AADL Talks To: Tommy York, of York Food and Drink

Wed, 03/19/2025 - 12:23pm

When: February 24, 2025

Tommy York, owner of the popular eatery York Food & Drink, started his career with Espresso Royale, eventually transitioning to Zingerman’s community of businesses. After several years, he joined partner Matt Morgan to open Morgan & York. Tommy talks with us about his background in social work and how it shaped the evolution of his business; some of the many personal and professional challenges he’s faced over the years, and how he learned from mentors along the way to put people before profit.

Transcript

• [00:00:02] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:10] DARLA WELSHONS: This is Darla, and in this episode, AADL talks to Tommy York, owner of the popular eatery York Food & Drink. Tommy started his career with Espresso Royale, eventually transitioning to Zingerman's Community of Businesses. After several years, he joined partner Matt Morgan to open Morgan & York. Tommy talks about his background in social work and how it shaped the evolution of his business, some of the many personal and professional challenges he's faced over the years, and how he learned from mentors along the way to put people before profit.
• [00:00:44] AMY CANTU: Thanks for coming, Tommy.
• [00:00:46] TOMMY YORK: You're welcome.
• [00:00:47] AMY CANTU: We like to start with a little bit of background. Where did you grow up and what brought you to Ann Arbor?
• [00:00:55] TOMMY YORK: I grew up in Livonia. I like to claim that I was born in Detroit, which I was, but I'm not actually a Detroiter. When you're not from Michigan, you can say you're from Detroit and people are like, okay.
• [00:01:06] AMY CANTU: This is true.
• [00:01:07] TOMMY YORK: We all know how big it is, but I actually grew up in Livonia, and I came to Eastern Michigan for an undergrad in social work, and then Michigan for a graduate degree in social work. I have an MSW and a BSW, both. I came here in '84. Then I failed out of college after my first year and then came back in '86. I had to go to Hagerty High for a couple of years to get my grades back up.
• [00:01:32] AMY CANTU: Thanks for being honest about that.
• [00:01:34] TOMMY YORK: There's lots of people who hit a wall, and then don't tell people what you have to do after that.
• [00:01:39] DARLA WELSHONS: I mean, if you hit a master's, I think you did okay for yourself.
• [00:01:42] TOMMY YORK: I did okay. Thank you.
• [00:01:43] AMY CANTU: Then what happened? Like, what took you from an interest in master's work to... I'm assuming there were a couple of steps along the way before I met you when you were into coffee. Tell us how you got there.
• [00:02:00] TOMMY YORK: I had this idea that I would pay for graduate school myself. I got a full time job at Espresso Royale on State Street in '88. I was also in the social work program, and my internship was at the Depression Unit at the hospital, which at the time was Unit 9D. The work they were doing at the Depression Unit was absolutely mind blowing. They were saving people that were catatonic, that people were completely locked in and were never going to come back to life without ECT. I had come from a more liberal background where the less intervention, the better so I kinda have a... Wat's the right word? I was negative. I was down on medicine, I guess. When I saw it in action, I was like, this is absolutely amazing. But the things that people do to each other to get to the Depression Unit is what I could not deal with. My first case was a mother who had tried to commit suicide because she found out that her husband had been incestuously involved with their daughter since she was 11 or something. This one was like '60. The father had committed suicide successfully. The mother had attempted, and I'm supposed to, I'm, a what, 22-year-old kid treating these people for depression? That's going on, and I'm like, Oh, my God, how can people do this to each other? Then I would go from there to the cafe on State Street, and people were laughing and smiling and drinking coffee and eating blueberry muffins or cheesecake, and I was like, I think I like doing this better. I was in the third or fourth generation of "You can be a doctor or lawyer, and if those don't work, you could be an engineer." Which doesn't work for a kid like me. I need to be moving all the time. I found the restaurant work just to be really gratifying. You could go from A to B, and, I mean you and I worked together. You know what it was like. It was busy.
• [00:03:59] AMY CANTU: You were, yeah.
• [00:04:00] TOMMY YORK: When we would get there at two or three or four, and it would be midnight and you just blink and the whole day was gone. I gained a great respect for what people can do to help each other. I also learned that I have really shitty boundaries and had too much empathy, and I just could not leave that stuff at work. I thought, Go someplace where I can leave it.
• [00:04:24] DARLA WELSHONS: Do you ever regret leaving that? Or are you happy with that decision?
• [00:04:29] TOMMY YORK: No, shit I regret it all the time.
• [00:04:31] DARLA WELSHONS: Do you?
• [00:04:33] TOMMY YORK: Yeah. My life is full of regrets. Depending on the day. I think the people that are physicians will often say to me, Man, I should have gone into the food world. I hate doing this anymore. And then on my worst day, I'm usually like, I should have become a doctor. What am I doing this shit for?
• [00:04:51] AMY CANTU: Grass is greener.
• [00:04:52] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, exactly. Totally grass is greener. I mean, I love what I do, and I don't think I'd change it, but definitely there are some steps that I think if I could go back and alter, I would maybe turn here or turn there as opposed to plow through because I was really determined to make the business that I'm in now successful, and that came at a cost.
• [00:05:13] AMY CANTU: On the other hand, though, it's good to know as viscerally as it sounds like you did, that you weren't meant for that other work. You weren't meant for that, and you know it, and it's good to know that.
• [00:05:27] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, yeah. But I think on an admin level that we... Something happened in the last 40 years that -- I don't know if it was Nixon being pardoned by Ford or what happened -- but our progression toward a fair and just society is where we are now, which is just absolutely horrifying. I think if I had stayed... I could have gone to maybe the community organizing route. But I tell you, when I was an undergrad and I was looking at the pay rates, it was like, $25,000 a year, 30 years ago. There's no way you were going to be able to buy a house in Ann Arbor and have a family. Those career choices were like-- I can't do that. Then I went to the master's thinking, if I get a master's, at least I'll get more money. Then I was like, Oh, my God, I can't believe people do these things to each other. I got to get out of here.
