Why didn’t Ohio City Galley work?

Ohio City Galley tried something different in Cleveland Why didnt it work?

Ohio City Galley tried something different in Cleveland. Why didn't it work?Marc Bona, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio - On its surface, Ohio City Galley was a good idea.

It served as a high-class food court with large bar area and communal tables. It opened in 2018 as an incubator business, offering a platform for four restaurant concepts to operate at W. 25th Street and Detroit Avenue.

But this week, Pittsburgh-based owner Galley Group Inc. suddenly announced it will shut the doors Friday, Feb. 28.

Chad Ellingboe, Galley Group’s vice president of operations, issued a vague statement, saying only, “There were various factors that led to this difficult outcome.” The statement thanks Cleveland for its support but does not elaborate. Ellingboe did not return an email seeking further comment.

Related coverage: Ohio City Galley is closing

The idea worked this way: The Galley Group chose four initial restaurants and took care of advertising, utilities and similar bills under a revenue-sharing plan. It was a chance for a start-up eatery to test the culinary waters, or for an established restaurant owner to try a concept. If the restaurant operators felt the timing was right, they could move out on their own, having had a chance to save on bills.

"We want our financial success to be their financial success," Ben Mantica, one of the company’s two founders who has since left the company, told cleveland.com last year.

But a combination of factors, from intangibles like not having a specific identity to important details like parking, appear to have contributed to the closure.

Vince Thomascik, who operates two of the four current restaurants, Pie2 and Grains and Greens, along with Brett Sawyer, said those associated with Ohio City Galley were notified about the closure Tuesday. And while the delivery of the news came as a surprise, some signs foreshadowed the demise.

"It wasn’t a total shocker, though," he said. "We’d gone in there around the holidays, and it was pretty steady. We were a new business so the numbers were about what we thought they’d be. Business just kept declining after New Year’s. We started looking at each other - like, 'It’s OK here, but there’s no way they could be making money.' The space is so big. It wasn’t going to be a huge surprise if they closed this space. We kind of saw it coming. But the way it was delivered was definitely kind of a shock."

One challenge Ohio City Galley faced was parking. The complex competed with area businesses for street parking around the main drags of W. 25th Street and Detroit Avenue. The building faces downtown to the northeast.

Thomascik said parking was "definitely an issue, because the lot that was adjacent to the building was not the building’s." He said it tended to fill early, and that made it tough for a lunch crowd - for customers and workers.

And despite being at the corner of two main streets, he said location proved challenging because "that building was just a tough neighborhood to push the concept the Galley initially wanted."

He added: "The place lacked identity."

"It began as purely creativity, chef-driven," he said. "When you switch to what we were doing - pizza from scratch, naturally fermented - we were trying to hit a very specific, narrower audience.”

And that sought-after audience needed to be huge: Ohio City Galley's space covers 7,500 square feet and seats 225, with the restaurants in stall-like areas.

Van Aken District Market Hall in Shaker Heights takes a similar focus on a larger scale, with about a dozen stalls, mixing dining and retail. But Ohio City Galley was first, and the stall concept might have been too unfamiliar for the Cleveland audience. Thomascik credited the Galley Group for trying something new, but “I feel like the concept inherently causes confusion."

"I’m from Cleveland. I never had experience with any of these food halls that do well in other cities. It was a foreign concept to me," Thomascik said. "Sometimes it could have just been a longer process to get the consumer acquainted with such a concept.”

Ohio City Galley opened with an inaugural quartet of restaurants: POCA from Michael Nowak of The Black Pig; The Rice Shop from Anthony Zappola; Tinman, from Michael and Tom Schoen, and Sauce the City from Vic Searcy.

The restaurants offered thoughtful creations, from POCA's chicken thigh with Oaxacan mole negro, epazote white beans, poblano and onion escabeche to Sauce the City's variety of dishes, including a chicken sandwich with dressed street corn.

Searcy is an Ohio City Galley success story. He has extended his Cleveland hot-chicken concept a mile away to Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, where he was a winner in last year's Launch Test Kitchen competition. When the renovated arena opened last year, Searcy was part of it. He operates a dedicated Sauce the City stand in its Loudville section.

Just weeks ago, Searcy said he would open a second concept in Ohio City Galley called The Burger Shop, focusing on brisket-rib-eye blended sliders. The other two current tenants, Pie2 and Grains and Greens, focus on pizza and salads and grain bowls. Sawyer and Thomascik are seasoned in the restaurant business; they are partners in two other Cleveland restaurants - The Plum on Lorain Avenue and Good Company in the city's Battery Park neighborhood.

Last year, changes came about in Ohio City Galley. The Rice Shop and POCA left. In November, Pittsburgh Business Times reported Fulton Galley in Chicago was closing after five months and Mantica had left the company.

The Galley Group opened Smallman Galley in Pittsburgh in 2015. It added another, Federal Galley, two years later in the same city. Ohio City Galley came along in the space formerly occupied by Massimo da Milano, the iconic Italian restaurant in the 100-plus-year-old building. Fort Street Galley opened in 2018 in Detroit, and North Loop Galley started in 2019 in Minneapolis.

Whether the company's operations in those cities stay in business with the stall concept remains to be seen. Thomascik sees a positive coming from his time with Sawyer in Ohio City Galley.

"We might someday in the future be able to have a brick-and-mortar Pie2," he said. "That would be the brand we’d be interested in pursuing. We already have two businesses, so it was like adding a third to the fold was a great learning experience. We didn’t do everything right, but we learned from it.

"As far as an incubator, I think you can be set up for success there. It’s fairly low-risk. The rent is adjustable based on how you do food sales-wise. Which is why I think our concepts - not just ours but Sauce the City and The Burger Shop - they could do OK even when it was slow, because the price of being in the space for us isn’t horrible, it’s manageable.

"But when you have a building that big that’s freshly renovated, that’s not going to be cheap. That’s not a flexible rent. They have higher minimums that they’d have to meet, based on a concept that’s incubating.”

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Marc Bona covers food, beer, wine and sports-related topics. If you want to see his stories, here's a directory on cleveland.com.

Anne Nickoloff covers local music, food and entertainment topics. If you want to see her stories, here's a directory on cleveland.com.

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