the federal courthouse and across the street from the New Haven Green. CT Transit stop just a few feet from the door. Despite the location, Chick-Lets isn’t seeing as much business as Giordano would like. Giordano said that the lunchtime line is “out the door,” but the line was well contained in the restaurant on a Tuesday before the grand opening when a reporter stopped by. Giordano said that he is struggling to attract business in the evening. (That block gets less foot traffic then other parts of downtown with more nighttime businesses.) The restaurant stays open until 9 p.m., but after the sun set, there were so few customers that Giordano needed to interrupt an hour-long interview only once.
Starting a business isn’t easy, and Giordano said that he doesn’t expect to start making money for about a year. “We have break-even numbers,” Giordano said. “Some days we’re close to them, and some days we’re really off.” He knows that this is a huge risk for him and his family. “I literally dumped every single dime of my retirement money into this concept,” Giordano said. He runs the risk of getting fired from his job at PrimePay for underperformance—he had to take a bit of time off from his day job to get Chick-Lets up and running—and he also runs the risk of Chick-Lets not turning a profit.
Giordano said he expects his profit margins to be small. “Organic’s expensive,” he said. “I’m paying top dollar.” He buys the vegetables from vendors at the local farmers markets in Wooster Square and on the New Haven Green. The chicken comes from a Connecticut organic farm, but he declined to provide more details citing agreements with his supplier. Every day, Giordano wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and is in the restaurant within the hour. He said that he doesn’t get to sleep until 2 in the morning. He spends a few hours every day doing conference calls for PrimePay.
“My dream is to get this up and running to the point where I can leave corporate America,” Giordano said. Eventually, Giordano hopes to franchise Chick-Lets. He said he wants to open five locations in Connecticut, with each restaurant built within the local community – buying from local farms and supporting the local economy. “I don’t know if it’s possible,” Giordano said. “But we’re going to give it a try.”
SOURCE: http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/why_did_the_chicken_cross_church_street/
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