| À la carte: So, you actually came to San Francisco to open Le Charm? |
| Chef Delangle: No, I came here to do catering. And I used to have a catering business — mainly for galleries. I was looking for a bigger kitchen to expand my catering business when I found Le Charm. It was empty for lunch, and I said okay, so we opened the restaurant for lunch and did catering at night. We did that for about six months. Then we slowly started to open on Friday and Saturday nights. After that Thursday — then Wednesday — and now we are open five days and six nights each week. So, no more catering! |
| À la carte: When did Le Charm actually open? |
| Chef Delangle: We opened September 19th, 1994. |
| À la carte: And your goals were not initially to open a restaurant? |
| Chef Delangle: No, it just happened that way. My goal was to do catering. I thought this city needed a catering company — one that could provide fine French catering — there isn’t one in the city. I wanted to create very nicely “turned” hors d’oeuvres and stuff like that for gallery openings. I still have a couple of customers from galleries. |
| À la carte: Do you like the restaurant business better than the catering business? |
| Chef Delangle: They are two different approaches. When you do catering, you have to go to the customers. When you have a restaurant, customers come to you. You don’t have to move. So, it’s a very different approach. Both businesses are very interesting. It’s more difficult to operate a restaurant than to do catering. At least with catering, you know what you’re going to cook, and you can plan ahead. People do not just show up at your door and say, “Hey, I’m having a party of 50 tonight.” With catering it’s, “I’m having a party of 50 in three weeks” — so you can plan ahead. When you have a restaurant, every time you open the door, you never know how busy you’re going to be, and that makes it more challenging and more difficult. |
| À la carte: So, what have been the rewards for you of running the restaurant? |
| Chef Delangle: The rewards? Well, the customers’ happiness is the best reward you can get. When people come to the back and say, “That was another great meal,” that is the best reward you can ask for — that’s all I need. |
| À la carte: But I assume there have been problems along the way, what have those been? |
| Chef Delangle: Not enough space, and sometimes it’s difficult to have enough good workers. I’m not complaining, because we have very good workers now — we’re very lucky. All the time we have to say, “Oh, now we are serving this many customers a week, and we need a storage room, or we need a walk-in.” There was nothing here when we started, not even a walk-in! Now we need to expand the stove — we need another one — and that’s the kind of problem we face every time we expand the capacity of the restaurant. |
| À la carte: Were there any specific problems you ran into because you are a French restaurant? |
| Chef Delangle: No, French food is pretty well accepted in San Francisco. And it has become more and more fashionable to have a bistro. As with gastronomic French restaurants, the number of bistros have grown in the past five years. It’s amazing! When I opened, there was only Fringale and South Park Café — at least in this neighborhood. |
| À la carte: In San Francisco now, as far as French, there is Fringale, La Folie… |
| Chef Delangle: But, La Folie is not a bistro, it’s more like a gastronomic restaurant. You have to be very careful when you’re talking about French restaurants. There are different categories — you have a café, you have a bistro, you have a brasserie, you have a gastronomic restaurant. |
| À la carte: Do you think Americans understand the differences? |
| Chef Delangle: I’m not so sure they do understand the difference, but I’m sure when the bill comes they see the difference! It’s a very different way of cooking, it’s a very different way of thinking, and you will have a different atmosphere if you go to a café, if you go to a bistro, or if you go to a brasserie. The brasserie should be open all day — almost 24 hours a day. It’s open early for breakfast and it closes for dinner at 2 o’clock in the morning. Bistros close in the afternoon. Typical bistro hours are open for lunch, closed in the afternoon, and then open for dinner. Typical brasserie hours are open all day. |
| À la carte: What about a café? |
| Chef Delangle: But a café doesn’t sell food. It just sells snacks. Snacks are very, very specific in France. People go to a brasserie when they want specific items, like fresh oysters or choucroute or something very specific that is not served in a café. But if they go to a café, they will have a croque-monsieur, a quiche, or something like that, and maybe a little beer on the terrasse. So it’s very, very different. |
| À la carte: In defining Le Charm as a bistro, are you forced into a category that sometimes you’d like to be outside of? |
| Chef Delangle: Oh, yes, sometimes I wish that if I had more energy and more opportunity, I could open Le Charm Brasserie. Then people will understand maybe that a brasserie is bigger. It has to be able to seat 150 people, and the food will be different. Then there could be Le Charm Bistro and Le Charm Brasserie — and why not Le Charm Café? So you have all these different foods and different atmospheres — if you can create it. But, I’m not going to do it, it would be too much of a headache. |
