Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • March 9, 2020 • Hartford Business Journal 23 The Cook and the Bear, which would open in West Hartford's swanky Blueback Square. Parking around the 50 Memorial Road location was difficult, and rent in the chic neighborhood was high, but none of the owners felt deterred. "We thought, 'Oh, we're from Millwrights, and we're partnering up with Bear's Smokehouse, how could we fail?'" Aurrichio said of their calculation at the time. They really did seem to have everything going for them: Name recognition — Anderson by this time was a regular on cooking shows, and in 2018 would appear on Season 15 of "Top Chef," while McDonald was a local food celebrity in his own right; Media coverage — the announcement of the restaurant and eventual opening both made headlines; Reviews — professional critics and Yelp reviewers alike praised the menu's seamless inclusion of down- home fare with high-end elements (like a brisket sandwich with a miso-herb aioli). Even with all that, the restaurant never drew enough people to earn a profit. That will always bother Anderson. The partners shuttered the operation last summer. "I think that the restaurant was special enough for people not to have an issue walking to it from a parking lot," Anderson said during a recent inter- view at his two-floor, colonial-style house in West Hartford, less than a half-mile down the street from the now-defunct eatery. He sighed and shrugged. "Who knows? That one will always be a mystery to me," he said. Closing The Cook and the Bear was difficult, Anderson said, but the numbers weren't trending toward future profits. "That one was kind of a humbler," Aurrichio said. "It was like, what we thought was the equation to make a restaurant successful wasn't." Around the same time, it was becoming clear that Porrón, a restaurant Anderson and Aurrichio opened in downtown Hartford's Goodwin Hotel with partner Randy Salvatore in 2018, needed some retooling. Anderson partnered with Salvatore to open and run restaurants and bars in the Goodwin and New Haven's Blake Hotel, establishing Spanish- inspired Porrón and Bar Piña in Hartford, and the Hamilton Park restaurant and High George bar in the Elm City. Porrón's Spanish tapas offerings downtown made sense in theory. Located steps away from longtime institution Max's Downtown, a restau- rant in the Goodwin would either have to compete with Max's, or offer something completely dif- ferent. Anderson, who served as the U.S. culinary ambassador to Spain in 2017, chose the latter. But highly specialized food is tricky in downtown Hartford, said Rob Maffucci, who owns V's Trattoria nearby on Trumbull Street and has been a fixture in the city for about two decades. Hartford's popula- tion is growing, but not enough for consistent traf- fic at a niche restaurant. "If you're too fine-tuned then you're shutting out possible business," said Maffucci, whose restaurants all serve Italian cuisine. Last month Anderson opened the re-concepted Ter- reno, which serves burgers and spaghetti and meat- balls alongside stuffed quail and swordfish piccata. The more casual items already appear on the menu at Hamilton Park, and are debuting at Mill- wrights in the next couple of weeks. "A big focus is driving top-line revenue into our restaurants, and how do you do that? You make sure you're doing what people want," Anderson said. "The mentality used to be, 'well this food is deli- cious, they'll like something,' but if they don't eat skate wing or monkfish or something weird, then there's nothing here for them." And part of doing what people want is for TV's Chef Tyler Anderson to play up his star power a bit. Each night at about 8:30 his wife, Stepka, a nurse who works at an Avon med-spa and in the ICU at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, reminds him via text to walk the dining room and say hello to diners. "There is some celebrity that comes with being a chef, because it's been made on TV to be this celebri- ty thing, even though it's not really that glamorous at all," Stepka said to Anderson while the two sat in their living room. "So whether you like it or not, that now comes with what you do." Anderson smiled and rolled his eyes at her. "Thanks, babe," he chuckled. EXECUTIVE PROFILE Data Engineer w/ Aetna in Hartford, CT. Analyze sci, engr, bus. and other data processing problems to implement and improve comp systems. Rqmts: Master's degree in Comp Sci, Comp Engr, or IT. Will accept combination of degrees equivalent to a Master's. Minimum of 2 years of exp working in Data Warehouse projects. Exp must include leveraging multiple tools and prog. languages to analyze and manipulate data sets from disparate data sources; building data transformation and processing solutions, and working with large-scale search applications and building high volume data pipelines. 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