San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
STRANGE TIMES
Flux: Brian Strange talks about family business — the pandemic, hopes for 2021, new ventures.
Brian Strange’s catering business, one of the largest in San Antonio, traces its history back 69 years.
The company, Don Strange of Texas, bears his father’s name. But it got its start when Brian’s grandparents opened a grocery store on Bandera Road on the city’s West Side in 1952.
“It was just a good old country grocery store on the outskirts of San Antonio,” Brian Strange said.
At the time, the store run by Joe and Edith Strange was the last one between San Antonio and Bandera, providing staples and gas to travelers.
The couple added a barbecue pit, grilling and selling chopped beef as a way to increase profits. The barbecue proved so popular it propelled them into the catering business.
Strange’s Party House opened in 1959, a block from the grocery store. It was the first catering establishment with multiple party rooms in San Antonio outside of a hotel or country club.
Brian’s father expanded the business, catering events outside the party house, first throughout San Antonio and eventually to South Texas and other parts of the U.S. Over the years, the catering company has brought a Texas flavor to a wide variety of events, including Hollywood parties and a regional food series at the now-closed American Festival Cafe in New York’s Rockefeller Center.
The business exploded in the late 1960s, spurred on by increasingly sophisticated San Antonio customers who wanted food choices beyond Texas barbecue.
By then, Don Strange had taken over. He was in charge when the city hosted HemisFair in 1968. The event attracted visitors from all over the globe and was a boon for the catering business. It fed parties for many of the international pavilions.
Brian Strange has worked for the company since 1989 and has had a hand in every aspect of the business. Strange, 54, became CEO of the company after his father died in November 2009.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Don Strange of Texas was catering more than 1,000 events a year. But the pandemic has hit the company hard, as it has most others in the hospitality industry. Strange said he hopes better days aren’t far away.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Q:
When did you first get involved in your father’s catering business?
A: I have been involved all my life. As a child, I knew how to cater parties. I knew how to cook. It was a true family business. Both grandmothers worked in the family business. My mom had a cousin who used to work here. That is how I spent time with my dad, going to catering events on weekends. I went off to college at HardinSimmons University in Abilene, Texas. I thought I wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll promoter. I went to work for a guy in Dallas but wasn’t very successful in that business, and I decided after a year that it wasn’t the profession for me. I came back to the business in 1989.
Q:
Tell me about COVID-19. How has that affected your business?
A: Everything was going really well. We started a partnership to open up our first brick-andmortar restaurant. Our business selling Grill Pardner (temperature-controlled warming plates)
was doing well. We sold several thousand of them in 2019. Then came March 7 or 8. It was like a balloon popped, and it has been a very challenging time since then. At the outset, we acknowledged the fact that we probably weren’t going to be doing any event of any size anytime soon. We thought it would be a 90-day experience, not something we would still be dealing with today.
Q:
How did you pivot the business to survive?
A: We started thinking, how do we get food to our customers? How do we serve other needs? Customers started calling us and said, “Hey, I need you to drop off 10 dinners to my employees’ houses.” Or “Can you take food to my parents for the next two weeks?” We weren’t in the delivery business so we didn’t know how it worked. We struggled early and did better as we did more of it. We used our own drivers for home delivery. We wanted to control everything, from cooking the food in our kitchen to bringing it to the home. Our employees who were normally bartenders or cooks or did other jobs helped with home delivery. We pivoted everyone’s skills.
Q:
Even with the delivery, your business must have been severely affected.
A: Business is down around 50 percent. A lot of the events with 300 to 400 people had to be reduced to 200 or 100 people due to capacity requirements. We’ve had to change venues. So instead of holding an event at a museum, we did it at their ranch outside of town or in the backyard of a person’s home. People who were getting married in the spring pushed to the fall, and the ones that were getting married in the summer pushed it to this spring and summer. We are going to take care of everyone eventually. The general concern is to hold events that are safe for everyone.
Q: Did you have to lay off employees?
A: We had 50 full-time employees. We were able to receive around a couple of hundred thousand in federal stimulus money and keep everyone on the payroll for several months. Unfortunately, we had to lay off most of the employees in late June. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It’s nothing personal, but the reality is you have to exist and have a place for people to come back to work. We hope to bring back most of the full-time employees by the end of the year.
Q: Did you also employ parttime workers?
A: In addition to the full-time staff, we could have 300 to 400 part-time workers at a particular event. We could no longer employ them. They included college kids, nurses, schoolteachers. We had a pretty interesting mix of people who liked what we did. They worked for us for years, and it was like one big family. We look forward to bringing back those employees back
on a large basis as our catering events resume.
Q: How is business looking for the rest of the year?
A: I hope we will be back to normal by the summer. But I didn’t think we would still be talking about the pandemic right now, so we will see. People have to feel safe and the rules have to ease up in terms of people — allowing them to gather. The vaccines are helping, but people are still being really careful. I would love for us to be comfortable about gathering, but some people are and some aren’t. We had a really good October. That was really encouraging. I thought to myself, “This is becoming much better.” And then November and December slowed down as COVID cases spiked. We have a good number of bookings for the spring and the summer. It looks like it’s going to hold — there is not going to be a lot of changing or canceling of events. A lot more people are getting used to wearing
masks. But I can tell you that people are really looking at the fall of 2021 as a time when business gets back to normal. That’s when I think more people will be comfortable holding events, particularly when it comes to large gatherings of several thousand people.
Q: After decades as a catering company, Don Strange of Texas is opening its first brick-andmortar restaurant in April at the new Estancia del Norte Hotel. What led to you to get into the restaurant business?
A: So Charles Leddy (CEO of Presidian Hotels & Resorts) called me a year and a half ago and says, “I just bought the old La Mansion del Norte hotel, and I think that Don Strange needs to come over to the hotel.” We never had done a restaurant before, but it sounded intriguing. We are always looking for new opportunities. We started talking, and it evolved into us not just running the restaurant but providing catering for weddings and meetings and other events. The restaurant will be called Lazo with Don Strange. We have hired Heather Nañez, former head chef of Bohanan’s Prime Steak and Seafood. She understands we’re going to incorporate the authenticity of Texas cuisine into the restaurant’s menu.
Q:
What are examples of the Texas food you’ll be able to order in the restaurant?
A: A very basic scenario would be to introduce someone to venison crepes. You got a little bit of French and the venison of South Texas and wild game on a platter. Or there’s our crabcakes or wonderful snapper being grilled outside, a lot of show in front of guests. So when you think of Don Strange, you’re used to seeing our cooks in front of people. As you go into the restaurant, we want you to use all your senses. We want you to smell it. We want you to feel it. We want you to hear the sizzle, see the flames. And it comes together into a beautiful dish served on your table.
Q:
What are your future plans, besides opening the restaurant and resuming the full complement of events?
A: My dad was an incredible visionary, and he always thought out of the box. He thought that anything was possible. If you can dream it, you can do it. You have to take risk to create things. I would like to partner with Charles Leddy and Presidian for some other food venues at other hotels. We are looking at how to sell mail-order grilled white wings. They are a piece of bacon atop a chicken breast, Monterey Jack cheese, pickled jalapenos, rolled up with a stick through it. They are then marinated in white wine. We would also like to sell some of our sauces to consumers. We are particularly noted for our jalapeno béarnaise sauce and our jalapeno-cranberry chutney.