• [00:06:26] AMY CANTU: Well, it's funny, I didn't know that about you at all. Thank you for sharing that.
• [00:06:30] TOMMY YORK: It was amazing. The people that do that work every day, they should be making as much as the surgeons who do whatever they do 'cause they put entire communities back together sometimes. It;'s amazing.
• [00:06:44] AMY CANTU: Ok, so you were at Espresso Royale. What did you learn from working in this business, right from the get-go, that maybe surprised you or that caused you to think, I want to do this -- aside from liking the energy and seeing happy people drinking coffee.
• [00:07:02] TOMMY YORK: Well, our boss was a guy named Marcus Goller, who's no longer with us. I think that the folks that paid attention in church or in temple and got the Judeo-Christian work ethic and how you treat each other right, do well in business a lot of times. I was working a shift one day, and Marcus came up to me and he said, Are we paying everybody as much as we can pay them? I said, What did you just say? He said, Are we paying people enough money? All these people are putting themselves through school. Where are we at on the wage thing? I said, I think we're doing fine because we were all getting profit sharing at the end of the month, and that was 205 or 600 bucks, which was a lot of money back then. He said, Yeah, I was trained by Sandy Boyd, who was there was a CavaCafe here for a minute. But he was Espresso Roma out in Davis, California. Their whole thing was, pay people as much as you can. Then they'll stay and they'll work, and then you'll enjoy it. I think when you work with good people, no matter where you are, that's the deal. I probably could have stayed in social work, and people would have said, Stop being worried about these people. They're good. Go home and enjoy yourself. But who knows? I don't know. I just like being surrounded by people that really like to work hard and really like to play hard and treat each other as best they can.
• [00:08:38] DARLA WELSHONS: Ok, so where you are now -- what happened between Espresso Royale?
• [00:08:42] TOMMY YORK: Sure. That was wild.
• [00:08:47] TOMMY YORK: I was working at the Main Street store, and Ari and Paul, who started Zingerman's with Mike Monahan, which a lot of people don't know, but Mike Monahan and Paul, actually, were the first two to start it, and they brought Ari on later. Ari and Paul would come down to the Main Street Cafe because it was far from their shop, and then they would strike up a conversation. I said I was going out for a partner meeting in California, and they said, Oh, enjoy. When I got back, they said, How was the meeting? I said, Oh, my God, it was horrible. They said, What do you mean it was horrible? I said, Our ownership, our majority partners, want to go up against Starbucks. I said, That's crazy because there were no Starbucks East of the Mississippi. Espresso Royale had like, at the time, 22 shops. We were in Hennepin on Hennepin Street in the Twin Cities, all the way down to Illinois and in California and in Boston. We had shops all over the place. I said to the majority partners, like, there's no way we can beat Starbucks. They're three years ahead of us. Based on due diligence, if we want to go public, we have two or three years of due diligence. They're already going. Why don't we just lock up the Great Lakes? There were no cafes in Manhattan. There was nothing. They were all like little neighborhood shops, nothing like we see now. They were like, No, we're not doing that. I got back from the meeting, and Ari and Paul were like, What are you going to do? I said, I'm going to leave. These guys are going to hit the wall, eventually, and this is not going to be good. They said, Well, what are you going to do? I said, I don't know. I'm going to do something. About six months later, they came back and they said, You want to join us? I said, Yeah, sure, what do you want? They said, We're opening a produce department. We're going to take over the Ascione Brothers' space in Kerrytown. I went back and talked to Julie and my wife about it. She's like, Don't you have to get up at like two in the morning to go to the produce terminal? She's like, You can't do that. That's not going to work for you. I went back to him and I said, Hey, thanks for the offer, but I don't want to drive a produce truck down to the terminal. Then about a month later they came back and they said, What about the deli? I said, What about the deli? They said, What about running the deli? I said, That's a 250-person place. I usually run like a 20-30 person shop, and three or four of them at a time. That's a different responsibility altogether. They're like, We'll train you for a year, and if you don't like it, you can leave. If you do like it, then you can buy in. I said, Okay, so they offered me equity in the store, and I told my partners I was leaving, and they were like, Ok,see ya.
• [00:11:30] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:11:31] TOMMY YORK: Now Espresso Royale's gone. I knew it was coming, they really just went step by step down the ladder of quality, unfortunately. But it was good when it was good. So I got over to Zingerman's, which was amazing. I got the coffee part of things, then I got the food part of things. Then from there, I went to the wine part of things and the alcohol because in Europe, they all fit together. In America, they're all disparate. But in Europe, everything goes together. While I was with Zingerman's, I had a nice-sized travel budget so I could go all over Europe and check things out, which is what I did.
• [00:12:11] AMY CANTU: How long were you with them?
• [00:12:13] TOMMY YORK: Seven years.
• [00:12:14] AMY CANTU: Wow. So you learned a lot from them.
• [00:12:17] TOMMY YORK: I learned a ton. Talk about having food mentors. Ari and Paul, you're like-
• [00:12:24] AMY CANTU: That's the best you can get!
• [00:12:25] TOMMY YORK: It is the best you can get.
• [00:12:25] AMY CANTU: Not just around here.
• [00:12:26] TOMMY YORK: No, worldwide. Absolutely. Those two, you know, they were with Lisa De Young who started Food Gatherers, and -- for-profit companies starting non-profit companies to help other people and dead set on making sure people were paid well and having insurance and having a workplace where... Can we say the banned DEI words? There was diversity and equity and inclusion on their minds 30 years ago, and they were one of those businesses where when you treat people right, you see, what are they now? Like a $70,000,000 company or I don't even know. It's North of 78, probably. With hundreds and hundreds of employees who have insurance and meaningful work and all the stuff our grandparents thought, You can't do that because there's no... If you get hurt... I mean, my grandparents would tell you if you got hurt, you just got fired. There was no union. There was no OSHA. There was no nothing. When I went into the food business, my grandmother, on the steps of Rackham, she said, You're wasting your life. She walked off and left it. I looked over at my mom and I said, Wow, that's what you got. She's like, Every day. I was like, Wow. That pressure to get in a position where you make enough money so that if you get hurt, it's fine, was present in our family anyway.
