As riverfront development continues in downtown Fort Wayne, two iconic restaurants owned by the Hall family, The Old Gas House and The Deck, stand sentinel at the project’s east end, eagerly awaiting its completion.
It all began, according to a third-generation owner, Ben Hall, when his grandfather, Don Hall, opened his first restaurant, a drive-in, in 1946.
Here WBOI’s Julia Meek discusses what’s happening there on the river scene with Ben, future plans for a 3rd historic riverfront space and what his family's longstanding presence in the community represents.
Find more information on the family’s history and its restaurants at the Don Hall’s Restaurants website.
This is a transcript of our conversation:
Julia Meek: Ben Hall, welcome.
Ben Hall: Julia, my pleasure.
Julia Meek: So, Hall's restaurants continue to be rolling on the river, with the end of that final phase in sight; in a word or two, how does it feel about now? Can you even believe that this is all gonna happen?
Ben Hall: A long time coming? It's been a dicey, shoot, it's been five years, give or take, and it's gonna be, it's gonna be great-- when it's done. I'm not gonna hold my breath for when that day arrives.
Julia Meek: That's probably a good idea. Okay, the last riverfront update from the Halls family was in 2018 as a matter of fact, after your historic Cambray building move,
Ben Hall: Yes.
Julia Meek: So, we have lots to catch up on. But first, another major setback for everybody and everything right after that was COVID. So how were you able to shift gears and adapt and carry on as a successful, well established restaurant concern here in town?
Ben Hall: Oh my gosh, we were throwing darts blindly for a period of time. That was the most, in my experience, and there had never been probably in the history of restaurants, at least in my lifetime, but nothing as rapid and so significant as far as if you were in the business of inviting people into your building to sit down and eat food, nothing that was anywhere close to that.
Julia Meek: What kind of new ideas were you able to implement, especially during quarantine? How did you keep everything carrying on?
Ben Hall: Well, when all you could do was carryout? We had restaurants that were more accustomed to carryout, but you take the Gas House, for instance, or the Factory, on Coldwater Road or the Tavern out in Coventry. It was not even a secondary portion of the business. Nobody thought of, Ooh, let's get a couple of steaks from the Gas House carry out tonight, because who would do that?
And then, very rapidly, not only the first several days during quarantine, which I believe day one was a Tuesday, because I can remember on a Monday, kind of doing our weekending paperwork. And by the time I had gotten from downtown to New Haven to drop our books off, and I'm thumbing through my phone and I'm trying to follow the news, and Michigan closed, and Illinois closed, and Kentucky closed.
Ten minutes later, by the time I walked into our office, and somebody chases me down and says, hey, did you just hear the governor closed Indiana? And nobody knew what to do. I dropped my stuff off. I went back downtown. I had a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle that I was lucky enough to have my hands on, courtesy of some liquor distributor friends.
And we sat in the kitchen, and we drank that bottle of bourbon and tried to figure out, what are we going to do? And this was at the Gas House. Some of the other stores, the Hollywood or State Street or the Drive-in that had a more designed carryout or drive-thrus or curb service available.
It was a little bit easier for them to figure it out. But a more classic, go in, sit down, eat your dinner type place. We weren't on the radar for people getting carry out food. The customer hadn't really adapted yet and hadn't really figured out well, if we're going to want food from the Gas House, we're just going to have to get carryout.
So, we were standing around that first afternoon, and it was probably two or three in the afternoon, and Nick Hanchar, who runs the dining room at the Gas House, said, well, let's throw together the downtown grocery store that everybody seems so intent on having. And (chuckles) we put together a menu, so to speak, threw it out on Facebook maybe three or four o'clock in the afternoon, and we might have had our first customer maybe an hour later, which we were like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest thing ever.
And we sold that gentleman toilet paper, because the world had obviously gone into panic. We sold them toilet paper and maybe some hamburger and a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels from behind the bar. And we were very amused, suddenly. Because, I mean, it had been a pretty rough 24 hours.
But as some people may be aware, we central commissary the vast majority of the foodstuffs that go into all our restaurants. We're grinding hamburger, we're processing steaks on our own. We've got produce and fish and all other kinds of perishables sitting out there to supply all the stores. And we were obviously not going to be nearly as busy as we typically would be and well, got all this stuff out there.
Let's see if anybody's interested. Because the grocery guys, it became very apparent quickly that the grocery guys, they got caught blindsided, just like anybody. Supply chain, you know, one of your most common phrases from the spring of 2020, supply chain, supply chain. And they hadn't planned on this, obviously, and so their shelves were empty.
