Last week. Lunchtime. A surprisingly steady flow of people, most of them wearing masks of various colors and designs and most of them young, were walking into Stan’s Donuts & Coffee, a shop at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Rush Street, and leaving with some sort of doughy treat.
Behind the counter was a 21-year-old named Alec Montgomery, who grew up in Rogers Park and Lakeview and is studying for a degree in hospitality at DePaul University. He has worked for Stan’s for the last four years and he is one of the 100-some employees who has been able to stay on the job, sharing this shop with two other employees. Some 400 others have been furloughed.
“I am lucky, I know, and we have been surprisingly busy,” he says. “A lot of regulars are still coming in in the mornings and on nice days we get a slight rush. People enjoy their walks.”
A man at the counter, not wearing a mask said, “I need a dozen … They’re not all for me.”
Sitting in the shop was Rich Labriola. He owns this place and 11 other Stan’s across the area, as well as four restaurants. There are two places called LaBarra, in Oak Brook and Riverside. His first is Labriola Bakery Café in Oak Brook, opened in 2008, and another Labriola, the largest, came in 2015. It is not far from here, a few blocks south at 535 N. Michigan Ave.
“We started this year so strong, business was up across the board,” he says. “And then …”
He has driven here from his west suburban home as he has been doing most days since stay-at-home orders went into effect, “just to check in and move around.”
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This is one of the seven Stan’s that has remained open for quick pick-ups.
“People staying home is not good for my business, any business,” he said, seemingly without rancor or resentment. “I don’t want or deserve any sympathy. There are enough people to feel bad about. What about the people who borrowed and scraped to start a restaurant and were just about ready to open? The mom-and-pop place?”
He understands the uncertainty and worries of these people because he was once one of them.
So was his father, Danny, who opened a pizza place in Calumet Park shortly after returning from World War II. Named Danny’s Pizza, it was just a storefront operation, no tables.
Danny was a sign painter during the days and the family lived in Blue Island. Rich, the youngest of four children, remembers, “I’d sneak into the back seat of his car and hide there and wait for him to drive to work. It was only a five-minute drive, but I knew that once we got there, he’d have no choice but to let me stay.”
He learned to make pizzas and to sell them. But when Rich started high school his father sold the pizza place and so he worked a lot of non food-related part-time jobs.
“I was not the greatest student and I didn’t I didn’t want to go to college,” Rich says. “I wanted to be successful, but at 18 I didn’t know what ‘successful’ meant.”
He and a brother-in-law opened a pizza place of their own in Alsip. It closed after two up-and-down years. He then was working as a meter reader for Commonwealth Edison when his uncle gave him a piece of bread and, no hyperbole, in so doing changed the course of his life.
I charted that fortuitous journey — quitting his job and selling bread out of the back seat of his car, learning to bake bread, borrowing a few hundred dollars from his father and starting his own bakery, was doing $30-million in business when he sold to start his first restaurant — in a story I wrote after I first met Labriola more than three years ago.
The Stan’s portion of his trip began when Labriola saw a TV travel show feature about Stan’s Donuts, a famous place in Los Angeles, which had been in business for more than 50 years.
Labriola called Stan and called him again many times over the next few years to talk about collaborating. Stan was reluctant, as he had been for many previous franchising offers. Then Labriola went for a visit and found, he says, “This tiny place, with a phone on the wall. It reminded me of my dad’s pizza place.”
The two men made a deal and the first Stan’s opened in Wicker Park in 2013.
Now, sitting in the 12th Stan’s to open here, Labriola said, “It has been a great partnership. Stan had to close his L.A. shop in April, and he turns 91 in August. But I talked to him yesterday and even though he misses working, he sounds good.”
Labriola sounds surprisingly good too. “Over my years in business I have needed to take out small business loans. There have been a lot of tough times. We opened the first restaurant in the middle of the 2008 financial troubles. Rough but we survived. We’ll be OK. Most of my employees will be OK.
“I worry about them. Look, I don’t need people feeling bad for me. This is what it is, and these are the rules and I can’t blame anybody for that. I tend to be quiet if I don’t have a better idea and I don’t.”
He sounds surprisingly optimistic, saying, “As an entrepreneur I am always working and this time has allowed me to explore, think of different avenues. Maybe wholesaling. What do you think about Stan’s donuts in supermarkets? And this is a chance to fine-tune our operation, have even better customers service. People are going to need a good reason to come back outside.”
He expects that the Stan’s outlets will bounce back faster than his restaurants.
“People go to restaurants to eat and to be entertained with the scene, conversations with friends,” he says. “Donuts? It’s just in and out but it’s comforting and pleasurable, like ice cream.”
Over the last month, Labriola has lost 10 pounds. “I’m cooking for myself,” he says. “Doing a lot of baking.” He has also been — who hasn’t? — watching a lot of TV. “At first news and more news. But got to be too much, just overwhelming. I was watching hoping to hear good news.”
Long divorced with no children, he is a vigorous 57-year-old. “There really is just no stop in this business. I’ve been lucky but have also worked as hard as I know how,” he says.
Labriola tries to keep in touch with his furloughed employees. “We really are like a big family,” he says. He has been feeding members of that family too, with full family dinners that his 400 some furloughed folks can regularly pick up at his otherwise shuttered restaurants.
Saturday he served pasta, salad and, of course donuts.