BEDROCK BALTIMORE
BEDROCK BALTIMORE
“Baltimore is only 40 miles away from DC, but it might as well be a different universe.”
Our search for new locations took us to Baltimore where we found a beautiful old bank-turned-nightclub, cleverly named The Vault. The building was for sale and ,y wife’s uncle Phillip Abraham liked the location and the structure, so he invested. We were encouraged because Starbucks had opened their first street front location in Baltimore just across the street, so we assumed that the neighborhood was ready for some nightlife.
The buildout was challenging, but we turned this tired, old building into a pool room with a live music stage, and a small restaurant called then Sidecar Grill next door. There were several flaws in our plan. 1) This part of Baltimore was not ready for nightlife. 2) We knew little about operating a music venue. 3) We knew less about operating a restaurant. In addition, the ceilings were high, too high to make the room feel comfortable, so the place alway felt empty. There was a cool basement space where we built a bar and added several pool tables. That was the best part of the whole space, but in the end, not enough to make it work.
We had misjudged the market in a big way by looking at demographics on the printed page. The lesson to be learned, though it took me a few more knocks on the head to figure it out, is to sit in front of a potential location on busy nights and on slow nights, and count the number of potential customers walking by the door. It seems so simple, but we had built our successes in neighborhoods that were dense with our demographic. Bedrock Baltimore lasted less than a year and we headed south, back to DC, a bit wiser but a lot poorer.
