12y

Pluckers Wing Bar (Austin, TX)

About the bar (from official website):

We are asked all the time what is the real story behind Pluckers. Why did you want to be in the restaurant business? How did you think of the idea? Where did you get the recipes? So here is the first blog in a series of how Pluckers became Pluckers. Most of the facts will be true…from my perspective at least…which if you ask many of the people who know me is a skewed perspective.

At First There Were Four

You've probably read the back of our menu where provides a shortened version of how Mark and I started Pluckers in our college dorm room. However, very few people know that there were actually four of us that were planning to start Pluckers. These were our friends Marc and Andrew. Marc went on to an illustrious career as advertising creative and now works in the liquor and wine business. Andrew has settled into corporate law in Chicago.

What really happened was that one night during our freshman year in 1991, we had all been drinking at our dorm called Castilian after a night on 6th street in Austin and wanted to find a place to deliver us chicken wings. Marc and I had worked at various wings restaurants in Atlanta during high school and assumed there must be plenty of wings restaurants in Austin. We were shocked when we couldn't find a single restaurant that delivered wings or even served chicken wings on the menu. Growing up in the ATL, there were hundreds of wing restaurants and it seemed unfathomable that a college town like Austin had none. We started to talk about how much fun it would be to open our own restaurant. Mark and Andrew walked in the room and we all started throwing ideas around about how to make it happen.

We looked across the street and there was a 5 foot wide by 8 foot deep shack in the Castilian parking lot. We thought that would be the "perfect" place to open a little delivery and take-out restaurant. Little did we know that this shack (which still stands there today) had no air conditioning, little electricity and would get as hot as130 degrees in the summer. But being freshmen, we thought we knew everything about everything and started to devise a plan to work part-time at the restaurant and continue to go to school. Obviously we had no idea how hard it was to get in the restaurant business, had no management, marketing or accounting skills, but we didn't care, we wanted some wings dammit!

Marc's dad owned several restaurants in Atlanta so when we went home for the summer, we decided to sell him on our idea and see what he thought. I think the first thing he told us is that if we were smart, we would never get into the restaurant business. However, he was nice enough to humor us and using insight from Marc's dad, we came up with the budget to build a wings restaurant while enjoying a Patty Melt Plate at the Waffle House in Atlanta. For the uninitiated, a Patty Melt Plate is a hamburger, between two pieces of heavily buttered toast, ketchup and chopped onions all griddled up and served with hashbrowns and may be one of my favorite things in the world to eat. If you haven't tried it, it may be second only to Pluckers wings when you are drunk or stoned…but I digress. Our budget was literally written on a Waffle House napkin and were probably about as accurate as could be expected for two guys with a freshman level education.

We were so excited about the prospect of opening this wings restaurant that Marc and I flew up to Chicago, budget in hand and went to visit Andrew and sell his parents on our grandiose idea. Now Andrew's parents, being typical Jewish parents thought the idea was horrible. Andrew's dad wanted him to follow in his footsteps as an ambulance chaser (which he did for about 3 years out of law school) and didn't want his son missing any of his valuable UT education. However, somehow we convinced them that we would each only have to work about 10 hours a week and that we could fit it in our schedules. Little did we know that wasn't even remotely a possibility. When we came back to school that fall, we discussed everything with Mark Greenberg and during our sophomore year, we spent time together working on marketing ideas, figuring out how to raise capital, recipes, etc.

I can't remember exactly when or what happened, but at some point, Marc and Andrew realized that this wasn't their dream and sort of fell by the wayside. This was about the time that Mark Greenberg and I were both turned down by the business school at UT. It seems that since we were students from out of state, we had to have GPA's over 3.95 or above to transfer into the business school that year. Because we had been pledges during our freshman year and spent most of it locked in our fraternity basement, building a party, sleeping or drinking, we were just a shade away from meeting that requirement. By a shade, i mean that I think we had a 2.5 GPA during our freshman year. So what were Mark and I going to do? Eureka! We will be advertising students. Sure we knew nothing about advertising and didn't even want to be in advertising, but it seemed easy and we didn't have anything else we were interested in. The reality is that if either of us had gotten into the business school at UT, there probably wouldn't be a Pluckers today. So we have UT to thank for that!

As advertising students, the one thing that Mark and I learned over our final three years of college is that we both agreed that most advertising was crap. We wanted to devise advertising campaigns that spoke to people on a real-world level and weren't full of fancy catch words or Shakespearean wit. Our teachers routinely gave us C's in our classes and it pretty much embittered us to the ad game. It's funny, but we both still harbor a little of that resentment to this day. That's partially why we voice a lot of our own radio commercials and have never used an ad agency.

