Starting a restaurant isn’t always easy business.
That difficulty was no doubt multiplied in 2020 when businesses were ordered to shut down and limit capacity.
Cinderella von Hach and Steven Startz started Le Citron European Cafe and Bistro in 2019 with the original goal of serving cheesecake and coffee to the New Braunfels community, but the pair said those goals quickly changed.
“I said, there is no way that is going to pay the bills,” Startz said.
Startz and von Hach met when Startz was working nights in the oil business. Eventually the pair made their way to New Braunfels where von Hach found the building Le Citron now occupies vacant. She said she was too excited to wait on securing the property for the future restaurant.
“I just went ahead and did it,” she said.
The idea for the restaurant has evolved over time, originally being a small cafe. But the pair leaned into the idea of the European bistro, offering more and more items from the old continent to hungry New Braunfelsers.
Von Hach isn’t shy about originally being from Germany, and she is excited to now offer some of the European treats she enjoyed growing up.
Despite the French name, Startz emphasizes that the restaurant is actually European.
“The cool thing about it is it leaves us open. We could have Polish food if we wanted to,” Startz said.
The first year
Startz said many restaurants don’t make it through their first year. The odds are low, and when the pandemic hit, it posed all sorts of challenges for Le Citron, which had only been open for less than a year at that point.
The pair had spent months putting the restaurant together, painting the walls and imagining the layout.
“It took a while … nine months,” von Hach said. “It’s a family operation. We had our kids in here painting. … Everything here is hand made, even this,” she said, pointing to the decorative siding on the wall. “Me and my daughter, we painted this, we caulked it, we used tools we’d never used before.”
Startz and von Hach said they had never owned a restaurant, so when the pandemic hit, the found something wonderful in New Braunfels they hadn’t discovered before.
“We’ve made a lot of restaurant friends now because we reached out like, ‘Hey, how do we do this?’ … ‘What printing paper do you use?’ Simple things, but simple things will hold up production,” von Hach said. “So we made friends with all the restaurant owners downtown and they are super great. There’s a restaurant community, so when COVID hit and stores were closed … and they were out of cake boxes or napkins, there was a great community right there.”
According to von Hach, restaurants were pulling together in the worst of the pandemic to help each other out, and for the two owners who were new to operating a restaurant, that community was priceless.
“That was kind of behind the curtain, how every restaurant downtown was helping each other out,” von Hach said. “That was cool. That was really cool.”
Moving Target
Even after making it past the first year, the pair said they are still learning. Those lessons go just beyond what hours to be open or what supplies to order.
“We had a crepe maker out front where we could make crepes and people could watch,” von Hach said. “But then we had so many orders coming in and just that one little crepe maker didn’t cut it for our customer traffic any more.”
That change resulted in moving the kitchen and redesigning the front of the restaurant.
“Steven built everything in here,” she said.
Startz said he often deals with the team in the kitchen and suppliers.
“I watch the numbers like a hawk,” he said.
In those numbers, he said he’s learned some important lessons.
“There’s only a few ways you can control costs in a restaurant,” Startz said. “That’s food cost and labor cost. That’s it. Those are the only two things you can control in a restaurant.”
“We learned a lot from knowing nothing to calculating food costs and making sure how to staff properly,” von Hach said. “We’d never done that before. It’s not easy.”
The menu has also adjusted over time.
Startz’ claim to fame was the American breakfast plate, which he said the restaurant lacked in the beginning. Adding bacon or sausage, hash browns and French toast to the menu has been a blessing, according to him.
Now as spring and summer approach, the pair are ready for the rush of visitors in New Braunfels who will hopefully come in droves after being stuck at home in 2020.