• [00:13:49] AMY CANTU: It's funny because when I worked with you, I always thought you were a very nice person, very much cared for the employees.
• [00:13:57] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, what happened?
• [00:13:57] AMY CANTU: No. [LAUGHTER] It's not where I'm going with this. But then when you started talking at the beginning of this about your background with social work, I thought, Well, that's where it comes from. But it sounds like a whole lot of it came from what you learned through the Zingerman's...
• [00:14:12] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, absolutely.
• [00:14:13] AMY CANTU: Like, a lot of it.
• [00:14:13] TOMMY YORK: My parents, too. My parents raised me right. I would say, What about this? What about that? Why can't we get this? Why can't we get that? Like a spoiled kid would do. Maybe privilege is better. My parents didn't really spoil us, but we were certainly privileged. My mom and dad would say, Look down. Look down at how many people have nothing. Come on. As a kid, you're like, Oh, God, what a cheap-ass. I can't believe we can't get a new car. Why do we have to ride a two-year-old car? My dad was an accountant, so he would say, I'm not buying a car driving it off the lot and having it be 20% less and less than a mile. You'd get a two-year-old car, which, who would complain about that if they were in India with no running water and no food? They'd be like, Oh, we could sell this car and feed our whole village. My parents and then just lots of really good people around me, who were always willing to steer... I should actually also give Rosemary Sarri, who was a professor at the School of Social Work, when I was really having trouble with leaving the food world, she said, York, you can do social work anywhere. I was like, What do you mean? She's like, Imagine if somebody went to work and they had a really good day at work and they came home, how would they treat their family versus they went to work and they were berated and belittled and they came home -- how would they treat their family? I was like, Wow. She's like, Social workers do social work anywhere. It doesn't matter. It's just: Go do your thing. I was like, Oh, my gosh.
• [00:15:47] DARLA WELSHONS: That's great advice.
• [00:15:48] TOMMY YORK: You spend money to go graduate school and you think, Oh-- when you're young, you're like, I gotta use this degree. I gotta get money. I gotta do something, and then you realize, like, That's silly. But you don't usually realize that until you're getting ready to retire in your last two chapters, you're like, Oh, I could have done that. It would've been fine.
• [00:16:07] AMY CANTU: Exactly.
• [00:16:07] AMY CANTU: When did you meet Morgan, and when did you decide to leave Zingerman's? How did all that happen? What's that transition?
• [00:16:16] TOMMY YORK: Well, I met Matt Morgan at the South Side Espresso Royale. He interviewed for a job, and he said, I can only work for three months because I'm going to move to Arizona or California or someplace like that. I said, You know what, we need people for six months to a year at this store, but State Street could probably use your help. I walked him up to State Street, introduced him to Wade Radina, who was the manager of State Street, and they hired him. Then he worked his way through the company to be the corporate espresso machine buyer and repair guy and all that stuff. Then he started his own business, which I can't remember the name of. I was then at Zingerman's and he came to me and he said, I'm trying to make this espresso machine repair business work, and it's not working. He's like, I'm in Minnesota one day. I'm in Wisconsin the next day. They want me in Kentucky another day. He's like, I'm running out of cash. I'm running out of energy. This is killing me. I said, Well, why don't you come and work with me? He's like, I don't know anything about food. I'm like, It's not that hard. It takes work, but you can do it. If you're driving around fixing espresso machines and you have a physics degree from the University of Michigan, I'm pretty sure you can figure it out. He came on and I think worked with me for five years, and then Marylou Towner, who owned Big 10 Party store, called Ari and said, I want to sell my business, but I don't want to sell it to a corporation. You folks seem to do the right thing, and I want you guys to buy it. Jenny Tubbs, who was Ari's assistant, called me and said, Mrs. Towner wants to sell this business. Will you go check it out? Matt and I went over and checked it out, and then we went back to Ari and Paul and said, You guys want to go 50/50 on this? They said, Well, the way the Zingerman's community business was set up it was 81/19. Ari and Paul owned 81%, and then the partners owned 19. That has since changed, but at the time... And Matt and I sat down and did the math, and we were like, There's no way we can build any real wealth if we do this. We are basically going to be buying ourselves jobs. Ari and Paul said, Then go do it. They bought me out of Zingerman's and then gave me the money to be able to go buy that. I lent Matt the money, and then Matt paid me back, and off we went.
• [00:18:27] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:18:28] TOMMY YORK: Yeah. I've been pretty lucky so far.
• [00:18:30] AMY CANTU: Yeah, that's great.
• [00:18:31] TOMMY YORK: But the 2001 9/11 happened the week we bought the store.
• [00:18:40] AMY CANTU: Oh, teally? Oh, great.
• [00:18:42] TOMMY YORK: Then a month later, my mother-in-law died from leukemia. Then 2008 happened and our sales dropped 30% overnight. When we were talking about regrets earlier, it's like maybe it would have been better to sit tight, keep my mouth shut someplace else. But I'm not able to sit tight or keep my mouth shut, so I knew that about myself. But when you look back, it's like, Maybe you should have just figured out how to do that.
• [00:19:07] DARLA WELSHONS: Well, obviously, you made it through because you're here now.
• [00:19:09] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, I did.
• [00:19:11] MALE_1: We can run over and grab some of your cold brew at a time.
• [00:19:13] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, please.
