Prepped for pandemic era
Violet Crown to open while restaurant screenings aren’t permitted
Violet Crown plans to reopen as a restaurant only, possibly by the end of the month, while its movie theaters remain shuttered for the indefinite future. Since opening in 2015 in the Railyard, Violet Crown has been known as much for its food as its cinema offerings.
With restaurants allowed to operate while theaters remain off-limits under state public health orders, Violet Crown owner Bill Banowsky and general manager Peter Grendle have been busy during the seven-month down time rethinking the future — and present — at the 11-screen movie house.
The present includes restoring some revenue with a restaurant. The food will be mostly different from what moviegoers took into theaters with them in March.
The primary offering will be pizza inspired by Tender Fire owner Ben Crosky, who has had his wood-fired mobile pizza oven parked next to the lawn at El Rey Court since April, serving up crispy sourdough pizza drizzled with olive oil.
“I read about him in an article in The New Mexican,” Banowsky said. “I love that style pizza. I tried his pizza and loved the sourdough crust.”
Banowsky invited Crosky to develop pizza and salad recipes for Violet Crown and tinker with the dough to make it ideal for a large, commercial oven.
“He is using our kitchen as a prep kitchen,” Banowsky said. “My goal is to have the second-best pizza in Santa Fe.”
It will not be branded as Tender Fire pizza, but anyone familiar with Crosky’s craft will recognize the familiar tastes of the locally sourced toppings Crosky favors.
Grendle said he was also working on a hamburger to fit with the revamped restaurant. The Violet Crown french fries will be back as well as another item or two, but for the most part, the menu will be new.
“We’re looking at really good pub food,” Banowsky said. “We want to be competitive with other restaurants. We want to be a profitable pub restaurant.”
Violet Crown owns its building and leases the ground underneath from the city. With outdoor dining seeing distinct favor these days, the patio facing the railroad tracks is being extended to wrap around to the poster wall and toward the theater entrance.
For now, all planning is short term, but there is a sense many of the changes at Violet Crown will be long term.
If and when movie screenings resume, Banowsky and Grendle already have portioned off the dining and food-ordering area to keep restaurant patrons separate from movie patrons getting food.
Banowsky said the cinema side is ready to open within two weeks whenever the governor gives the green light.
Patrons won’t recognize the Violet Crown cinema experience, either.
The plan is to reopen Violet Crown sometime in the future as an RSVP experience: Groups rent an entire auditorium and pick a movie to watch from a jukebox-style selection of many available movies.
Group theater rentals suddenly became the spontaneous normal in summer as movie theater chains and independent cinemas around the country embraced the idea of renting out auditoriums to groups for anywhere from $100 to $250. That solved the awkwardness of socially distancing a general audience.
Banowsky foresees Violet Crown being exclusively group rental when it reopens. Even when general admission becomes feasible again, he anticipates a hybrid model, with group rental screens remaining available.
The domestic box office flop of Tenet in early September rewrote the game plan for the cinema industry nationwide, which looked at the Christopher Nolan film as the barometer for widespread new releases.
“It’s a bloodbath in the cinema industry,” Banowsky said. “We made sure we had a capital plan until sometime next year.”
“Up until Tenet, we were going to see movies happen,” Grendle said. “When Tenet came out, here’s when people are supposed to be coming. The door will be open. Then Tenet didn’t happen [as a box office success]. We are now on a completely different track.”
In the meantime, Grendle has been the only employee at Violet Crown since mid-March. Like in the movies, odd things happen when you’re all alone in a building, as if the building knows it has been abandoned.
“When we shut down, everybody thought it would be two weeks,” Grendle said. Then time passed. “We had things malfunction. The fire alarm died. Five months in, our freezer died. You become friends with that rack of ribs, and one day it’s melted. We’re about to reach the expiration date on our candy. What do I have to fix today? Our elevator is down, it stopped working.”
Movie theaters constantly cycle people through the auditoriums more than 12 hours a day, leaving exactly no time to undertake maintenance projects.
“You honestly dream of those weeks when you have nothing to do,” Grendle said.
He has now had seven months.
“So I have this maintenance list,” Grendle said. “My job has been to give back to the building, now that nobody is here. I found construction dust from 2015 in the back of my office under a box. I found someone’s cellphone. It was so expertly buried in a seat you had to rip the seat apart. If anybody is looking for a green iPhone …”
Grendle has plopped himself in each of the 729 auditorium seats and bounced and twisted and tried to approximate as many body shapes and body motions as possible — what he calls “squeak/ creak tests.” About 25 seat backs were replaced and countless bolts were adjusted.
“When I push back on a seat and hear a creak or squeak, I now know each bolt where that noise is coming from,” he said. “I feel I can do seat fixes between shows now. It used to take three hours. I estimate I tightened 4,000 bolts.”
Specially for COVID-19, an iWave air purification system was installed in Violet Crown’s heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system to kill pathogens and allergens, including the coronavirus. Violet Crown also has an electrostatic sprayer that is worn as a backpack — Ghostbusters style — to decontaminate an auditorium with a peroxide multisurface cleaner and disinfectant before the cleaning crew enters.
“We can de-COVID an entire theater in 45 seconds,” Grendle said. “This is an usher’s dream.”