If 2020 is the year of the food and beverage pivot, few have been more dazzling, or more preternaturally non-discursive, than that of Eric Riveraās Addo. From inside a converted coffee bar on Ballardās NW 24th, Rivera and his small seven-person team have pirouetted effortlessly from an in-demand tasting table experience to an all-encompassing digital expression of a restaurant. From in-house delivery to pantry staples, gamified takeout experiences (Oregon Trail dinners), and outrageous subscriptions (a dessert experience known as āOnlyFlansā), Addo in 2020 is a real-time exploration of what it looks like for a restaurant to survive.
Except, well, letās give that just a beat. My lede is at least partially bullshit.
Riveraās work this year has not been āeffortlessāāfar from it. Rivera is white-knuckling this thing, adapting week over week to keep his restaurant afloat, fusing every ounce of his personality and worldview into a modern digital restaurant in plague times. Rivera does all the web design and graphic design, making for an ever-changing experience of updates and drops that feels more like following a cool indie fashion brand than it does a restaurant. He also openly courts controversy, calling bullshit where he sees it on chefs sacrificing safety for profit during COVID and comparing those dining out cheerfully in packed dining rooms to dinosaurs amidst meteor impact. āIām pretty open about my opinions on things,ā Rivera told me during our conversation on the back bar of his restaurant. āIf I see something stupid in the industry, Iām going to call it out.ā
From whole dinners to home-cooking building blocks to team building and cooking class experiences, it feels like thereās nothing Rivera wonāt try. āWe sell plants now,ā he tells me, laughing, as he gestures to a wall of succulents. āThatās adaptability.ā But along the way, one is given a glimpse at a new kind of chef identity: extremely online and painlessly digital. Thirty years ago, if a chef were good on cameraāa Bourdain, an Emeril, a Rachel Rayāa whole new world of opportunity opened up to them. So too goes the digital chef in 2020, and Rivera, more so than perhaps any other chef right now in America, is a living embodiment of this potential. It is dizzying and delicious to watch.
This interview has been gently edited and condensed.
Hey EricāThanks for speaking with me. I want to start by saying, you know, in terms of pivoting to an online restaurant experience, you seem to have a really natural touch. Where does this ability come from?
Iāve always done online work. When I started in restaurants, it was a function of me trying to get a restaurant job and nobody wanted to hire me. Then I started a food blog while I went to culinary school, and that entire time I kept on doing itādocumenting, revising, talking to people. Iām a terrible writer, and Iām not much of a food personalityāI wasnāt trying to be a personality. Honestly, I was just trying to figure out how to talk to people and develop a message, to build something beyond me being a chef and knowing what I am and what I can do. That can only go so far.
It felt like it was important to build a brand thatās not fake. Iām not trying to be something for everyone or Mr. Smiles or always positiveāIām trying to adapt. I talk to my guests and get to know who they are.
I want to be clear, if it seems like Iām good at running a restaurant in 2020, wellāregardless, all of this shit sucks. Itās not fun. People are dying. Itās still a pandemic. Iām not trying to gloss over that and say, āHereās your release, hereās your time awayā¦āāwe are working with the reality of whatās happening around us while trying to give you good food, and we can entertain, too. It might not be for everybody, and Iām okay with that.
Iām curious about the strategy games and team building dinners youāre offering. Was this another COVID idea, or does it come from some other experience?
We were doing those here already, before COVID, but it was under the radar because a lot of people didnāt need to do that when they went out for dinner. Making a game or an experience out of food, thereās an aspect of it that can quickly become likeā¦Teatro Zinzani or something, really over the top stuff. Mine is more like going to a local play. You have to kind of use your imagination a little bit to get into it. Itās not high production value, and thereās a lot of experimentation going on.
When COVID came, we had to flip the script and go all virtual, and the gamesāthereās a lot about that work that actually makes sense in an online setting. So we do games that are based on the Oregon Trail, but we also do cooking classes. Those are both really easy to do online, and we took that template and started applying it to other ideas, like the team building experiences.
What youāre talking about is a kind of pop culture fluencyāan āonliningā of the restaurant experience, which is bigger and more important than I think people necessarily realize here at this moment. It goes to a āfuture of foodā sort of place. Do you agree?
Sure, but at the same time, we have always done dumb random shit like that. I never wanted Addo to be a static restaurant. I donāt think thatās important anymore. Menus across the city offer the same things with the same products, and thatās not me. I didnāt want to fall into that trap.
Iāve been really on this weird other side of the industry for a while, being recognized for it, and wanting to be recognized for it, but then also not recognized at all, and honestly, I donāt give a shit. Iām going to do whatever I want. People are going to buy it, and people are going to say it sounds stupid. My goal is to find enough people who want to find it.
My background before food was sales, specifically mortgage insurance and financial services. Thatās a very different world, but the sales stuff stuck with me, and when you start applying that mindset to restaurants and how menus work and building menus, it makes you realize that actually cooking is the easiest fucking thing to do, the easiest part of it all. The hard part is finding continuous ways to sell, especially within the dynamics of all this stuff thatās happened in the last year. Itās a lot, and itās hard.
There were ten different times we almost had to close. Ten times. You see your sales drop quickly for reasons you canāt control, and itās a hard time to pay bills, and then a spike comes out of nowhere, and I guess weāre still alive. But thatās the reality of it. I used to plan my menus out a year ahead of time and sell dinners ten months ahead in small ticket batches. Everything is week by week now.