We might have been the only place in town that you could go and bought hamburger, chicken breast, bread, eggs, milk, toilet paper. And we found that out the next couple of days because we got blindsided. It's kind of how we operate. We're kind of willing to go into something not really knowing what we're doing, and we hadn't the slightest idea about running a grocery store in the midst of a national pandemic and panic!
The first day was okay, we kind of had some fun with it. We were trying to keep as many of our employees working as we could. But there's a stark reality there, that at some point, as far as, you know, what the Feds were gonna do. We just figured at that time, well, we didn't figure at that time that time, we knew at that time that we were on our own.
And what the heck was gonna happen? So, we tried to keep as many people working as we could, because everybody was panicked, you know, it was the end of the world. So, we had people working at the Gas House in cook and carry out, but then they were also like the order pickers for the grocery store.
And we thought, oh, we got a 50-pound bag of hamburger here. If somebody orders a pound, you'll come back and here's your scale, and you weigh it out. And like, day one, I think that worked. But then by like, day two, the word was out, and we were, I mean, we were busy, Like, legitimately busy.
So, then the next day, we were bagging up pounds of hamburger. We had, we'd go 200 pounds of hamburger in a day, which, I mean, I don't know if you know what 200 pounds of hamburg looks like. It's a lot of hamburger!
So, you know, somebody in the morning was bagging up pounds of hamburger, and we were cutting apart flats of eggs and wrapping them up in dozens with saran wrap. And just like everybody, we were just figuring out, I mean, it was survival mode, it really was.
Julia Meek: And you survived.
Ben Hall: And we survived, maybe not too elegantly, but we figured it out, and within a couple of days we, you know, it wasn't your typical grocery, but it was fun. It kept people interested. We're old school enough, I mean, everything isn't dollars and cents, but at the end of it, it is.
People still needed to work, and whatever we could do to maintain as many of our people as we could, that was what we were trying to do. We've been around for pushing 80 years at this point, pushing 75 years at that point, and we haven't gotten to where we are, wherever that is, with just a slave driver mentality.
Our people know us. They know us as humans, and we're loyal to our people, if nothing else. And that's good for us, not just for our sake, whenever we have to answer for what we've done with our lives. But from a practical standpoint, you endear yourself to people in a good way, and they appreciate that. As far as staff goes and customers and everybody else, they know what our motivations are.
Julia Meek: And coming out on the other side, what had changed by then, especially on your riverfront scene after COVID, everybody going forward, new normal, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. What was out there?
Ben Hall: Well, immediately, at least as far as downtown goes, we had the benefit of being outside. And I think to some extent it's still the thing for people. It's one of the kind of hangover things from COVID.
There are still plenty of folks out there that look at the threat of illness as a little bit more real than they might have previously. So outside peace, it's obviously a huge thing about what we do downtown. You know, the blind squirrel found a nut there, to some extent. We started doing that.
City's motivation into riverfront followed not too long after, and so, yeah, the dynamics downtown are completely different than they were really even 10 years ago. But you go back 20 years, 25 years; 25 years, you wouldn't recognize, you wouldn't recognize downtown from where it is today.
Julia Meek: Indeed. And so back to the logistics of doing business right in the middle of it, development-wise. Now, once all the construction dust clears. and you might have some doubts that it's going to, but we know it is going to, what are we looking at down there on Superior Street, down in your neck of the woods?
Ben Hall: Yeah, the big-ticket stuff. So, the Barrett & Stokely development, right across the street from us, it looks like a building now. So that's good. I talk to those guys every now and then and get a little bit of an update.
I think their back of envelope is moving people into residential units, 2026, so there's a, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, to borrow a song lyric from a band that I used to listen to in college and still do. "There's a light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope it's not a train," (all chuckle) That's Cracker, in case you're not familiar. The bridge rebuild was another big bump in the road.
Julia Meek: Beautiful end game, but yes.
Ben Hall: Very nice. A huge upgrade from where we had been for a lot of years. Big sewer job out on Superior that had us messed up off and on unpredictably for months. And good people like yourself, on any given day, you figured out what the navigation was, because it might have been different than it was 12 hours prior.
So those were the big ones that were really, kind of really messing us up a bit about two years ago. Those are coming along. And the next big sort of thing is the Urban Trail. They're currently working on, Harrison now.
So, if anybody sees Harrison between Washington and Main Street, that project, it's kind of a unification of more pedestrian friendly sidewalk that runs up, lands on Superior. If you see, kind of what sidewalks look like in front of the jail right now is kind of what it's going to look like down in our neck of the woods.
So that's coming. Not exactly how we would draw up a construction schedule, but we get it. We're downtown. We take the bad with the good.
