My Family’s History In the Restaurant Business
by Michael Bohlsen

Some people get it. The acts of devouring, consuming and satiating your hunger are only the most obvious purposes a restaurant serves. They don’t define what a restaurant is.
It tells only a fraction of the story. A restaurant is much more so about the complex tangle of dense root structure that gives it life. It is really about family, familiarity; it is about passion,
caring and comfort. Lifers, those who were never able to ignore the calling, understand a restaurant job is so much more than an
occupation. Restaurants are a unique and self-sustaining
ecosystem, the very definition of the saying (you had to be there).
With the benefit of hindsight, I believe I understood the path
my life would take well before I accepted it. I was always going
to be a restaurateur. Fourth generation. My brother, Kurt
and I started learning long before we knew where we were headed.
My father is a very successful banker, prosperous and working bankers hours. People have always had a tendency to ask, most often at 11 pm on a crazy Saturday night, “why didn’t your father encourage you to take the easier path, become a banker, make a living and retire early?” I always retorted that it must have been “something I screwed up as a child, I guess.”
He spends his free time, his nights and weekends, in the restaurants. Running restaurants is his hobby, his only true
passion. No successful restaurateur is in the business to get rich; they are in it because it is what they were born to do.
Restaurants are unique. What other industry receives the raw ingredients in the morning, refines them that day, sells those same ingredients, refined, that night, serves them to the customer under that same roof, watches as the guest consumes the creation and, finally, has the guest pay for the bill the same day, attaching a gratuity that reflects their interpretation of that evening’s experience?
The restaurant business is my family. Those who work in restaurants understand how the restaurant business becomes your life. How do you relate to others, “regular people”, who don”t have to work every holiday, don”t work every weekend and rarely stay out until all hours?
I began this short story with these reflections of the restaurant life because it is an important backdrop to the story
of my family. Above all else, we are a family business.
Often, when I think about the bright spots, I think about our mom. I consider that, for some, this is a mother’s dream. She has her husband home every night, after 40 years of marriage, and works with her only two sons every day. When we do research, we do research together. A night of work could be a night dining out as a family. Who could complain?
Whenever we have earned a few sheckles, we do what dad has taught us to do – we put it back into the restaurant. That is the true joy – not the money itself, but freedom it supplies to make our restaurants better. Any restaurant that is not improving is getting worse.
Kurt and I were lucky enough to spend the first 25 years of our lives with our paternal grandfather only ten miles away. He was a restaurateur and host in the purest sense of the word. He created the mold from which all other restaurateurs were made. He always had a joke, a smile, a comforting glance and a sympathetic touch. He taught us the things that parents weren’t supposed teach you, how to cure a hangover, how to pee in the woods and where to find the wild blackberries in the brush behind his house. Most of all, he taught us the importance

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of knowing how to find joy in every day.
His wife, our grandmother, was the cook, we still pine for her
buckwheat pancakes, delicately garnished with bacon strips lovingly laid inside the flapjack itself, smothered with butter (we are, after all, Germans) and covered in Vermont maple syrup. She was the rock, the one who made it work every day.
Dad was the busboy, our aunt was the dishwasher and her younger sister was the coat check. They were closed on Mondays and Herman was sure to spend every Monday visiting all of the other neighborhood restaurants.
Herman taught my father about responsibility. He closed his restaurant at 38 years of age and joined the army to fight his native Germany in World War II. Bohlsen’s Restaurant reopened after the war and remained a gathering spot until he retired in the 1960’s.
Dad emerged from his upbringing to charge through college and the navy. He served during Vietnam in Subic Bay, the Philippines. As the war grew, the base grew exponentially. He was 24 years old and in charge of designing, building and running a dozen officers clubs to accommodate the bulging military population. In exchange for his service, he got the experience of a lifetime. He was able to cut his teeth on the
United States Navy’s dime.
Recently we saw a letter that my father wrote to his father August 12, 1969. His enthusiasm bubbled off of the page
as he described his opportunity to own an Arby’s franchise in Deer Park. As you would expect, his first reach was
to grab for family. He invited his father to join him at Arby’s “university”.
The first Arby’s was staffed by my father, my five months pregnant mother, my grandfather and two green sixteen year old kids. He believed in himself. Or he was too naive to know better. He worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day, never bothering to count the safe or produce a profit and loss statement. When the first year was over, his accountant told him he had good news and bad news. The good news, he made a great deal of money. The bad news, he owed a ton of taxes.
He wanted to take the money and open a second Arby’s. Mom thought he was crazy but supported him, as is her nature. If he believed he could do it, she believed in him, too.
One Arby’s turned into two. Two turned into ten. Ten into twenty. Twenty into fifty-four. Then he got an offer he
couldn’t refuse and sold the whole kit and kaboodle. He was retired at forty-one. But for a man whose hobby was working the counter in one of his stores, retirement didn’t last long. Our local hang out, Beachtree Cafe, became of interest to him so he bought it and had visions of a casual theme restaurant peppering neighborhoods on the island. He opened two more Beachtrees while my brother and I were in high school, but the recession hit hard and growth was then halted.
We were fortunate enough to find an office manager and bookkeeper that is as honest as the day is long. Shari is, and continues to be, the skeleton upon which our restaurant group has grown. We also found the young son of one of our
employees who had an affinity and passion for food. Raphael brought with him a work ethic and loyalty that cannot be matched. When he is on the job, my family can sleep soundly at night.
Dad was looking for a North Fork Bank branch in Islip and took a tour of the Chase Manhattan branch next to Islip Town Hall. Chase declined selling it to a competitor, but acquiesced after he had pitched the idea of a high end steakhouse to the family, and we promised to build a restaurant, not a bank.
Everyone thought we were nuts. Building a temple to prime aged steaks and fine wine in the tiny hamlet of Islip, well off of the beaten path? The musings of a mad man, people said. It’s hard to forget opening night, the first table sat in the dining room, looked at the menu and promptly got up and stormed out. We were sitting on a bench outside the front door as a party left in disgust. “Who in their right mind would think people will pay that kind of money for steak and potatoes in Islip!” And for a while, it looked like the pessimists were right. We struggled for the first two years, but we always stuck to our guiding principles and served the finest steaks we could buy, regardless of cost. We never compromised our standards and waited for everyone else to notice.
Eventually, they did. We hired a supremely talented general manager, Robert DiPierro, who steadied the ship, clearly put our guests at the top of the priority list, and preached the gospel
of striving for food, drink and wine superiority. He taught us that you can’t make it all in one night, that it is better to do 300 dinners perfectly than 350 the hard way. He brought a passion for the business that let my family know we are not alone. Not surprisingly, his father was a chef.
Most recently, we built a seafood house in Smithtown building on our dedication to quality and reputation for providing
a complete product. H2O Seafood-Grill is only now beginning to mature and realize its potential.
Looking back at what our lives have become, we realize we are so fortunate to have a family of four Bohlsens that has welcomed and embraced so many more. Through food, we have learned the meaning of loyalty, trust and love. We wouldn’t trade it for the best banker’s job in the world.

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