Execs Launch Day With Power Breakfasts

May 6th, 2004
Atlanta Business Chronicle

Ricky Steele’s breakfast meetings usually are as succinct as what he orders on the menu: granola with skim milk and strawberries.

Steele, a networking consultant, lines up one meeting after another at the OK Café on West Paces Ferry and he and clients like to get right to the point. Food on the table in 10 minutes, out the door in an hour or less. Business done.

“Breakfast has a tendency to be the meal where people are fairly succinct and know they are going to have an hour and need to accomplish something,” Steel said.

If there is an unofficial record of breakfast meetings, Steele must have it. One day started at 7 a.m. at the OK Café and ended at 3:30 p.m. with seven back-to-back-to-back “breakfast” meetings. Each time the staff cleared the table, wiped it down, and new place settings were put in place as if it was the first table of the day.

It’s how business gets done all across the city as the sun is coming up. Boardrooms are replaced by booths and tables. Steaks give way to eggs and bacon.

The familiar hot spots for the so-called “power breakfasts” are Goldberg’s, The White House, OK Café, The Silver Skillet, Kudzu Café and the Ritz Carlton Dining Room, among others.

Breakfast at one hot spot is not like breakfast at all the hot spots.

At the White House in Buckhead, business people can get omelets with a Mediterranean flair. Banana pudding, of all things, is popular on the breakfast menu along with a complimentary bowl of seasonal fruits.

Owner and manager Demos Galaktiadis says the White House makes its own biscuits, cornbread and pastries. The restaurant was originally established in 1948 and has been at the present location on Peachtree since 1974.

At OK Café, executive chef Jeffrey L. Palsa will put his pancakes up against any in the city. “We serve a lot of pancakes, eggs over easy, traditional breakfasts, but our pancake is popular because it is a light, fluffy pancake,” Palsa said. “It’s a good old-fashioned buttermilk pancake.”

The restaurant also features a strawberry or blueberry protein power shake for the power breakfast. There is also a scrambled tofu dish with broccoli, water chestnuts and soy sauce.

At Goldberg’s on Northside and West Paces Ferry Road, the menu expands past eggs and bagel and cream cheese. You can spend $1.75 or $12 on a nova platter of smokes salmon, or lox platter.

Owner Wayne Saxe said Goldberg’s has carved out a niche market with the lox, eggs, onions and smoked salmon. The restaurant does eggs benedict, but will do it with bacon, ham or nova.

“You’ve got to have the high-quality food product, but you also have to create an environment where people feel comfortable to talk,” said Saxe, who estimates 80 percent of his weekday morning business is professionals. “There are a lot of booths where people can talk.”

The allure at each of the breakfast hot spots is the same. The staff is at the table quickly and the order is placed as the computer laptops pop open across the room.

“You get to business a lot quicker,” said Harold Schumacher, a restaurant real estate broker. “It allows your work day to be longer without carrying it over into the evening. You can knock out a significant piece of business and be in your office by 8:30 (a.m.).

“The other thing is lunch plans are booked out way in advance. Breakfast is a better slot to get somebody.”

The food is essential, of course, but the appeal of the breakfast meeting is the more relaxed environment for a business discussion.

“If you get to people in the middle of the day, they have a lot going on,” said I. Sigmund Mosley Jr., the president of Imlay Investments, Inc., an angel investment firm. “If you get them early they are probably more relaxed, not as pushy.”

It’s another way of saying a meal of pancakes is more conducive to business than a meal of steaks.

If the business dinner is the proverbial killing two birds with one stone, the business breakfast is knocking down a flock of commitments. Not only do you eat and meet, but you do it early so it saves evening time for family.

What’s more, the business breakfast meeting is more than the deal. It can be shopping for talent or money.

“A company CEO might be looking to hire someone, but he wants to do it away from the office,” said Martin Tilson, the head of the technology group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP. “They might also be the subject of an acquisition and they don’t want it out yet so those discussions are done better away from the office. They could be out looking for capital.”

Or they could be out looking for the best eggs benedict in town.