Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 50) “If it’s not a passion with you, you’re just going to fail. So many guys think running a restaurant is going to be sitting at a bar and watching it happen, but that’s just not the case. You’ve got to be out there doing everything you can possibly do.” sausage corn dogs and Cajun pasta. A standout among the restaurant’s desserts is Aunt Louise’s pecan pie, which Howton and his wife, Rhonda, make personally from a family recipe. Top it off with a dollop of fresh whipped cream or a scoop of the day’s homemade ice cream. Calorie counters vacationing at St. Simons can pick from a selection of lighter entrees like “skinny fettuccine” or a dinner salad topped with “no more blimp shrimp.” The son of a Naval officer, Howton moved around a lot growing up, but he never lived in New Orleans. The Cajun-influenced menu came about simply because that’s what St. Simons was lacking. “When we first came down here, our goal was to open a restaurant,” Howton says. “We had a financial plan, but we did not have an exact theme. When you’ve been in the restaurant business, you realize that the type of food matters less than the quality and quantity of the food.” Howton got his start in the restaurant business as a student at Tech. “I was in the process of cramming my four years into five when my parents said, ‘If you’re going to take that long, you’ve got to get a job,’” he recalls. So Howton, who says he was the only poor Alpha Tau Omega member in history, began waiting tables. Following graduation, he joined Gilbert Robinson Inc., which owned Houlihan’s restaurants, and held management positions in Atlanta, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Dallas. Howton left the restaurant industry in the ’80s and spent 17 years managing a small pawnshop in downtown Atlanta. He also managed a baseball team owned by Mike Duggan, Phys 73, an old friend from Georgia Tech. It was Duggan who asked him if he would be interested in returning to the restaurant business, this time on St. Simons Island. “Initially, I said, ‘No, no way,’” Howton recalls. “And then I heard the St. Simons part of it. My college roommate, Bill Dart (GMgt 72), was from Brunswick, so I’d been going to St. Simons since I was a freshman in college.” The business partners purchased a former all-you-can-eat crab shack and decided to give it a rustic, fish camp atmosphere to match the menu, renovating the space themselves and enlisting their wives for help with the finishing touches. “Mike and I were the only labor we could afford, so we got in here and started hammering,” Howton says. “After all of those years in the pawnshop business, I had every tool known to man. It was a lot of fun.” Just a few months into the business venture, Duggan had to return to Atlanta to tend to business, and Howton took over as sole owner of the restaurant. He and Rhonda were working seven nights a week. Keeping a restaurant in business is tough work. Keeping a restaurant in business in a seasonal spot like St. Simons is even tougher. Blackwater Grill opened in December 2000, in the midst of the island’s off-season. Howton is quick to point out the harsh reality of the restaurant industry, saying, “One out of every nine restaurants lasts until the third year, which is a very huge failure rate. So it wasn’t until the third year that we were able to stop scrambling and have a staff that would stay with us for a good while.” Howton says the key to developing a dedicated staff is treating your employees well, something he says he learned from a management course at Georgia Tech taught by professor Phil Adler. “Most of the time if you do a poll of what’s the most important product that an employee takes away from a business, it won’t be a paycheck. It will be the respect and the camaraderie with their managers, with their owners, with their fellow employees,” Howton says. And it was an industrial management class in which he worked on a large construction project that taught him a lesson in time management. “Those two things stuck with me, not only through management with Houlihan’s, but when your name is the only one up there, you either do it right or get out and find another job,” he says. “If it’s not a passion with you, you’re just going to fail. It’s as simple as that. So many guys think running a restaurant is going to be sitting at a bar and watching it happen, but that’s just not the case. You’ve got to be out there doing everything you can possibly do.” 50 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Fall 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.