• [00:19:15] AMY CANTU: How did you weather the downturn, especially the Great Recession? I've read it in the paper, but can you just give us your take on how you got through all that?
• [00:19:27] TOMMY YORK: Well, my dad and one of his friends, Don Chisholm, who was a real estate developer in town, lent us the money to stay liquid as the bottom line. We called him and we said, What are we supposed to do? They said, Cut to the bone immediately. Cut your salaries, tell everybody that's working part-time, they can't work anymore. We just freaked out and just kept pushing.
• [00:19:52] AMY CANTU: Was it that other people just weren't coming in to buy the things that you had because their habits shifted?
• [00:20:00] TOMMY YORK: Their habits shifted, their income dropped. I think the stock market was what? Down at 500 or something like that. Pfizer closed right before that. Remember, all that North campus... All those jobs disappeared. It just seemed silly for people to be buying affordable luxuries, even things as simple as beer and wine. I think they just went, Holy shit, where are we going? Thankfully, Obama and Biden fixed a real mess and never ran around threatening anybody. I don't think anybody even went to jail for selling things that they said were cash equivalents that weren't. Before, Amy and I were talking about the short memory that people have. Well, we won't hammer on anybody. We want everybody to come join us.
• [00:20:51] AMY CANTU: No, it's been crazy. But then you shifted. You were very proactive in finding new ways to change the store up and meet what was there. What was of interest? Can you talk a little bit about that?
• [00:21:06] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, wow. It's fascinating. It was the perfect shitstorm maybe is a better way because there's no such thing as the Internet when we were kids. The economy crashes, and the Internet comes on board, and this guy Jeff Bezos starts sending shit to people's door fronts and they don't even have to leave their houses. All the things that we, while I was at Zingerman's, had to travel to Europe to find and make relationships with, people could now get on a computer and order cheese from New York or order cheese right from France or England or wherever. The retail side of things just kept going down and down. I said to Matt, I said, We have to go into something that can't be duplicated. We have to have a personality-driven restaurant. He was like, I don't I don't want to do that and I said, That's the only thing we're going to do. We personally guaranteed these loans, and they were North of $2 million, and I'm not going bankrupt. It's not happening. Matt was like, I can't do this anymore, we're not making any money. I'm not saving anything. It's making me anxious. I can't sleep. I'm going to have a freaking heart attack, and I was like, Okay, it's fine. He's like, I honestly can't do it and I'm like, Okay. He's like, You need to buy me out. I was like, Buy you out of what? There's no money here. Matt left. Then my friend Noah Kaplan, who started Leon Speakers. He started Leon Speakers right when I was starting at Espresso Royale. I was on Main Street. He was on Liberty, I think, below maybe where Roost Ost is now. I think, right under in the basement there. He came in and he had dreadlocks, and he was like this super funky dude, and he's like, I'm starting a speaker company. We were like, we need speakers for the store. Peter Thompson, who works with me still, bought Noah's first pair of speakers that they produced, and I bought their second. Fast forward 30 years later, Noah was in the store, a clean-cut cut successful business person, and wonderful dude in town who gives a lot to everybody, walks up to me, and he goes, I heard Matt left. I said, Yeah, and he goes, Do you want some help? I said, Yeah. I said, What do you have in mind? He's like, We should open a brewery here. Well, I'll come up with something. But you want help and I was like, Yeah, I need help.
• [00:23:30] AMY CANTU: When was this?
• [00:23:32] TOMMY YORK: What's that? 2017 probably? Then the city wouldn't let us. Mothfire Brewing was the brewery that they were going to put in the courtyard there, but we couldn't do it in that little building. But the city didn't want a brewery there, which is fine. I understand. Probably makes sense after Homes had such great success. I don't think Tommy Kennedy had any idea that Homes was going to be as popular as it was. Some of their customers didn't respect the neighborhood very well. I think the city was like, God, here we go. Another brewery or whatever is tucked into a neighborhood that's going to be not well received. They said, No, don't do that. The brewery went on a Ellsworth by Costco, and he put together his brother and then Sarah Okin and Elan Ruggill, whose all of our last names, happened to spell out York, which is great. Then we were like, Okay, this must be meant to be, let's figure it out. They came in. They ended up buying Matt out just so he would go, which was really generous on their part. Then put in some money and said, Get out there and do your thing, York. I was like, Okay, I'll do it. I'm not an office person, and I was having to do a lot of office stuff and a lot of admin stuff that I'm just not good at. I mean, I could be if I was a different person. I understand it. But it doesn't get me up in the morning. Waiting on customers and making food gets me up in the morning. Administrative stuff keeps me up at night.
• [00:25:07] DARLA WELSHONS: That was, you said 2017 before the pandemic. What happened with the pandemic?
• [00:25:14] TOMMY YORK: The Pandemic was, Here we go again. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:25:17] AMY CANTU: Here we go again.
• [00:25:18] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, here we go again. I thought for sure we were done.
• [00:25:25] DARLA WELSHONS: Was Ricewood with you by the time?
• [00:25:27] TOMMY YORK: Ricewood was with us. Yeah. But they had just moved inside. And then all the dining rooms and all the restaurants got closed. We bought a bunch of furniture and programmed the outside of the store, which was just really like two or three picnic tables that was just set for Ricewood. We transitioned all the way into pretty much a restaurant. We kept a small portion of retail, but nothing like we had before. We sold our off-premise license to Plum, and we bought an on-premise license. That was like an $80,000 thing that I thought, oh, how are we going to do this? But Plum paid us $80,000. They said -- one of the Jonah brothers, I can't remember which one -- just said, Buy the on-premise for yourselves, and we'll pay you whatever it was for the off-premise, because we need it for the Maple store. I said, I don't know how much it's going to be, and they said, Don't worry about it, just go do it. They were supportive in a pretty fun way. I think we, as a group, could have done it, but I was still thinking I'm going to have to go out and collect cans at night in order to make payroll. I was in a risk-averse spot for a long time. After losing that much money, I was just like, Oh, my God, not another thing.
