04/04/2025
To my favorite Anchonauts,
After a long winter with doors shuttered at Ancho Honey, I’ve had the time to do a lot of thinking about the future of the restaurant, and the unique challenges we, and everyone in the restaurant industry faces as a whole, each and every day. I’ve been searching for the best possible path forward, trying to find a way to make the business make sense, and to honor both the passionate following we have built, as well as my original goal for the restaurant, which, as you know has always been simply to “add something cool to the neighborhood I grew up in.”
After much soul searching, however, I’ve decided that the only logical next step is not to take one. As such, I won’t be reopening Ancho Honey in the Spring. I have about a million thoughts on the subject, so if you have the time, read on to hear some of them.
When we opened Ancho Honey nearly six years ago, in 2019, the world and the restaurant industry in particular was a very different place. Ancho Honey opened as a one-man show, where I devoted every single scrap of time I had and every dollar left in the bank to help transform a largely forgotten building into the proving ground for my culinary ambitions. As some of you remember, I didn’t even know what the business WAS when we started. Was it an experimental food lab? A place to test out recipes in a licensed kitchen, and sell the results to the neighborhood? A place to try new things that you couldn’t find elsewhere, or grab a quick snack after work? Anything was possible, and I was determined to figure out what would work and what wouldn’t.
Within six months of opening, the pandemic struck, and Ancho’s mission crystallized in my mind. Suddenly, food scarcity was a real thing, and people weren’t willing to risk dining out. Our grab-and-go case and contactless service through our to-go window did a booming business, feeding locals at a time when restaurants were either shuttered or simply too scary to visit.
As the most terrifying parts of the pandemic wound down, the customers stuck around. I tried to offer something unique and fabulous every single week, at a price that normal people could afford. But as the business grew beyond my capacity to run it singlehandedly, a few other things that I couldn’t have anticipated in 2019 changed as well. It’s no secret that this industry’s labor pool shrank considerably, making hiring unexpectedly difficult. The talented men and women that helped develop Ancho into the success that it became, the soldiers that braved tight, hot working conditions and a global pandemic eventually moved on, as people in this business tend to do, and I found them difficult to replace, both in dedication, spirit, and ability. We continuously managed to find new incredible people to pick up the reins, but ultimately, there was just too much work to ask such a small number of people to do.
In addition, the cost of food and basic services swelled post-pandemic to out-of-control numbers. Our electric bill tripled. Our food costs more than doubled. In the background, prices kept climbing ever upward, making our original intent of producing the best possible food at the lowest possible price simply unsustainable. The grab-and-go meals that we tried to keep priced at around $12.95, really should have been closer to $15 or 16.95, and at that point, I couldn’t feel good about charging higher-end restaurant prices for food in a plastic box, no matter how good I knew it was. Because of this determination to keep prices low, Ancho never really left a lot of money in the bank at the end of each month, and if a business isn’t turning a profit, is it a business? Or more of a really expensive hobby?
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Earlier this winter, I brainstormed a few ideas for how I could “relaunch” Ancho Honey, and give it the second act that it and you deserve. “Maybe it’s a fine dining restaurant, only open two nights a week, with two sit-down service,” I thought. That would require a significant overhaul of the dining room, changing our entire model of service, even more staff, and significant investment in a building I don’t own, with a lease set to run out soon. “Or maybe it’s a burger restaurant, and we do a couple of different kinds of fries, and leave it at that,” I thought. I’d still require more staff, more equipment, and I’d still be terrified of the ever-rising cost of ingredients. “Or what if I got rid of the case meals, since that would level out my food costs, and just sold three things: Haddock sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, and burgers?” Fair, but those three items only drove about a third of our business, and besides, I’d opened another chicken sandwich-focused restaurant (http://www.gethoneys.com) closer to town. Wouldn’t I be competing with myself?
There was a fourth option that I had to consider, which was that I could just…not do any of those things. The appeal of that option made me have to consider a few uncomfortable truths about myself. The first is that at 47 years old, I’m starting to slow down a little bit. Not in a way most people would notice, and not in a way that won’t make me laugh at myself in another 30 years. But at the end of an eight hour shift as a line cook, I’m tired. I’m a little slower than I used to be. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can see a future where my presence on the line will be a liability and a source of frustration to the talented, bright-eyed young men and women around me. I don’t want that. But it’s coming.