Julia Meek: We're all in this together, too. (All laugh)
Ben Hall: We're all in this together. And some year or two down the road, at least our little corner of downtown will be all tidied up and lovely.
Julia Meek: And patience is a virtue; that's one more thing we should add.
Ben Hall: I think we have no other option.
Julia Meek: You guys have been handling it very, very well, and as things all catch up and come together down on that river, what can you think about developing at the Cambray?
Ben Hall: Me and the other folks who I share a last name with and some element of a bloodline, everybody has opinions. And someday it'll be something. I guess, if I had something more interesting to say than that, I probably would.
The upside, it's a perfect spot for something right smack in the middle of everything, the park, apartment buildings that are brand new, and then the rabbit hole on a jail that won't be a jail someday, also down the road.
There's still more to come. River North, who knows? Wells Street, there's still an awful lot that's going to be coming, and which is great for downtown at large. Fortunately, a lot of this isn't necessarily right out in front of our store.
Julia Meek: (chuckles) That must be relief after all of these years. And honestly, the community so appreciates the preservation work that your family is known for. Why is historic preservation and re-use important, would you say?
Ben Hall: Julia, that's got to go back...so, the Gas House is an example. If people don't know, it's...the Gas House. I mean, it's a horrific name that you would give a restroom. (chuckles) It makes no sense, except in the context of, it was a gas plant in operation until the late 1940s.
And I think it was probably commonly known as a landmark around town, as the gas house, or the gas plant or something to that effect. So Grandpa Hall, maybe not so much as an architectural preservationist, he saw an opportunity, and I don't know. Ever since then. I mean, we like old stuff.
Julia Meek: You like old stuff. (chuckles)
Ben Hall: Old stuff has charm. Old stuff has attention to detail that, you know, you might not find in your average build these days. And we love saying things like, oh, that building's got good bones. (laughs)
And it goes all the way down to the homes, literally, the homes that I have bought, that my parents bought, that my aunts and uncles and cousins have all bought. I don't know. We're all like frustrated architects or builders. We like to think, oh, I can take that, and I can make something spectacular out of it.
And nobody likes to see the cool old stuff just get plowed. There are elements of Fort Wayne that deserve to be maintained. We don't look at ourselves like visionaries in that regard. We just kind of like the charm of old stuff.
Julia Meek: Well, the community is glad that you think that way, Ben. And you do well as a third, fourth, if you count all the young ones learning the business, generation, family-owned business. You have a lot of street cred. What are the best and worst vantage points that go along with the reputation, with that cred, what's the best and what's the worst?
Ben Hall: Well, I mean, the worst is probably that we, (chuckles) we have a problem with trying to be too good, if you can understand that. I mean maybe too much conscience. And I don't mean to demean what a national restaurant operator is doing, what they're doing is fine.
But we always kind of had this thought that we're going to give you something better than what that guy's going to give you, and we're going to try to charge you less to do it. That's kind of been the way of it for a long time. But then reality catches up with you a little bit.
You know, I can still sing the Buster Platter song for you from the 1980s when the Buster Platter was $1.50. And off air, I'd be happy to sing you the song. Nobody wants to listen to me sing. It's not my calling. (all chuckle) However, there is an expectation that if you go into a Halls, it's going to be priced and put together in such a way. As best we can.
We're still living up to that, there's no question. We're still underpriced for some things that we do. But, I mean, I only need to talk to you about inflation. I mean, inflation has gone absolutely bananas. COVID might of, was sort of the beginning of that.
So it catches up, and we've got to be realistic with how we price things. But that's a bad thing, and it's a good thing. And I guess I shouldn't have said that's the worst thing, because, I mean, it's okay to have that. if we have a street cred, and if our street cred is that we're good and we're fair and reliable, that's good too.
Are we the sexiest game in town? No, but that's okay also. You try to make yourself accessible to as much of the food buying population as we can. And, you know, you put a little bit of a twist on one store that, you know, it's a little bit more tuned for X demographic, and this store is a little more in tune with that.
And some things are kind of what they are. Takaoka, Takaoka is kind of Takaoka. There's not a real edginess to it.
Julia Meek: And that's a Japanese, lovely restaurant that happens to be upstairs of the Gas House.
Ben Hall: Yes, in the mysterious, in the mysterious upstairs of the Gas House, which, again, it's just kind of how we go. We see something. It's a good idea. How in the world can we make this fit inside of our world. And Takaoka is a perfect example of that.
Julia Meek: Perfect example. And the Hall's Family work ethic is another thing that's no secret. It certainly has been suggested as the ultimate key to your three, four generations of success. What do you say to that? Is that still there?
