- Associated Press - Sunday, November 6, 2016

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - Before deciding whether to buy back Sticky Fingers, Chad Walldorf toured the restaurants still bearing the brand that he and two prep school buddies invented in 1992. A decade ago, when they sold the Charleston-based company, there were 16 Sticky Fingers across the Southeast, and at least that many e-mail messages arriving each day with tantalizing new expansion proposals.

“They were saying, ’Please open a Sticky Fingers in my hometown,’” Walldorf recalls. “We thought the company had outgrown our managerial skills: We always felt there were people who knew better than we did, and we thought new ownership would help us grow.”

At first, Sticky Fingers did grow, padding its portfolio with another seven locations. But then the chain faltered. Watching employees from his seat at one of the 12 surviving Sticky Fingers, Walldorf was sure he knew why.

“They were cleaning the floor with a whisk broom and a piece of paper, because they didn’t have the right height broom and a dustpan,” he says, sounding sad. “So I ran across the street to Lowe’s and bought them; the employees were like kids at Christmas. It was very bleak. The company was losing money, so there was a focus on cost control and making bad long-term decisions to chase the short-term dollar.”

Now Walldorf; fellow founders Jeff Goldstein and Todd Eischeid; and Robert Patterson, longtime operating partner of the chain’s original location on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, have taken on an even bigger clean-up project. The partners are determined to save the chain by reviving the excitement that surrounded Sticky Fingers when it first brought Memphis-style barbecue to the Lowcountry, blazing a path for outsider smoked meat that Texan John Lewis shadowed almost 25 years later.

“I told our board we’ll never close another restaurant,” Patterson says. “That’s the goal. We don’t need to have a million locations or be traded on the stock market. We want to return this place to its glory days.”

Saucy thinking

Corporate legend holds that Sticky Fingers started on a lark. Jeff Goldstein’s father, who would later become locally known as the owner of Sofa Super Store, had successfully sold hickory-smoked ribs in Chattanooga. He figured the recipe would do equally well in Charleston. And since Goldstein and his friends, then in their early 20s, were having trouble landing grown-up jobs, Herb Goldstein helped set them up in a former Po’ Folks.

“There were just not a lot of restaurants in Mount Pleasant, so we were busy from the start,” Walldorf says. On the first night, when Goldstein finally emerged from the overwhelmed kitchen, he approached a table of customers to ask after their meal. “They said, ’None of us got what we ordered, but it was all great.’ The whole concept had an authenticity about it that people appreciated.”

The combination of bluesy music, sugary sweet barbecue sauce, fair prices and the onion loaf, an appetizer woven from battered onion slivers, looked unbeatable. Within five years, Sticky Fingers was so beloved that an edition of the “Where the Locals Eat” travel guide listed Sticky Fingers as the community’s pick for best family restaurant, best homestyle food and best place to take children. But the brand was becoming equally well known beyond the region through its mail-order barbecue service and bottled sauces sold at grocery stores.

At first, the only place to buy Sticky Fingers’ sauces was the Harris Teeter across the parking lot from the Mount Pleasant restaurant. “Then an incident occurred with Maurice Bessinger,” who ruled the pre-made mustard sauce market in the late 1990s, Walldorf says. “Some Walmart executives were in his store and they picked up white supremacist literature. All of a sudden these grocery stores kicked out his product, so there was a void on the shelves.”

By 2006, Sticky Fingers was selling bottled sauce in 4,000 groceries nationwide.

New manager in town

For the young founders, the numbers were daunting - and a distraction from their growing families. They started talking seriously about getting out. Discussions sometimes got heated. “The three of us had argued about everything for 14 years, so that wasn’t anything different,” laughs Walldorf, who still shares a downtown office with Goldstein and Eischeid.

Although they negotiated to retain board seats when they sold, the men didn’t anticipate the brand would need much steering to stay on course. “We were naïve and didn’t foresee what was coming,” Walldorf says. “As foolish as that sounds, we thought the company would just keep going.”

Soon after the deal was closed, the private equity group in charge hired a CEO who recoiled at Sticky Fingers’ casual way of doing business.

“We were less a corporation than a loose collection of friends, so we struggled with the new management,” Walldorf says. “Was he doing the right thing that we should have done all along or screwing up a brand that we spent years building? In retrospect, we should have been louder and banged our fists on the table.”

Instead, the founders stood by as the new owners laid off employees; restructured the compensation plan so managers weren’t given a share of profits, effectively docking them $20,000 a year, and radically cut back on material expenses: Even the onion loaf was deemed too costly to produce.

Eventually, the owners ran out of money, briefly putting the chain under a bank’s control. “Banks don’t run restaurants very well, to say the least,” Walldorf says. “They gutted the brand.” According to Walldorf, one location was forced to use paper plates because a supplier repossessed its dish machine. Another ran out of silverware. Even after the Red Hot & Blue BBQ chain picked up Sticky Fingers, Walldorf felt like the days when an employee would volunteer to fix a guest’s flat tire while he ate were very far away.

Unchained

“Finally, I told Chad we had to get rid of the middle man,” Patterson says. As of this year, Sticky Fingers is again locally owned. To celebrate the changeover, the founders moved the company’s headquarters back to Johnnie Dodds Boulevard and invited restaurant and catering managers to Charleston for a two-day ideas swap.

“We’re making sure we do everything the best way possible,” Patterson says, pointing out that the brisket is now cooked in butcher paper because a cook suggested it.

Mostly, though, the chain isn’t making many changes beyond restoring the blues soundtrack - “over the years, I’d hear anything from Britney Spears to classic rock,” Walldorf says - and purging the menu of misguided items. “The menu was all over the place. Trying to be all things to all people, they’d put a steak on there and eight different burgers: Just a bunch of stuff that we frankly didn’t do very well.”

Also back: The onion loaf.

“We got to bring the signature loaf back,” Patterson says. “People told me they quit coming because we got rid of the loaf.”

Despite the drive toward consistency and stability, Walldorf and Patterson are very touchy about the word “chain,” which to them represents everything that’s antithetical to Sticky Fingers. “When I hear people say Sticky Fingers is a chain, I’m like, ’We’re not,’” Patterson says. “I go to church with you. I coach your kids.”

“Part of the culture is we always fight against that word,” Walldorf says. “It’s a small, regional . I still can’t say that ’ch’ word.”

After 10 years of seeing Sticky Fingers run as a traditional chain, Walldorf and Patterson are apparently worried that restaurants with multiple matching locations can’t display personality or support their communities. During Hurricane Matthew, they had a chance to prove themselves wrong.

Sticky Fingers in Mount Pleasant didn’t lose power during the storm, so Patterson opened the restaurant on Saturday at 3 p.m. A line formed 90 minutes later, and didn’t let up til nearly midnight. Patterson, who wore his rain boots throughout service, reports they fed 800 customers, in addition to catering meals for 500 National Guard members.

Echoing that group of forgiving patrons that Goldstein encountered during Sticky Fingers’ first-ever dinner service, one of those customers reviewed the experience on Yelp: “Let me tell you, I have never been so impressed by the hard work that I witnessed. Sure, the food may have taken a little while, but who cares?”

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