Mind Over Matter
How Four Female Restaurateurs Made It in the Ocean State
They’ll be the first to tell you what it isn’t. Being a restaurateur isn’t glamorous, it isn’t 9–5, it isn’t sexy or making them rich. It is, however, enriching. It is creative; it is replete with kind, dedicated people. Neither Ellen Slattery of Gracie’s and Ellie’s in Providence, nor Sue Lamond of Newport’s Salvation Café, nor Jeanine Iannucci and Angie Armenise from Blackie’s in Smithfield would sacrifice the reward for the relief of decreased commitment.
They weren’t expecting easy.
Success or failure for these entrepreneurial leading ladies has nothing to do with the fact that they are female, they agree. They believe that being positive role models with a firm, guided mission and dedicated work ethic has earned them whatever triumphs they may claim. Like their male counterparts, they have learned lessons the hard way, made friends and enemies, weathered catastrophes and victories. That’s the standard cost of running a business, not a unique parameter of their sex.
“In this business, if you want to be the best and be on top, you have to work for it. There’s no magic answer,” says Blackie’s co-owner and Executive Chef Angie Armenise. The Chicago-born Johnson & Wales graduate was Rhode Island Hospitality Association’s 2018 restaurateur of the year. Raised in a culinary family, she says she never wanted to be anything but a chef. “You have to work as hard as you can until you achieve your own personal level of greatness. There are sacrifices that you choose to make, or not.”
Being at the top means they started at the bottom, working seven days a week, doing every single job from painting walls and cleaning bathrooms to ordering food and hiring staff. Work/life balance, they say, doesn’t exist—so much so that only one of these four is a mother. Running the business, greeting guests, refining menus and working the line until midnight are more routine than children’s bedtimes and vacations.
“We miss things that are important to us,” says Iannucci, perhaps the black sheep of this group with scant culinary background before buying Blackies’s with Armenise in 2011. They expanded to a larger, modernized facility last August. “Hopefully you figure out solutions and ways to get your people together. Our families come here for birthdays and events, because this is our life.”
This fierce devotion to their shared missions can be alienating, unless they surround themselves with like-minded, goal-oriented people who would work 60-hour weeks right alongside them. This was Slattery’s foundation while opening the four-time AAA-award-winning Gracie’s on New Year’s Eve 1998, and then her second restaurant, Ellie’s, in 2012.
“That team is really what drives me. They are inspiring and motivational, it’s really invigorating,” says the Johnson & Wales-educated chef/owner. “Same thing with my children. It’s the people that you surround yourself with. That’s where I get my fuel.”
Blazing Newport’s “Restaurant Row,” Salvation’s Lamond was considered the first to establish Broadway as a foodie destination in 1993 before the main street’s 21st-century gentrification. It was an investment, she says, in the community and in herself, then a 25-year-old, “under-experienced and under-capitalized weird girl with a kooky restaurant in a neighborhood where people thought [I] was crazy.”
“I was looking for a hero,” she says, “but they don’t exist. So I looked around me, and [the heroes were] the people who worked beside me day in and day out. If we didn’t have the money to print a menu, we would write it in Sharpie and it would still serve the purpose. I still have this DIY guerilla warfare ‘get it done’ mentality. When you’re open seven days, you have to.”
Their lives have not been without stress and heartache—in fact, that is common. When the restaurant floods, staff don’t show up, a crucial piece of equipment breaks or someone is bitten by a guest’s dog, they are positively “equipped for every moment of every day to live up to the challenge of solving problems,” Slattery says from her Washington Street wine cellar. “I’m pretty composed, try to think things through and be thoughtful. But with 65 staff across two restaurants, obviously some things need to be made up on the fly.”
Living in perpetual triage, these restaurant sisters remain motivated to serve good food to good people, and be part of something bigger. Each of them sources from local farmers and purveyors, including Narragansett Lobster, Greenview Farms, Kinneally Meats, Little State Flower Co., Baffoni Poultry Farms and so many more. Lamond agrees these relationships with local vendors are crucial.
“Every time I can do a special order or create a dish from a new local vendor, I do it,” she says. “We’re so lucky to have them.”
They are all involved in their communities philanthropically, too, donating food, restaurant space and time.
“Selfishly, it fuels my soul,” Slattery says. “It’s rewarding work that you can see.” Blackie’s donates 10% of kids’ meal sales, sponsors weekly dinners for hospitalized children and is planning to create veggie gardens at Smithfield elementary schools to donate produce to homeless shelters or senior centers. Slattery volunteers with Women & Infants Hospital and March of Dimes, while Lamond offers her event space complimentary to nonprofit organizations. Iannucci says, “We have both worked very hard but we have not forgotten the core values of what’s most important. If you can give back in the smallest way, it is extremely valuable.”
Expanding into the event sphere, each of these women also is developing business plans and space to attract a broader scope of clientele. This has been a salvation for Lamond, who renovated her building in 2013 and added a 60-seat event room. Slattery offers off-site catering while Blackie’s event strategy is still marinating, though they’ve built an ideal space into the new restaurant.
“We catered 34 weddings in 2018, for six of which we closed the restaurant and took everything off-site, including 25 members of our team,” Slattery says. “That’s really rewarding for us because it’s a new experience, it’s an opportunity for growth.”
“We use our event room as a resource for organizations looking for extra space and overflow for the restaurant when needed. I don’t know how we’d survive without it in the off-season,” Lamond adds. “I knew I couldn’t work as hard as I was working. When you’re small, you can’t generate enough revenue to pay for additional key positions. But to get to the point where you have enough money to pay a general manager and chef, you need to have the right number of seats to bring in enough people.”
Survival of the fittest has a different meaning when bias, sexism, discrimination and regret become factors in the decision-making process. But still, there it is.
“There is a misconceived notion that we’re dumb women and we don’t know how to do this or that,” says Armenise, “so we’ve been taken advantage of.”
Lamond, one of seven siblings, believes that, if she were a man who had done what she has done, she would have been more lauded or appreciated. “Others looked at me with low expectations. If I had been a man or more experienced, I think people would have taken me more seriously,” she says. “I never took myself that seriously, so perhaps others didn’t either.”
Slattery grew up with a working mother, was raised to work hard like her two brothers, and never thought about feminist struggles. “I’ve never put any thought into that,” she says. “Growing up, I always wished my mom was home making dinner. But I didn’t understand the concept until I was in college and thought ‘Oh, now I get it.’ But my best friend’s mom stayed at home, was a baker, and I was always very inspired by her. It was the best of both worlds.”
Heads on swivels and with earphones constantly barking at them, they are feverishly serving a little of this and a little of that to anyone who needs them. But as unstylish and unsexy as they portray themselves, these businesswomen are unstoppable, which is powerfully appealing.
“The only thing you can do is to start out each day fresh. You really have to try to leave all of yesterday behind. People are looking to us for motivation, guidance, constructive criticism, praise and inspiration. That has to come from the top … from us,” Armenise says. “That is very motivating to me every day, that people look up to me and I have an opportunity be a positive influence in someone’s life.”
Blackie’s
280 George Washington Hwy.
Smithfield
401.231.4777; EatAtBlackies.com
Ellie’s
225 Weybosset St.
Providence
401.563.3333; ElliesProv.com
Gracie’s
194 Washington St.
Providence
401.272.7811; GraciesProv.com
Salvation Café
140 Broadway
Newport
401.847.2620; SalvationCafe.com