• [00:26:50] AMY CANTU: Before the pandemic, to go back to Ricewood: What made you decide this will work, to have a different business in with my business? How did you come up with that idea?
• [00:27:03] TOMMY YORK: Lisa Oca came up with that.
• [00:27:05] AMY CANTU: She came up with it.
• [00:27:06] TOMMY YORK: She's a friend of both Frank and Gabe and mine. She's a physician in town, and she's like, You got to meet these people. I was like, Okay. We went to their cottage on Crooked Lake and had her husband, Mike Chrissos make a big paella, and then Frank and I just started talking about what we could do, and he was like, We want to do a barbecue truck, and he was running Ravens Club, which was cranking it. He was sick of working late at night, and he had a small baby and wanted to be home and give up to work until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and I said, let's just try it. The thing that people don't understand about food and cities, and I think, well, around here, but in New York, they definitely understand it: You can never have too many good restaurants or too many cool shops. If the more the merrier. It's like, if you can't get a seat with us, you can go to Fraser's or you can go to now Madras Masala. I think they're doing, what's the breakfast place over there?
• [00:28:15] AMY CANTU: It's called Hens...?
• [00:28:16] TOMMY YORK: Stray Hen?
• [00:28:16] AMY CANTU: The Hens House.
• [00:28:17] TOMMY YORK: Stray Hen?
• [00:28:18] AMY CANTU: I don't know.
• [00:28:18] TOMMY YORK: Well, they're opening now by us, too.
• [00:28:20] AMY CANTU: Oh, they are?
• [00:28:21] TOMMY YORK: There'll be more. I don't do barbecue, so why, you know...? Because we had the liquor license, now we could sell the beer and the wine and the booze, and nobody else can cause that's a monopoly thing, which is another. Monopolies aren't usually great, but in some cases, they are, I guess, if you're the one who has the monopoly.
• [00:28:43] DARLA WELSHONS: They started as a food truck outside.
• [00:28:45] TOMMY YORK: They started as a food truck outside.
• [00:28:47] DARLA WELSHONS: Then, how long was it before?
• [00:28:49] TOMMY YORK: I think it was about three years.
• [00:28:50] DARLA WELSHONS: You scooped them in.
• [00:28:50] TOMMY YORK: They couldn't keep up. They were selling out immediately.
• [00:28:56] DARLA WELSHONS: I remember we would go there for lunch and stuff would be gone.
• [00:29:00] TOMMY YORK: They would have a queue sometimes an hour before they opened, and I think they were open at 11 and people would be lining up at 10.
• [00:29:07] DARLA WELSHONS: That got you a whole new set of foot traffic too.
• [00:29:09] TOMMY YORK: I had a whole new set of foot traffic. Absolutely.
• [00:29:11] AMY CANTU: There was never a period where or there was not a thought of, Oh, it would be competitive. It was always you felt it was just going to be mutually beneficial.
• [00:29:21] TOMMY YORK: It was like when Anthony, who's next door, Anthony's Pizza, said, We want an exclusive so that you guys don't start making pizza. I was like, That's fine. People are always like, You should make pizza. I'm like, There's a pizza place right next door. I don't need to make pizza. But no, like, bring more.
• [00:29:38] AMY CANTU: Some more, the merrier.
• [00:29:39] TOMMY YORK: Because there's the person who doesn't or can't eat meat, and then there's the person who's intolerant of this or allergic to that. Now we have Madras Masala, Bao Boys, Ricewood, and Anthony's Pizza in a block right there.
• [00:29:56] AMY CANTU: It's not even hardly a block. It's like half a black.
• [00:29:58] TOMMY YORK: It's right. It's not even a block. You can get music lessons at Oz's right there.
• [00:30:03] AMY CANTU: I've heard your concept described -- at least, it was a while ago in the paper I saw -- described as European Cafe and you touched on how different they look at alcohol, coffee, whatever. Is that how you would describe...?
• [00:30:23] TOMMY YORK: Absolutely.
• [00:30:24] AMY CANTU: You would describe what you have right now.
• [00:30:26] TOMMY YORK: As a European-style cafe. You can get a coffee in the morning and a drink at night. When we went to Spain for our honeymoon in 1991, and one of my father-in-law is a guy named Jim Harkema, was Eastern's football coach. The kicker of the team was from Spain and heard that the coach's daughter was getting married so his parents treated us for two weeks in Spain.
• [00:30:52] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:30:53] TOMMY YORK: For our honeymoon, which was amazing. Then we had a whole group of friends who were our age. We're 24, and there's a bunch of 21 and 22-year-olds. They took us all over the place, and their favorite spots were, stop in the morning for a coffee here, and then we'd say, Oh, we were here this morning, weren't we? Then there was wine and tapas happening. Then I was just like, Wow. This is how you could do restaurants. I was still at Espresso Royale then, so then when Zingerman's, I got fitted into that, I was like, These are all the things from Europe. Let's do this. I tried to get Ari and Paul to put, uh, we did get a liquor license for the deli, but we had such a good labor supply of people in recovery from Dawn Farm and places like that. They were like, We can't jeopardize that part of our... I mean, those two maybe always put people before profit. We could have just got a liquor license and said, Screw it, we're doing this. They were like, No. This is a pipeline for people who are in recovery where they can get back on their feet and earn a living and get right. I was like, Yeah, that makes sense. Let's do that.
• [00:32:09] AMY CANTU: I see some of the similarities between you and Zingerman's, your store and Zingerman's, but that's definitely not it. It goes off in its own direction.
• [00:32:19] TOMMY YORK: But you can also see the completely screwball ordering system that you would have thought I'd learned. It was like, Now, let's replicate where you can't get anything exactly where you want from anywhere when you go there. You're like, Oh, no, this is the wine counter. Sorry, you need to go up there if you want to do that. Which people could actually, you can order anything from anywhere, but sometimes people are like, Oh, I don't know what that is, you need to go over there.