At some point during our junior year, we decided that we were going to go for it and start a restaurant. Neither of us wanted to sit behind a desk or even have a boss for that matter, so the restaurant thing was looking pretty good. So where to start? The first idea we had was to come up with a bunch of wing sauces and try them out on our friends. The annual Silver Spurs Chili Cook-off seemed as good a place as any. There would be plenty of drunk and hungry people at the event and since everyone else was serving chili, we figured that we might have something fun and different to offer. So we went to our fraternity house and cooked up several thousand pounds of wings and brought them out to the Chili Cook-off. I think the first sauces we had were mild, medium, hot, teriyaki, BBQ and Honey BBQ. For those of you that were out there that day I apologize. You see, we didn't realize that cooking wings in the morning and serving them 8 hours later would give you a case of the runs.

The reaction we received at the Chili Cook-off was outstanding and encouraged us to keep moving forward with the idea. I think the Chili Cookoff was officially the day that we knew we had something special and weren't going to let anything get in our way of opening a wings place. At this point we started looking around the campus area for a location, but learned quickly that no landlords wanted to rent space to two college juniors with no restaurant experience. It was going to take a bank loan, more money than we had and a landlord that believed in our concept before we were going to find a space. Luckily, we found one at the corner of 23rd and Rio Grande.

The Original Pluckers was a converted from Armen's Mediterranean restaurant. Armen's was a hokey little place that served good food and was a favorite haunt of the UT faculty. Back in those days, UT students weren't eating sushi, Indian food or anything called cous cous or hummus. We all lived on Pizza Classics, Gumby's and Mad Dog and Beans. After 11 years of being in business near campus, Armen wanted to move his operations to a place 5 times the size up on Parmer and Mopac. Side note: Armen failed in that location in about 6 months.

We bought Armen's restaurant all of the equipment in it for $11,000 and assumed his lease. The next step was finding a bank that would believe in us so we could secure a loan. Mark and I had each saved about $25,000 and our parents gave us another $25,000, but we still needed $25,000 from a bank to be able to finance the business. We spent weeks vistiing different banks all over Austin trying to find someone that would give us a shot. After about the first 10 banks, we were really discouraged because it seemed that no one wanted to lend money to two college kids with a business plan and no restaurant management experience. Luckily, we found a man named Gary Ashby at Liberty Bank. Gary saw how hard we were willing to work and believed in us enough to finance the $25,000 loan.

Because we were operating on a shoestring budget, Mark and I basically had to renovate the restaurant ourselves. We knocked down all of the old walls in Armen's and built new ones, painted the restaurant, waxed the floors and pretty much rigged the place together enough to pass health, fire and building codes. We had a lot of help at that time from Mark's future wife Niffer and Mark's brother and our future partner, Sean. Sean was still in college and would round up a bunch of his buddies and they would come down to the restaurant to paint and build. It's funny to think that his involvement and hard work would eventually pay off down the road.

One of my favorite stories before we opened is how we decided what items were going to put on the menu. We already what we felt were solid recipes for chicken wings, but we needed to add other items for some diversity. So we called all of the potential food distribution companies in the area and asked them to bring us all of their fried appetizers and side items. Fortunately or unfortunately they brought us about 100 different items. As college students, we were in heaven….or so we thought. We set up a little Fry Daddy one summer evening at Mark's house and started frying up batches of every fried food known to man, 20 kinds of fries, 12 jalapeno poppers, fried zucchini, chicken tenders, taquitos and on and on. Instead of being smart and eating a small bite of everything, Mark and I would eat an entire portion of each item. Within 2 hours, I swear we had put down about 3 pounds of fried food each and had only gotten about 20% of the way through the items. I have never felt so sick!

A couple of days later, we set up the Fry Daddy again and this time were a little smarter about it…we only ate half of everything we cooked. At the end, we got through about half the items and then just gave up. So if you are wondering how we decided our initial menu, it was as much a product of us not being able to eat another bite of fried food as it was a process of elimination. I think the final decision on us choosing to serve our soon to be signature Waffle Fries was mailny because we didn't want to try any more french fries.

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User submission (by sportsfan610)

Plucker's in Austin,TX is the best bar in america. From the 20 or so TVs on game day to the "fire in the hole" wings and the great UT atmosphere, Plucker's is the place to get great wings and watch any game. Here in Austin, we love Plucker's so much, my boy's youth group goes there just about every Monday night to hang, eat some great wings and watch football. They have so many great flavs of wings to get, and they have awesome salads, desserts and fried maccaroni and cheese! When it was my birthday, they made me put two cone cups in my mouth(beak), and flap to-go-boxes in front of the whole restauraunt!

Come down to Austin and check Plucker's out!

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