Crushed By Giants Not Crushed By COVID
DryHop, located in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, has been one of Chicago’s craft beer success stories since its opening on June 13, 2013. Led by founder Greg Shuff and Director of Brewing Operations Brant Dubovick, the DryHop team quickly showed a comfort level with business pivots.
First they jettisoned a well-crafted small plates menu because their kitchen capacity proved too small to keep up. Then they opened Corridor Brewery and Provisions, a second brewpub located about a mile west, in 2015. And then they opened Roebuck, with their take on Neapolitan-style pizza, in a space adjoining DryHop.
This adaptability unexpectedly proved critical when the COVID outbreak shut the city down in March 2020 — just as construction completed on Crushed By Giants, their first brewpub in downtown Chicago. And the fact that the team had taken a deep dive into pizzamaking turn out to be a key piece in weathering the crisis.
The following Q-and-A with Brant about the company’s food and COVID pivots is the concluding part 2 based on May 17 interview in which DryHop Head Brewer Steve Adams also participated. Part 1, which focused on the group’s beer styles, was published on Saturday (May 22).
Correction: The special beer DryHop has on tap to celebrate its upcoming 8th anniversary is called The Hop, The Oat, and The Cookie. There was an inadvertent error in the name in the Part 1 story published Saturday.
Q: Roebuck’s pizzas were intended to be a step toward diversifying and providing some contrast to DryHop next door and Corridor a few blocks away. It turned out to be a really good idea during the COVID period. Anything that was good for carryout and delivery.
Brant: That was definitely a good pivot during COVID. We even did it at Crushed By Giants. We originally started out as a taco place and pivoted away from it, because tacos weren't really holding up well to carryout and delivery, and pizzas hold up much better and can be reheated much better… It really helped especially when we weren't allowed any indoor dining in the winter and colder months. Crowlers [cans filled from the beer taps and sealed for carry-out] and pizzas are what enabled us to survive.
Q: The “gastro-brewpub” idea was really very forward when DryHop started. You've always gotten rave reviews for your food and you’re in national magazines for having one of the best hamburgers in the country. But you did have to revisit that a little bit because the kitchen had capacity issues.
Brant: Yeah, absolutely. We started out as a tapas restaurant with a cheeseburger. We found that people really dug the tapas idea, but we have a very, very small kitchen. We were having a very hard time executing a tapas menu when people were ordering four or five plates of something as opposed to one plate of a cheeseburger and french fries.
It was really difficult to have quail eggs on everything or be intricate with our plating and do that with the consistent quality. Whereas we found that cheeseburgers tended to be 40 percent of our sales. What do people want when they're at a brewery? They want a cheeseburger, they want a chicken sandwich, or do they want a pizza?… So we really wanted to concentrate on putting out a very, very high-quality product but also give what our guests wanted and what they expected from a brewpub experience, which is burger, beer, pizza.
A chopped salad does really well for us with fresh local produce and we really concentrate on that local movement. Ryan Henderson's our executive director of both kitchens now and he does a really good job of sourcing as much local ingredients from local farmers that we can use, which a lot of our guests want.
It's sort of evolved [during COVID]. We can't have people sitting in here, so what travels well when they're picking it up? Pizza does really well. Tacos not so well. So it was like, we want to be in business after this pandemic, what do we need to pivot so that we're all around in 2022 as opposed to not being in business anymore? And that was we need to give the guests a high-quality food experience, but also give something that we're not going to get phone calls and Yelp reviews saying, “This food is atrocious.” So we cut out like mussels and tacos and stuff that doesn't travel as well and gave the people what they wanted.
Q: So basically massively upgraded bar food.
Brant: Massively upgraded bar food that travels well and in a very concise menu on what we do well.
Q: And how is that going to affect your planning going forward? This formula worked.
Brant: I don't know the answer to that, Bob. I hope it goes back to normal. I hope we're back to 100 percent by at least Fourth of July. I hope we can welcome people back to seating at the bar because right now we have real limited seating at the bar. I would love to see a packed bar. I would love to sit at a packed bar with you and enjoy a pint and a cheeseburger. I would love to enjoy our mussels again because I thought they were phenomenal… Maybe starting out like slowly adding things on and see if people are coming back and eating mussels or not eating mussels. See what works in the post-pandemic world.
I'm very optimistic that we can maybe not be back to what 2018 was, the raucous days of 2018 and 2019, but I think we are going to be set for people who want to return to normal.
Q: To some extent, some people are just used to hibernating... So the place may be less crowded but it may not necessarily mean you're doing less business.
Brant: Yeah, if you want to stay in your house and it was sort of trending in that direction anyway, people want to Netflix and chill, we’d be more than willing to help you out with that and deliver you some food or have some pizza available for pickup and continue… Indoor dining has returned and since the weather’s gotten nicer people can sit outside, so our to-go numbers have declined, but there were still up from what they were pre-pandemic. We would love to continue the trajectory of offering that option as well.
Q: Crushed by Giants is your first downtown venture and its opening was much anticipated. It was on my way home from work at the time and I was planning to be a regular. With the onset of COVID, the timing turned out to be really unfortunate. Were you already in too deep or was there a discussion about maybe we should put this on hold?
Brant: It was never really a decision to put it on hold because it was literally the week before construction finished on it. Constructions done, Greg needs to start paying rent… We were supposed to open in March and it got pushed to July…
Basically during COVID, anybody who wanted a patio was allowed to have a patio in order to survive. And the city was really, really, really lenient with allowing you to apply for a patio license. However, it is not an ideal situation that Crushed by Giants has a patio because Crushed by Giants is on the second floor. We have a giant escalator down to the first floor…
The city decided to reopen in July [for indoor dining], but even when they reopened, 25 percent occupancy is not ideal, especially with the rent that's being paid in River North…. Then came Halloween of 2020, the city said shut it down again and we don't know when we’re going to allow indoor dining. So we shut Crushed down again, I had to let David Kerns our brewer go. [He has since been rehired.]
So it was not an ideal time to open it but we made it through and we are optimistic to be 100 percent occupancy, which is drastically going to help in that space… I expect with the pivot to pizza, which seems to be really popular, and a hundred percent occupancy, I anticipate a bright future for Crushed by Giants.