• [00:32:43] DARLA WELSHONS: You just went through some remodeling, didn't you?
• [00:32:47] TOMMY YORK: We remodeled again.
• [00:32:48] DARLA WELSHONS: I haven't been in to see the new setup.
• [00:32:51] TOMMY YORK: We put a wine bar -- exclusively wine -- in the back. The reason I did that -- or not I; anytime I say "I" it's actually we 'cause it's not me ever...it's a group -- but we noticed that people who go to the bar like to talk about controversial subjects. They like to talk about sports and politics, and it's a different thing. People who drink wine or wine enthusiasts like to talk about travel and cooking. I thought, if we separate those two, because our wine customers were never sitting at the bar -- it was always a different -- there were always people getting cocktails or beer, not wine. The wine people would sit at the tables. I was like, What would happen if we got a wine dispensing machine, which we have now that you can have 12 wines on tap? You can try things instead of by the bottle. You can just try and buy the glass, which is great.
• [00:33:46] DARLA WELSHONS: We should be having this conversation there.
• [00:33:50] TOMMY YORK: We can do Part 2 [LAUGHTER]. We can do Part 2 with the tasting. Yeah, we added in a wine bar on the back so that wine customers had a place to go and could actually talk about travel and wine and cooking. If you want an opinion about short ribs or whatever, just sit right down there and start talking about what you're cooking this week and people will go with what you're cooking, and it's great.
• [00:34:15] AMY CANTU: That's so interesting. It also means you're eavesdropping, right, Tommy?
• [00:34:19] TOMMY YORK: Yeah, absolutely. Well, all good customer services service people eavesdrop.
• [00:34:24] DARLA WELSHONS: Right. That mean you're obviously, you're curating your business to your customers.
• [00:34:29] TOMMY YORK: Yeah. You know, I tried to make a place where I thought, What would be the most like what I experienced in Europe, and what would be a place where everybody would feel comfortable, no matter what. Come in your housecoat with your curlers and get your cold brew. Not that you would do that, or right after a soccer match, and the kids wear their spikes into the store. Sometimes my staff will be like, They have their spikes on. I'm like, Who cares? They're like, Yeah, scratching the floor, and I'm like, Who cares? Like, Who really cares about the scratched floor? You can fix that. Like, the mom and dad who are, like, exasperated with the kids, and they're like, I need a freaking beer. After their ass gets kicked in soccer whatever. All the parents can get a beer, and all the kids can get chocolate milk, and they run around and put rocks in the fire in the yard, and it's great. People like, Look at those kids. They're putting rocks in the fire.
• [00:35:24] AMY CANTU: Yeah, we get that at the library, too. It's like, Oh, just leave the kids alone. Let them be kids!
• [00:35:29] TOMMY YORK: Exactly.
• [00:35:30] AMY CANTU: Here's the thought. When I think of your space, it doesn't feel small, but it doesn't feel big. It doesn't feel like an airplane hanger, or whatever. It feels intimate. But there's a lot going on in that space. That's a lot to pack in there. And you also do, like, pop-up events, and you do parties, and you really encourage all kinds of different activities, too.
• [00:36:00] TOMMY YORK: That's right.
• [00:36:00] AMY CANTU: Can you talk about the philosophy of bringing all that in. Again, is it just like Darla was saying, you see people want this and just say: Okay. You sound like you say yes to everything. [LAUGHTER] What have you said no to?
• [00:36:13] TOMMY YORK: Oh my gosh, Amy, you've got it. You got it right on the... [LAUGHTER] [OVERLAPPING].
• [00:36:21] DARLA WELSHONS: There's gotta be a "No" in there.
• [00:36:24] TOMMY YORK: There's mostly yeses. I have a very close friend whose name is Nick Durrie, and his sister's name is Jessica Durrie. We work together. You might remember her. She married Brant Cosaboom. We all worked together on Main Street, and she started Small World Coffee in New Jersey and their father was a big wig at General Motors. He was General Motors European president and then Asian president. He and I were out for a run years ago. I said, Mike, What's your secret to success? He said, I figure out how to say yes to everybody. He goes, Sometimes it's really conditional. Like, you have to meet these conditions, and then I'll say yes. But he's like, Figure out how to say yes. He says, Think about it. When somebody asks you something, what's your immediate answer? I'm like, No, I can't do it. I'm tired. We don't have the money. It's a pain in the ass. Why are you bothering me? Don't you know how busy I am? Just leave me the fuck alone. You see it on people's faces. They're like (sorry, I should probably, whatever. You can bleep that out.)
• [00:37:22] AMY CANTU: Yeah, no, that's fine. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:37:24] TOMMY YORK: But it was really interesting because I thought to myself, I think General Motors was the biggest company in the world at the time. He said, Let me tell you a story. I said, Okay. He said, I got transferred to Italy, and I sold a bunch of tractors to I can't remember the nationality of the people now, but it probably doesn't matter. Anyway, he sold a bunch of tractors and they stole them. Like, he delivered the goods without getting the cash. He gets called into New York. This is probably like a million-dollar loss or something. It's a big loss and he's the new head guy in charge. He gets called. They fly him. They're like, Get on a plane right now. We don't care how much it costs. They fly him back to New York, and I said, What did they do? He said, My boss said, Don't do that again. I said, What? And he said, No, my boss said, What happened? How can you make sure this doesn't happen again, and how can we learn from it? And Mike was like, Uh, get the money first? [LAUGHTER] I don't remember what he said. It was more sophisticated than that. But it was like, just to figure out how to say, yes, figure out how to make things happen. It's easy in this culture for the white guys to think that they know everything, and we're seeing this shit again. But they don't. They're the real minority, and they keep holding on to power. If you take a second to listen to your spouse or the kid down the street who says, I wish I could go someplace and hang out with my buddies and people are like, We got to get those laptops off our. There's people camped out here for hours. They don't buy anything. I'm like, Who gives a shit? They're here. They're not at home. Maybe they work from home, and they're bored out of their minds or they're waiting for a spouse or whatever. So yes, the long answer to all that is I almost always say yes. But probably going back to social work, I have shitty boundaries, and I'm a people pleaser. It's good for hospitality, but it's not good for money management and things like that.
