FOOD & LIFE

Morphing Annies' new home

Longtime lunch spot moves upscale with bistro on Congress Avenue.

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT WRITER
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

When I first met Love Nance and Sherry Jameson in April, they were interviewing a chef from Arizona about joining their team at Annies Cafe & Bar.

A tall, thin man whose work had appeared in Bon Appétit magazine had prepared sea scallops with orange-jalapeño sauce, fried goat cheese with pesto and a few Mediterranean specialties for them to taste. Between bites, the two women - by turns relaxed and funny, then focused and intense - asked the chef about managing food costs, artistic plating, mixing drinks, teaching and leadership style. Did he have the will to come down hard when the situation called for it?

It amounted to a catered job interview, one of 14 they would hold with chefs who responded to an ad on Craigslist to help Annies evolve from its catering and lunch-service roots in a West Sixth Street bank tower (when it was called Apple Annies) into a European-style day-and-night bistro on Congress Avenue. Nance and Jameson wouldn't mention any other names, but they smiled and shook their heads in disbelief at the secretive roster.

When another chef told me a month later that Annies had hired Mark Schmidt, the former chef-owner of the celebrated Café 909 in Marble Falls, the head-shaking incredulity made sense. They weren't messing around. This guy had been named an American-Statesman "Best New Chef" in 2005, and his Café 909 had landed among the area's top 10 restaurants four years running before closing in 2008. Alongside longtime Annies chef Tony Amplo, executive chef Schmidt (in his 13th restaurant opening) will apply the owners' "farm-to-table" philosophy of using fresh, local and organic (when possible) ingredients for breads, soups, pastries, steaks, seafood, breakfasts, pasta dishes, entree salads and specialty dishes such as pan-roasted rabbit from Sebastien Bonneu's local farm, Cuvee coffee-rubbed lamb rib-eye and farmers' market summer slaw.

"The goal is to have layered price points," Nance said. "We want people to be able to afford to eat here five times a week and never have the same thing."

On June 1, the new Annies opened quietly for breakfast and lunch and will keep its abbreviated schedule through Saturday. In that time, they'll also conduct some opening rituals, including a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10:30 a.m. today and a few private dinners for friends and family. But on Monday , Annies opens for the full-circus ride: catering, delivery, takeout, breakfast, lunch, dinner, bar and late-night afterthoughts. They'll open at 7 a.m. and stay open until 10 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, until midnight on Thursday and 2 a.m. on Fridays. On Saturdays, Annies will be open 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., closing on Sundays until brunch service begins in July.

"This was always the dream," Nance said of the larger mission for Annies. "We always knew we could do so much more. Through all my trips to New York, I've just always seen Annies evolving into a brasserie. Something people could come in and enjoy all day long and into the evening." In pursuit of a brasserie-style rebranding, Nance and her team decided to drop "Apple" from the name. They hired Austin graphic designer Brett Stiles to construct a new logo identity, which he did with typography best described as cosmopolitan antique: austere sans-serif fonts set off by words in ad-style pointed serif faces, with the occasional engraved-style apple accent alluding to the cafe's roots.

Planting a new Annies

A year ago, things looked like they could have easily gone the other way for Annies. The lease held by the 26-year-old business at the base of the Bank One (now Chase) building had ended, and the cafe closed in April 2008. Two and a half decades of catered sandwich-pasta-and-cookie box lunches and cafeteria-style service that included tomato-brie soup, a Thursday meatloaf that former City Council member Max Nofziger wrote a song about and a salad sampler with manic followers. Gone just like that.

To keep Apple Annies' catering and wholesale baking operations going, Mangia Pizza owners and longtime business friends Jeff Sayers and Mark Negro offered Nance and Jameson space at their company's commissary. "They stepped up to the plate in a big way," Nance said. The search for a permanent home had begun even before the old site closed, and the two were touring the Day Building at 319 Congress Ave. with real estate adviser Louis Aldridge in early 2008 when they saw Las Manitas co-owner Cynthia Perez walk past the windows. "There's your new neighbor," Aldridge said. He turned to Nance and Jameson and said, "What happened to that Las Manitas money?"