The darkness of that timeline made me take a hard look at the future of my family, as well. My oldest daughter is about to start her freshman year of high school. My middle daughter is halfway through middle school, and my youngest starts next year. That means that in a very few short years, they’re going to start disappearing, striking out to make their own marks on the world, entirely without me. (And maybe even in spite of me!) I read that by the time your teenager is 16 years old, you will have spent something like 85% of the time you will ever spend with them in their lives. It’s a sobering thought. And when I think about what I want these girls to reflect on later in life, when I think about who I want to be to them, it’s not, “My dad was great. He worked 80 hours a week, was operating at the top of the stress scale, and I rarely saw him.” Instead, what I really think I’d like them to say is, “He showed up. He was there.” I think that’s the best thing anyone can say about a parent, and I can’t be that for them if I’m away every waking hour trying to keep two restaurants afloat.
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This brings up another reality that I must face, which is that trying to split myself between the two restaurants, as I did last year, did neither restaurant any favors. Both concepts deserve 100% of my attention. And while I have made Ancho Honey the biggest part of my life and my identity for the last six years, I have to divorce myself from emotion, and run the businesses as they are: Businesses. And when I try to remove my own ego from the equation and look at these problems from a pure business perspective, there are a few facts I can’t ignore.
This year, Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace saw virtually no dip in sales during the winter months. Our sales figures for February were virtually identical to our sales figures in June, which as anyone who spends winters here knows, is virtually unheard of in this area. In contrast, at Ancho, sales in February versus sales in June were consistently down about 66% every year. The extreme seasonality of that location makes winter survival difficult, both for the business and, y’know, my life. I also have to acknowledge that, strictly in terms of sales, Honey’s drives as much revenue in a week, as Ancho does in a month. Overall, sales for Ancho were down 56% for 2024, versus 2023. In 2024, Honey’s made over 4x as much money as Ancho for the year. Finally, because of the fixed nature of our menu at Honey’s, things like food and overhead costs are level, sustainable, and predictable. For these reasons, making the choice to prioritize Ancho Honey over Honey’s seems irresponsible, from a business perspective. Diverting budget, staff, and most importantly, time away from Honey’s in favor of Ancho seems like bad business, no matter how emotionally tied to Ancho Honey I may be.
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I’m extraordinarily proud of every single thing we accomplished at Ancho Honey, and supremely grateful to all of you for the time and attention you gave my weird little restaurant. I know this news is disappointing. Every day, people ask me when we're reopening, looking forward to our return. I’m not overstating it at all when I say that building this business gave my life shape, and without the support of our customers, it never could have grown and blossomed into what it did. I think in our time at 6 Wallston Road, we really did contribute something to the food landscape in our area, offering flavors that you couldn’t find anywhere else, and that’s all I ever wanted to do.
Our work at Ancho served as a proving ground for the concept that launched Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace, which continues to grow and thrive at its location in Thomaston. We’ve created dozens of new jobs there, with a devoted crew that cares about the business and the quality of the product they produce, and it shows every day. In addition to new jobs, Honey’s is able to support community nonprofits; in the year we’ve been open at that location, we’ve kicked back thousands of dollars to Trekkers, Pope Memorial, the Georges River Land Trust, the Girls Scouts of Maine, and other community-focused local organizations, which I’m very proud of. Most of all, in Honey’s, we have found a business that is virtually limitless in its capacity for growth, without the weight of the entire enterprise resting quite so much on only my shoulders. I’m excited to see what the future holds at Honey’s, and I hope you’ll join me there as the Honey’s community continues to evolve.
Most importantly, thank you. Thank you for popping in every week to see what was new, for telling your friends about Ancho, putting stickers on your cars, and for helping us develop the kind of passionate following that most restaurants only dream of. Developing this business and this community of customers has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life, and for that, I am grateful.
Sincerely,
Malcolm
P.S. If you still are holding onto an Ancho Honey gift card, please respond to this email so we can figure out the next steps. Honey’s is a restaurant completely separate from Ancho; we keep different sets of books, use different transaction processing software, and have two entirely different systems for managing gift cards that can’t directly “talk” to each other. Because of this, Ancho gift cards can’t be used at Honey’s “off the shelf.” And while absorbing the debts of one business into another business is well, bad business, I’m determined to get you the value you deserve. Reach out and we’ll figure out a plan.
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