Zack Bruell strides into the bar of L’Albatros and greets me with a “How are you?” delivered so sincerely that it’s downright touching. We were supposed to meet the day before at Siam Café, a popular Thai-Cantonese place on St. Clair Avenue that the Cleveland restaurateur has been patronizing for years. “It’s almost a Chinese version of mine — it’s got this pop to it,” he says as we settle ourselves at a corner table in his crisp, white dining room. A traffic mishap (mine, not his) forced a rescheduling, so we meet at Bruell’s French brasserie on University Circle, one of eight eateries he owns and operates that range from the fusion-seafood flagship Parallax in Tremont to burger joint Dynomite in Playhouse Square to the recently opened Alley Cat Oyster Bar in the Flats.
“My attention span is short,” he says of the variety. “So I have to continually try to do something new.”
A waiter brings menus and recites the lunch specials. I express surprise at finding a quartet of pizzas among entrees of duck confit and cassoulet.
“You want to split one?” he asks, sounding hopeful.
“Sure,” I reply. “Which one do you
suggest?”
“The Bianco is a real simple pizza,” he offers, referring to a pie topped with rosemary, garlic, Parmesan and fontina cheeses. “I like that.”
The 63-year-old Bruell is soft-spoken, relaxed and happy — yet another surprise. I’d read about those days at his first restaurant, Z Contemporary Cuisine in Shaker Heights, from which came tales of servers walking off the job and things being thrown in the kitchen. (He later confesses that he was a screamer but not a thrower. “You’re breaking stuff, you have to pay for it,” he points out with a chuckle.) So once the waiter leaves with our order, I have to find out: How did this self-described Type A control freak turn into a guy who can sit down for a 90-minute lunch, relaxed even in one of his own establishments?
“There are basically three incidences in my life that changed my career,” he divulges.
Bruell describes running Z Contemporary Cuisine as “that first lifetime,” a decade of 90-hour workweeks after the first location’s opening in 1985. Much of it was spent cooking on the line, standing over his brigade and telling them exactly how he wanted each and every single dish done. “I did lunch, dinner, for 2 1/2 years,” he recalls. “The first meal that I missed was the birth of my daughter.” His breaking point came on a Saturday night in 1995, after he arranged for an employee to fill in for him so he could take his daughter to a Brownie Scout troop dance and the worker didn’t show up.
“I just said, ‘That’s it. I’m out. I’m going to sell this and do something normal,’ ” he remembers. “But I also was burnt out, so I took a year off.”
The second event occurred a year later, when he took a job as executive chef at Ken Stewart’s Grille in Akron. The job was truly 9-to-5. Stewart didn’t want Bruell sticking around for the dinner shift at his eponymous establishment because he thought his presentation was too precise, too intimidating, for the restaurant’s clientele. The arrangement forced Bruell to delegate responsibility to a group of people he didn’t know, hire or train. “I had to learn to trust,” he says. “That’s a big thing.” He credits the kitchen staff with making the lesson easier to learn over his eight years there.
“The people that fueled the rubber industry, a lot of those people were from West Virginia,” he explains. “And their work ethic was incredible.” He then turns his attention to the just-delivered white pizza, its crust sparingly dappled with char from the wood-burning oven. “Why don’t you try this while it’s hot?” he invites, then reaches for a slice and folds it in half.
After a few bites, Bruell tells me about the third incident. It occurred in 2004, shortly after he began working in Cleveland again with the opening of Parallax. He had intended to work on the line, just as he had at Z. The chef and sous chef, however, had other ideas.
“The second day in, they said, ‘Why don’t you go over there? We got this,’ ” he says. “I knew what they were thinking: We don’t want him around because he’s gonna be a pain in the ass.” Was he ticked? “Oh, yeah!” he exclaims. “[But] we had just opened up. So I didn’t want them to walk.”
Instead, Bruell began supervising line production. He compares the change to a musician who becomes the conductor of an orchestra in which he once played. The experience was a revelation, one that allowed him to grow and do more, from chatting with customers to opening more restaurants and launching catering and consulting services.
“Now I could control everything and see everything that came out, as it was funneled through me, control it that way without actually getting my hands dirty and doing the physical work,” he explains.
Bruell still describes himself as intense. Despite his myriad successes, he fears going out of business and losing his employees — a thought that has driven him ever since he opened Z. “Every once in a while, I’ll have these dreams that I’m on the line cooking again,” he says. “It’s like a nightmare. I can’t do it any more, and I’m lost.” He’s learned to tone down that intensity in the presence of staffers and try to have a good time with them. These days, the quest for perfection is channeled into his golf swing — he spends an hour or more every day hitting balls at Cleveland Metroparks’ Washington Golf Course. “While I’m doing that, my work disappears,” he says. The ritual continues even if the weather turns foul.
“This is really sick: I have a golf net that I put in the boiler room of the building that I live in, an indoor golf net, so I can hit balls,” he confides.
Bruell interrupts himself to acknowledge the returning waiter, nodding at the last remaining piece of pizza.
“You want another?” he asks.
“It’ll look better on you than on me,” I quip.
“OK. I’ll take it.”