Some people find great pleasure in a roomful of antiques. Others wonder, not without their own selfish pleasure, who gets to do the dusting. In either case, ever since “Famous” Dave Anderson piled stoneware crocks, license plates, mounted deer heads, and loads of other vintage goods from his personal collection into his Linden Hills BBQ joint, the customers have been delighted—a crucial factor in the restaurant’s success.
Now, of course, Famous Dave’s is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: DAVE) with more than a hundred restaurants across the country. (It has grown even more quickly than another homegrown chain, Buca, which makes liberal use of Italian kitsch in its décor.) Each one is bedecked as profusely with old-timey goods as the original restaurant. With still more franchises opening all the time, it would be perfectly reasonable to wonder: Where does all of this stuff—hundreds of enameled coffee pots; Paul Bunyan decanters by the dozen; seven-foot chainsaw-sculpture bears; heaps of snowshoes, fishing jackets, tobacco tins—come from?
The simple answer is Famous Dave’s headquarters in Eden Prairie. At the back of its corporate offices, past all of the gray-flannel cubicles, is a door leading to a massive, state-of-the-art warehouse. Thousands of square feet are filled with twenty-foot-high industrial shelves, which shelves are laden with umpteen carefully categorized and inventoried objects, which objects are destined to generate admiration, surprise, nostalgia, wonder, and other generally warm feelings in diners from Smithtown, Long Island, to Tempe, Arizona.
“A lot of people who come back to the restaurant want to sit in a different room each time, so that they can take in everything,” Dave Leach told a visitor the other day. He should know. As head of the décor and design department, Leach presides over Famous Dave’s warehouse of wonders, and has had a hand in decorating quite a few of those hundred-plus restaurants. (Business got brisk enough that he now has a partner, Greg Bartholomew, a former antiques dealer.) Leach is a man of few words, but after talking with him for a while it becomes apparent that he takes great pride in his work, and he’s aware that he has a brand of dream job.
When Leach gets word of a new Famous Dave’s, he first notes which model it will be: roadhouse shack, northwoods lodge, or the just-developed smokehouse design. Then he begins pulling items from the warehouse inventory, creating what he calls “vignettes” for the various restaurant spaces that evoke a farmhouse kitchen, a bait shop, an old-timer’s garage, a hunting shack or fish house, and so on. “It’s not just a display,” Leach said. “There’s a reason for everything to be where it is.” And a reason to stay there. To foil sticky fingers, each item on a shelf or in a cabinet gets glued down, from a Baby Ben alarm clock to a pickle jar of puzzle pieces. “Someone once ripped a decoy off a shelf,” said Leach. “They pulled so hard they took part of the shelf with it.” Once assembled, every last component, from a curio cabinet to salvaged church pews for the waiting area, gets shipped out from the warehouse.
The original Famous Dave’s décor has largely been translated to a series of formulas and templates, such that Leach can note offhand that twenty to twenty-four coffee pots get sent to each restaurant. But he and Bartholomew have leeway to add custom touches, such as Southwestern pottery for restaurants in Arizona, or Big Red memorabilia for those in Nebraska. (And if a sentimental franchisee wants to display a few of his own antiques, well, they’ll diplomatically integrate them.)
Leach maintains the inventory, every last item of which is tagged and registered in a database, with the help of a network of dealers and collectors in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and elsewhere. Once a dealer has accumulated a sizable pile of stuff, someone from corporate retrieves it with a truck. Leach also attends the bigger circuit sales himself, most every weekend from March through October. “I still like to beat the bushes to find something unique that can really help make a restaurant,” he said. But there’s another secret to creating atmosphere at a Famous Dave’s restaurant. Not everything is real.
Leach takes what looks like a can of motor oil from a warehouse shelf. It is actually a carved block of wood that has been meticulously painted, right down to the intricate stipples of black and brown amid silver and red that evoke years of accumulated grease and dust. There are also “Aladdin Angler” prop Thermoses (real ones can fetch sixty dollars) whose lids, Leach says, are grocery-store takeout containers painted a shiny enamel red. The artists and craftsmen who create these fakes are world-class counterfeiters, but Leach is tight-lipped about them. Company secrets. In fact, he’s about as willing to reveal that information as he is eager to hear from people who want to sell their old stuff. In other words, don’t ring him up about the decoys you inherited from Grandpa. He’s got plenty, thank you.—Julie Caniglia
Leave a Reply