AI Summary
5 min readRichard Mott, owner of North Pond and Spark Shared Kitchen in Chicago, started his first food business in 1981 as a finance MBA student at the University of Chicago. He bid on a school project to run a basement coffee shop, turned it into a full lunchroom, and grew it into a chain of 23 coffee shops across five universities. That early decision — to work for himself rather than take a corporate job — shaped a career that now spans nearly three decades of running a celebrated fine-dining restaurant and a shared kitchen facility that lowers the barrier to entry for other food entrepreneurs.
From Coffee to Fine Dining
Mott’s coffee shop business was predictable and functional. Sales tracked class schedules almost exactly. It was a utility business, not a luxury one. But it was also highly seasonal — busy during the academic year, dead in the summer. To balance that, he started working with the Chicago Park District on concessions. Through a set of circumstances, he ended up bidding on a neglected warming house in Lincoln Park — a spot that at the time was a homeless hangout with prostitution and a pond that looked like a drainage ditch. No one else bid on it. That became North Pond, which opened in 1997.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (04:14) **From Finance Major to Restaurant Owner** - Richard Mott explains how a summer internship convinced him he didn't want to work for anyone else, leading him to start a business while still in business school.
- 2 (07:20) **The Coffee Shop That Started It All** - Mott describes winning a bid to run a basement coffee shop at the University of Chicago's business school and turning it into a multi-location chain.
- 3 (11:42) **Learning Business the Hard Way** - Mott reflects on his biggest early mistakes and how the lack of soft skills training in 1980s MBA programs hurt him.
- 4 (18:56) **The Full Business Portfolio** - Mott gives an overview of his ventures: coffee shops, a fine dining restaurant, catering, vending, and investments in eight or nine other startups.
- 5 (21:38) **Coffee Shops vs. Fine Dining: Two Different Worlds** - Mott contrasts the economics and operations of his university coffee shops with North Pond, his fine dining restaurant.
- 6 (24:18) **The Birth of Farm-to-Table in Chicago** - Mott explains how North Pond evolved from a casual cafe to a pioneering farm-to-table restaurant and how the menu has changed over 30 years.
- 7 (29:22) **Why Restaurants Are the Worst Business to Get Into** - Mott delivers a blunt assessment of the economics of independent fine dining and why most restaurants fail.
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Show Notes
Richard Mott's first foray into hospitality was in the 1980s at the University of Chicago, where he started running a coffee shop in the basement of the business school when he was a grad student. By the time he graduated, he helped grow that single coffee shop into four locations across campus. He's a longtime Chicago-based restaurateur and his farm-to-table restaurant North Pond has been around since the late 1990s. Lately, he's expanded his business to include Spark Shared Kitchen, a catering facility and incubator for food entrepreneurs. He knows a lot about the practical economics of restaurants and hospitality at large, and in his decades-long career in the Chicago scene he's seen about everything. On our recent trip to Chicago, we sat down with Mott to talk about the ever-increasing price of food and labor, why diners are drinking less, and the expected and unexpected reasons that restaurants so often fail.
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