Ben Hall: Well, there's no secret. And I mean, you can talk to anybody in this industry, and there's nothing more critical than as an ownership interest being present inside the stores. And you can't I would say it's very near to impossible to create the reliability and the predictableness, if it's absentee ownership.
And other guys, gals in the industry, I think they would share the same opinion. So, you don't really have a choice but to be involved. You can't do it from a beach. You can't do it from a home office. You can't work remotely and keep things going in the direction that it needs to go.
So, the fact that grandpa was, you know, known for wearing his butcher whites into stores and being the guy sweeping the parking lot if the parking lot needed to be swept. And that went by osmosis down into his kids, you know, my father, my uncles, they all lived it, and then I lived it.
Julia Meek: He learned wisely and very, very well. You know, besides all of that, Ben, your sense of place, from neighborhood to community, are the real deal. Does that get more difficult in the techno 21st century we live in, to maintain that?
Ben Hall: Sure. I mean, it's just another element of competition. Back in the old days where it was us and the other local guys all knocking heads together. And everybody knew everybody, and everybody was friendly about it, and that was it, going out to dinner.
Now it's much different. The market is, if not saturated by quantity, it's saturated by options and modern tendencies. Away from where you know, where we came from and where we still are, is full service. And generationally, anybody my kids age and younger, they're perfectly content to go in you order something.
They call your name when it's ready. You go, sit down, and that's it. And then, you mentioned technologically, yeah, the avenues for getting your message to people much, much different. It's not yellow pages and the Sunday morning Journal Gazette anymore.
That could still be a piece of it. But avenues for accessing people, I mean, with advertising specifically, far different than it was before. And what is it? What do you say to ring the bell for people? And it's not necessarily price, it's everything. It's the whole package and what they experience while they're there.
If I'm trying to get kids in, and by kids, I mean like 25-year-olds and younger at this point in my life, (all laugh) it's what rings the bell for them, and how do you get it. And that's much, much different than it was. If the Facebook, Twitter world started coming into being in the early aughts, to borrow a last century term, yeah, it's a wild world out there.
And getting to people is it's a little bit different. But I think still to this day, just what is the experience that they get, and what are they going to tell somebody about directly. If, in fact, you're still talking to people and not just texting them. I'm old in that respect. I can, I get irritated with my children when they're just sitting there on their phones.
Julia Meek: You're an old soul with a big heart and an always-fresh perspective, Ben, and that counts for a lot. And you and yours have made a lot of memories for our community, and they have loved you for it. What last word should they know about the Halls, especially about that riverfront now, and especially including what it means to you.
Ben Hall: Ooof! I think people probably appreciate this, but probably not everybody. And it isn't just us. This is any independent business operator in the city of Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne's a great town. Fort. Wayne's been very good to us for a long time. And this might kind of sound generational, but you know, we put our guts into about everything, just like anybody else.
Do you get everything right? No, you never do, but the hearts in it in the right spot. And I think a lot of people appreciate that about local business. That's ultra important to us, and it's great that people do understand that about any independent shop out there. Just putting it out there and putting everything they have into it; this is the only way we're going to make it.
This is the only way we've hung around for 79 years at this point, and the only way that we're potentially want to hang around for another 75 years until we're both dead and gone and forgotten a long time ago. (all chuckle) And somebody else is doing, you know, something that used to be called Radio, I don't know what it'll be called then.
And talking about, you know, how in the world did you guys, have you been sloughing around in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for 158 years? Well, I don't know, my great, great, great, great, great grandfather did something or other else.
He used to be a butcher, and then he saw after the big war, whenever that was, I forget that was a which one, World War Two, I think? That restaurants were going to be a thing and supermarkets were going to be a thing, and meat markets were not going to be a thing.
And that's basically the story of where Hall's came from. Grandpa, yeah, he was a butcher. Came back. Ran his dad's butcher shops after his dad died at a very young age. Ran butcher shops, took care of his mom and his sisters, and then sometime in the mid 1940s saw that automobiles were going to kind of change things.
And I don't know if he foresaw the baby boom, but he got in and laid everything out on Bluffton road. Yeah, it's been a long time, and we work hard, just like a lot of people, work hard. To the extent that the world acknowledges that is great. It's great, because what are we here for on this earth?
It's not all nickels. I mean, some of it's nickels, but you want to be a good person, period. And if we can figure out a way to do it, selling burgers and fries, great, because when it all comes together. I mean, it's an absolute thrill when everything happens right. It's a huge bump to know when you hit something right. That's what keeps bringing you back.
Julia Meek: Ben Hall is a member in good standing of the Hall's Restaurant family, and former manager of The Gas House and The Deck. Ben, thank you for the work you and your family do. Thank you for sharing your story of it with us today. Do carry it on.
Ben Hall: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