Las Manitas had become a controversy magnet in 2007 after the City of Austin offered its owners, sisters Cynthia and Lidia Perez, a $750,000 partially forgivable loan to relocate the Mexican restaurant from its home at Congress Avenue and Second Street to make way for a hotel development. The sisters ultimately declined the city loan and made private arrangements to move, and Las Manitas closed in September of last year.

The building's demolished now, and there's no hotel yet. But the Business Retention and Enhancement program created to help Las Manitas and to foster downtown businesses became the springboard for the plan to finance the Annies project, and the partners began negotiations with the city that resulted in two low-interest loans - both of which must be repaid - of $250,000 each. The second loan came from the federally funded Neighborhood Housing and Community Development program. The loans put the finishing touches on Annies' $3.25 million plan to buy and breathe life into the historic building that had been built for cattleman James Monroe Day in 1886 and that for years had housed Davis Hardware.

"They couldn't have been more helpful," Nance said of city officials who worked with her group. When the loans were approved in June of last year, Austin Mayor Will Wynn said of the business-retention program: "Apple Annies is precisely what we had in mind. We're taking a long-standing, locally owned business and helping them control their destiny and putting them on Congress Avenue, where we want more of those businesses." The same program was also used for a $250,000 nonforgivable loan to help the Mexican restaurant El Sol y La Luna relocate from South Congress Avenue to East Sixth Street in March.

Putting the money to work

Aside from buying the Day Building, with its bank of a dozen tall, windowed wooden doors along the sidewalk across the street from Manuel's, La Traviata and Cork & Co., what is Annies getting for its $3.25 million? For starters:

• A 30-foot, horseshoe-shaped custom-built bar made of zinc - suitable for a menu of classic cocktails being developed with Fino Restaurant Patio & Bar mixologist Bill Norris. Wine service will be guided by Shelly Schmidt, chef Mark Schmidt's wife and co-owner of the late Café 909.

• A space designed by Austin's renowned Dick Clark Architecture, the firm that also designed Kenichi, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and Maiko. The Annies team's directive to the company? "Keep it simple. Make it warm and welcoming. Celebrate the building. Beautifully light the food," Nance said.

• A polished concrete floor in volcano chocolate brown.

• A kitchen big enough to run a full hot line, bake bread and pastries and do catering.

• Seating for 125 people in the main dining room, plus another 24 outside.

• A 2-ton pizza oven the owners found on eBay (with free shipping).

Inspiration for Annies' European cafe approach came from several sources. During the chef interview in April, Nance and Jameson pulled out two design books, "The Grand Literary Cafes of Europe" and "Gourmet Bistros and Restaurants of Paris." Both were randomly tabbed with blue, pink and yellow sticky notes of all sizes, peppered with writing: "signage," "mirror frame," "color of walls and ceiling." In a promo video for Annies on YouTube, Nance talks over scenes of the zinc bar being installed (she really loves that bar): "A lot of the decor is based on the cafes and the bistros that I hung out in as a student living in Spain and traveling Europe in the late '70s."

After Nance's travels, plus time as a display and food stylist for Neiman-Marcus and a foreign-exhibits coordinator for the Dallas Museum of Art, the Smithville native started Apple Annies in 1982 at the Littlefield Building. Jameson, who has known Nance since they were 3 years old in Smithville, came on as a business partner 10 years ago from a mail-order cake business in California and time crunching numbers with the Texas state attorney general's office. On a June morning on opening week, both were prowling the floors behind and in front of the cafeteria-line food cases, straightening tablecloths, talking with the new staff, saying hi to the hungry and merely curious people coming in from the sidewalk. By 11:45 a.m., the hungry were in the majority, and Annies was a working restaurant again.

In some ways, Annies has the feel of the new Walton's Fancy and Staple, a Euro-conscious bakery-coffee-sandwich shop in a turn-of-the-last-century building just seven blocks away on West Sixth Street. That shop, with a similar array of long bakery cases, bold signage and exposed bricks, has the will of actress Sandra Bullock behind it. Can that match the survival skills and charisma of Nance and Jameson at Annies? In downtown Austin, that story line will play out on two stages within walking distance of one another.

The better to build up an appetite.

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902