• [00:39:32] AMY CANTU: Although it's nice to see people there all the time.
• [00:39:33] TOMMY YORK: It's gratifying.
• [00:39:35] DARLA WELSHONS: There's always people.
• [00:39:36] AMY CANTU: Yeah and when you come in and even if it's busy and you're like, Oh my god, am I going to get a seat? It's...that's a good problem you have. Because it spreads the word.
• [00:39:44] TOMMY YORK: It's super gratifying.
• [00:39:47] DARLA WELSHONS: There's always a good energy. Coming in for a coffee or after-work cocktails with friends, out in the like I was saying, I'd like to be out there right now in the sun and it was summer.
• [00:39:59] TOMMY YORK: I lit a fire on Saturday. When it was sunny and I was just like, I bet you people want to sit outside. Then as soon as that fire started going, people were sitting outside. I was like, Yeah.
• [00:40:07] DARLA WELSHONS: I think about that. It's a nice mix of sun and shade out there until the sun sets, and then everybody gets fried, but it feels so good, and you're like, This is summer in Ann Arbor. It's a really nice space.
• [00:40:21] TOMMY YORK: I think most of us, probably you guys, too, didn't come from a lot of money. But we had, like, super good cousin interactions and cottage stuff that we just we figured out how to have fun no matter what. If we didn't have bikes, we walked, and if we had bikes, we would ride to wherever and goof around and build forts and just hang out, as kids. There needs to be a spot where people can assemble like that as adults. I think adults get very little time to play nowadays because that phone and the laptop follow them everywhere they go now.
• [00:40:58] AMY CANTU: That's a really good point. Your space is a very "in-person right now"... It's real play, it's not isolated play. In fact, you really would like it -- you're very much into it being a neighborhood destination.
• [00:41:13] TOMMY YORK: Absolutely. I don't care if people spend money. I don't care if they come there and never spend any money. It doesn't matter. The whole idea is like, somebody like Shaky Jake or something where you just have these neighborhood characters. We have neighborhood characters that just hang out, and I love it. People are like, We should do something? I'm like, Do what? People are rigid. We have a kid I don't know what his diagnosis would be. He goes from A to B, and he always comes in and he gets a couple of cokes and he has a backpack. A couple of the older white ladies were like, What that kid's talking to himself, and he has a backpack. I'm like, Yeah he does.
• [00:42:06] TOMMY YORK: [OVERLAPPING] Well, but what if there's a bomb in there? I'm like, why would there be a bomb in his backpack? They're like, But the media and everything they see on the TV, maybe they're not watching an unbiased news source. I'm like, This person's fine. I know they're fine. I've known this person for 15 years. They're not going to blow up. No, of course, we're going to read tomorrow that the store blew up [LAUGHTER] while we were shaking hands, but what a good way to go out. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:42:33] DARLA WELSHONS: This is where your social works comes in then.
• [00:42:35] TOMMY YORK: It's true. The other is easy to alienate. But when you figure out and get accepted by people that aren't like you, it feels so good. People just love it. Julie and I went to visit some friends in Rwanda last year or two years ago. I think that was the first time when I was like, the only white person in a whole town. Julie and I were walking down the street to go get coffee someplace, and there were nobody that looked like us anywhere. People were not given the weird hostility that you get here in the States, what are you doing here? It was more like, Wow, what are they doing here? Cool, we got to this cafe, and this guy's like, What are you guys doing here? We're like, Our friend is a doctor here, and we came to visit, and he's like, Oh, this is great. I want it to feel like that. I want people to feel welcome.
• [00:43:28] AMY CANTU: Well, would you run for office, please?
• [00:43:31] TOMMY YORK: No way.
• [00:43:32] AMY CANTU: But you served on a committee here or there, didn't you with the city?
• [00:43:36] TOMMY YORK: Not with the city. I was on a film festival board and the Y board. I'm not good at politics.
• [00:43:44] AMY CANTU: You're not? Ok.
• [00:43:45] TOMMY YORK: No. I like to use drugs, too. [LAUGHTER] Like Paul Saginaw said years ago, when you said what brought him from where I think he was at Michigan State at the time and then came here, and somebody asked him in a business thing. Why did you come to Ann Arbor, and he's like, Sex and drugs. [LAUGHTER] People were like, I'm like, come on. Why can't...
• [00:44:08] AMY CANTU: [OVERLAPPING] It's the truth.
• [00:44:09] TOMMY YORK: But why can't people just be okay with what's actually happening? We get off work, and we're like, It's time for a beer, like, Let's go. But maybe it's our puritan roots in this country.
• [00:44:22] AMY CANTU: It's definitely those. It sounds like everything's going pretty well.
• [00:44:27] TOMMY YORK: Yes.
• [00:44:27] AMY CANTU: Do you have any changes that you would like to enact that you haven't yet? Is there something else? Where is it headed? Where is your business heading?
• [00:44:38] TOMMY YORK: Excellent question. I think we'll up our kitchen game because we're still using induction burners and what we call Easy Bake Oven kitchen-style stuff [LAUGHTER]. It's very much like a cafe thing, as opposed to like a coffee cafe versus a proper kitchen. Our chef, Trish Hill is just brilliant. She's great, and she's hamstrung by the equipment she has. I think we'll upgrade our kitchen. That would be the next thing. Then I think just spend the next 10 years teaching people about hospitality and why it's important. Why it's a good thing to do. But as far as, like upgrade the furniture outside, just more nicer creature comforts. We have those metal chairs. I'd love to get rid of all of those. The ones in the back now are wood, which are equally as comfortable, but those, like, metal chairs were all we could afford at the time, so that's what we got.