Thereās been a lot of talk in the restaurant industry about how to āeventize takeoutāāhow to convey fine dining, or a special experience, into the act of eating food from a restaurant at home. How are you approaching this?
Weāre doing it by design. Ingrid and myself, weāre very good at that gameāhaving people in front of us, talking to them, creating an experience, but now you have to package that idea up and send it out. The question becomes, whatās the control method?
We started by creating our own delivery system. We have our own delivery driver, who is our own employee. We do not use any of the third-party systems. Itās literally one guy, and we schedule him in advance. We can deliver around Seattle, out to the east side, West Seattle, Shorelineāwe just pre-schedule it all. We do not do things like an āorder and itās there in 15 minutes thingāāthatās not what we do with people. Anything over $75 we include scheduled delivery with the order.
Itās cool because we control the process, which means itās not somebody thatās coming randomly into our restaurant to pick up, and our customers see the same driver come through every time. This is a relationship. It allows us a comfort level with what weāre doing. And essentially itās become like Jamie, our delivery driver, he is our front of house now. It happens outside the building, and for the guests, we have, like, a no-contact system and use a GPS tracking app, and itās all really slickābut still, he is the best vision we have right now for the front of house experience. And itās his job to make sure itās there.
This is a pretty dramatic adaptation of what āfront of houseā means to a restaurant.
We have to adapt to concepts like this. Thereās no choice. A lot of people answer to investors and are in a position where itās actually cheaper to just shut down and wait out the virus. I donāt have to play by those rules. I donāt have investors. Nobody is telling me we have to close. Itās on me to come up with new ideas and push things forward. Thereās no backing at Addoāweāre either here, or weāre out. Thatās why adaptivity becomes so important.
You appear to be very good at it.
Thatās the weirdest part. I think, you know, what Iām actually better at is cooking, and then being part of a face to face interaction with diners at a chefās table. Thatās my wheelhouse. But this year has stripped all that away from us. And itās likeāokay, cool, how do I fix this? Whatās the length of time? There isnāt this social media PR team of people behind Addoāitās literally just me and our very small team saying āfuck, we gotta figure this out.ā
Honestly, the biggest change is that Iām treating my restaurant like retail now. Itās a lifestyle brand, like an indie fashion brand or something. Itās our job to be a tastemaker. I meanāwe sell fucking plants now! You can shop with us to cook specific meals, but also for building block ingredients to develop your pantry. And so the question becomes, like, how do I package this up for you? I donāt have six to seven months to worry about perfect packaging. But I can drop my price points down and give the customer a little value.
New hot sauces. All with fruit from @kcline pic.twitter.com/0U5g2q8zCj
ā Eric Rivera (@ericriveracooks) October 31, 2020
How do you land on what to offer week over week? Are you trying stuff out in real-time, or leaning on favorites, or whatās the calculus behind that?
Thereās a lot of thought that goes into it. I think there are a lot of people who are afraid to buy shit from us because itās different and weird. Itās not a caesar salad every time. Itās very unique, and that presents a challenge.
When we first went into the pandemic we had a lot of guests who didnāt know how to cook or warm shit up at home. And we kind of had to explain, you know, thereās a reason why this doesnāt feel like a fine dining experience at home. Itās never going to feel like that. It took around two months before people got into the cycle of understanding what was really happening to our world. We are a lot more evolved now.
What comes next for Addo headed into the winter months?
I started focusing on our strategy for this back in September. For me, the number one thing is addressing the holidaysāwe are live now with our holiday packages. Iāve always done turkeys, and itās something I want to expand out and make even cooler. We are here to hit you up for holiday cooking.
My biggest focus is here is what experiences are like within a household. Around four months into the pandemic, people started getting sick of cooking at home. Doing the day to day bullshit, working or not, stressed out and depressed, dealing with kids, holy shitāI canāt imagine too many people wanting to sit there seven days a week after everything else at 5 pm and start cooking. That doesnāt seem like a realistic expectation at home, especially being depressed and going through all this stuff.
And so for me, it becomes a matter of saying, how can I help? What can I do to really make the most of what weāre good at here? Itās become this messaging idea that weāre your prep cooks. Throw that shit you got from us in the oven, who cares, itās going to be good. Itās better than what you buy from the store or from a subscription. We make very different flavors, and people appreciate that.
I want you eating our stuff three to four times a week. Price point becomes really important then, understanding how much I can charge, offering some subscription options and customization programs. But at the same time, seeing other restaurants close that used to be peopleās celebration and anniversary restaurants, itās likeāthat puts it back on me. Weāre that place now. So then we will rise to that challenge. Here are instructions, hereās how to make it as cool as can be, but also hereās some off the wall things to keep life interesting. We offer a hot sauce challenge, a beer fest program. Itās a push and pull. Thanksgiving is going to be huge this year because a lot of people canāt go home. A lot of people will just be here in Seattle, theyāre young and they donāt have a place to go, so thatās why weāre doing a Friendsgiving program, a way for people to meet up via a Zoom call with other people who are ordering food from us. This idea came from a very genuine place, a regular guest who told me honestly, āI donāt have any friends here, I just moved here for work, weāre locked in, and I canāt go out.ā So we will create that experience for them, a place to hang out on Thanksgiving.
Honestly, what I want is for our guests to be like, āHoly shit that was dope, what else can we do?ā And then they come back and order from us two to three more times. I want to feel like our company is your personal chef, because wine and food is easy, but whatās the next step for us? How do you bring people in and show them that you actually give a shit? Thatās honestly the next frontier, creating social experiences. People are going to really need that this year, I can tell. Iām sure of it.
