Behind Geek Bar's Ambitions, Money Troubles and Discontents
By Melissa McEwen in Food on Aug 13, 2015 8:00PM
The mounting evidence of Geek Bar's unmet ambitions and money troubles are getting harder to ignore, even as we have appreciated its counterpoint to Chicago's ever-so-bro-y bar scene.
A piece in this week's Reader highlights the struggles Geek Bar has faced, including some you won't read about on their fundraising page, where they recently (and successfully) raised money to keep the doors open in Wicker Park.
It hasn't been hard to notice as the people we met at Geek Bar's 2014 preview slowly disappeared, including the few who had experience running restaurants. Now only David Zoltan is left. The Reader says many left because they simply weren't getting paid, and their health insurance was cancelled. At least one employee said she found this out when she went to get her prescription.
"I fought as hard as I could to negotiate with Blue Cross, until mid July when we finally got a letter from them saying the health care was cancelled," Zoltan told Chicagoist in an interview Thursday. "We did have bounced checks but up until the big incident in July. We always replaced those checks and made sure that people did get paid even if it was later than we originally planned. But we had cash flow issues, tremendous ones."
What exactly was that incident? Geek Bar had vended at The 606's opening festival and Zoltan says that was "tremendously successful," so they hoped to use another festival to "bridge their cash flow problems." Unfortunately that festival was The Forest Park Music Festival, an event that he says predicted 10,000 to 20,000 people but ended up drawing a small fraction of that.
Despite these issues, when we spoke to Zoltan he remained optimistic that Geek Bar has something to offer and will be able to become profitable by next month. He's particularly enthusiastic about chef Joshua Mutchnick, an avid customer who joined the staff this January with restaurant experience (Graham Elliot Bistro, North Pond and Sixteen) and Rob Stein, who runs the front of house.
"[The Reader article was] deeply disappointing—here we've got former employees obviously hurt by a lot of the things that have gone on over the course of the year. Granted some of these folks haven't been in the startup world or the restaurant world, they weren't necessarily prepared for how tough it it can be sometimes, we've gone through some extraordinary struggles, above and beyond what most startups go through," Zoltan said.
He sees Geek Bar as more than just a bar, but a startup aimed at bringing the geek community together. And they did come together—at least some of them—to keep it afloat.
We think the Reader article highlighted some serious issues with how the business has been managed. But in some ways, we news outlets covering the story of Geek Bar and its discontents are part of the problem, by giving press to the endless stream of Internet-savvy crowdfunders looking for help getting and keeping their business ideas off the ground.