• [00:45:36] AMY CANTU: I bet you wish you had more parking.
• [00:45:38] TOMMY YORK: No.
• [00:45:39] AMY CANTU: You don't.
• [00:45:40] TOMMY YORK: I don't want more parking.
• [00:45:41] AMY CANTU: You like that everybody has to drive way up that road?
• [00:45:45] TOMMY YORK: No, no, no. I rode my bike here today.
• [00:45:47] AMY CANTU: You're right, ok...
• [00:45:48] TOMMY YORK: Like, I hate being a one-car family. Honestly, I hate it. I'm a car person. And Julie picks the car, which is bullshit, in my opinion [LAUGHTER] . But it's like this RAV 4 that I can't complain. There's nothing wrong with this car. It's like the greatest car we've ever had. It's like I thought our Subaru Legacy was great, but this car's even better. It goes through the snow. It's a hybrid. It goes 30-some-odd miles a gallon on the highway. There's nothing to complain about this. But I would like to have my own car one day. It might happen. But the reality is that people really should not be driving as much as they do. Especially in the neighborhood, they should get on the bus. I know mass transit is a pain in the ass, but if we're really going to get serious about stopping messing up the Earth, it's got to start someplace. It would be cool if we had a parking lot like, Dunham's over there. But it's just this impermeable asphalt sea. I tell people we're going to get drones, and we'll pick them up and drop them off, so that might happen.
• [00:46:46] AMY CANTU: That might happen. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:46:47] TOMMY YORK: We'll come and pick you up and drop you off.
• [00:46:50] DARLA WELSHONS: That would be crazy.
• [00:46:50] TOMMY YORK: See, wouldn't that then you could do it, like I don't know. We'll figure out something. [LAUGHTER] We got to figure out how to stop burning petrol and stop wrecking our earth. I thought it's going to be the kids problem, but it might actually not get to the kids. It might be our problem right now.
• [00:47:06] AMY CANTU: Oh, it's here, it's right now.
• [00:47:06] TOMMY YORK: I guess we have plastic in us, so that's not good.
• [00:47:10] AMY CANTU: What are you most proud of?
• [00:47:13] TOMMY YORK: What am I most proud of? That's a good one.
• [00:47:18] DARLA WELSHONS: Doesn't have to be business-related.
• [00:47:20] TOMMY YORK: No, it wouldn't be the business at all. I would say friends and family. They will tell you that there were times when I became a monster under the amount of stress that that business put. I did that to myself and to them. I think being able to stay married, which I'm sure Julie was just like, Why in the hell did I do this? I did not sign up for this. She was the kid of a football coach, so she knows about stress and families and all that stuff. What am I most proud of? Not to be too cheesy, but the fact that you and I have remained friends for more than 30 years, and that I think being part of having the town accept you and being a part of a family that puts fun into dysfunction. I think Paul Saginaw said it best when I was first learning. He said, The way I conduct myself is so that I don't have to slip into a doorway when I see somebody that I fucked over. I walk around town and I don't have to, I don't have to go, Shit, here comes someone and so, I got to get out of the way. There are people that don't like me. There are people that I've had disagreements with, but I don't think that anybody could honestly say that person went out of their way to do harm to me. There's, like, between tenants and landlords, things happen and between friends, things happen. But I don't think anybody would say, That guy's not okay. Like, don't go near that guy. That's not good. I think my relationships with people are the most important. Hopefully, I still get invited to birthday parties, and I might not... Christmas kinda sucked this year, [LAUGHTER] but that was not a good one, but we'll see. Hopefully, 11 months will go by and people will forget. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:49:09] AMY CANTU: No, that's great to be able to say that.
• [00:49:13] DARLA WELSHONS: Definitely.
• [00:49:15] TOMMY YORK: When you all asked to talk to me, why would people want to talk to me? That part of yourself, that's just like, We're friends, that's why. Find out what's going on with each other and make sure everybody's okay.
• [00:49:30] DARLA WELSHONS: And you, I mean, you are the owner of the Cheese Cheese Cheese sign.
• [00:49:35] TOMMY YORK: I know.
• [00:49:36] DARLA WELSHONS: [OVERLAPPING] That's like royalty.
• [00:49:38] TOMMY YORK: That's right. [OVERLAPPING] We have to bring that back. I have one of the "cheeses" at the house. One of the neon...as it was falling off. I would love to bring that sign back to its former state.
• [00:49:49] DARLA WELSHONS: That gives you street cred in Ann Arbor.
• [00:49:51] TOMMY YORK: That's right.
• [00:49:52] DARLA WELSHONS: That's like up there with the Arborland "A".
• [00:49:54] TOMMY YORK: That's right.
• [00:49:56] DARLA WELSHONS: Iconic images.
• [00:49:57] TOMMY YORK: Or the Weber sign over there, or Ann Arbor Muffler. I think those are the last of the-
• [00:50:03] AMY CANTU: I gotta get photos of those.
• [00:50:05] TOMMY YORK: But I think, it's interesting with the LED technology, we might be able to bring that sign back to its neon-looking ways.
• [00:50:13] DARLA WELSHONS: That would be a good investment.
• [00:50:14] TOMMY YORK: That would be fun, wouldn't it?
• [00:50:16] AMY CANTU: Well, thank you so much, Tommy.
• [00:50:18] TOMMY YORK: My pleasure.
• [00:50:19] DARLA WELSHONS: Thank you for coming.
• [00:50:20] TOMMY YORK: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
• [00:50:24] DARLA WELSHONS: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.