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roblems persisted into the new year. In January, Blanc left Arrowhead Specialty Meats — which had been supplying Blanc with a custom grind of sirloin and beef shoulder since Blanc’s early days in Leawood — for Scavuzzo’s. Arrowhead confirms that the account has been settled but won’t comment further. Peralta says the decision allowed him to save a dollar a pound and sell what he calls “never-frozen, grass-fed, hormone-free, noantibiotics beef from Kansas and Missouri.” But several industry sources familiar with meat pricing in Kansas City tell The Pitch that they doubt Peralta can buy the meat he wants while realizing such a significant cost savings. Also in January, Blanc changed another supply agreement, switching from US Foods to Sysco — and trailing a balance. During an interview with The Pitch in early December, Peralta said Circle had “worked out a payment plan in the last four weeks.” (A representative for US Foods had no comment.) In February, Blanc settled with Agia. According to Ron Kraft, an attorney for Agia, Blanc agreed to pay $700 a month toward $22,500 owed. Kraft says his client was last paid on June 25; he estimates that Blanc has paid $3,600 so far. In June, the Omaha Blanc shuttered after a midweek lunch service. The restaurant still had three and a half years on its lease. “It was working,” Cook says. “It would have been fine but for the strategic issues that Ernesto was facing. It’s bittersweet. I really like Blanc Burgers. I had a lot of time and energy and capital invested in that concept.” Peralta says East Campus Realty approached him about breaking his lease because it had a tenant interested in the property. The Midtown Crossing space sits empty today. On June 23, United Heating & Cooling filed suit against the Circle Restaurant Group for nonpayment of $5,076 worth of maintenance contracts related to the Plaza and Leawood
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Blanc. It’s called Big Orange and it’s not part of the Circle group. “It’s our color scheme. It’s our fixtures that we had to leave behind,” Peralta says. “Maybe we were going a little too fast. … Jenifer and I never had the money to get it open.” Blanc’s partnership was falling apart. Eans, Wilson and McMullin all left the company in October 2011. The Peraltas bought back Wilson’s 1-percent share. (Wilson now manages the Rusty Horse Tavern, in Parkville.) Eans and McMullin remain what Peralta calls “economic interest holders”: They have money and ownership stakes in the business but no other connection. All three declined to comment for this story. That same month, Ernesto took over daily operations on the Plaza, and Jenifer began managing the Leawood location. He says he didn’t know until then that his company was struggling. “If you have a pool full of water and the pool is full, you don’t see the cracks,” Ernesto Peralta says. “But all of a sudden, you’re losing water and you start seeing cracks. Sales were not where they were when we opened the business. And we still had the same expenses. It wasn’t until we jumped in that we saw the cracks. We lost money last year.”
B:2 before it shuttered in Lee’s Summit. restaurants. And the temperature kept rising for Blanc. A walk-in refrigerator at the Plaza Blanc was failing to keep food at the proper temperature when a Health Department inspector visited the restaurant August 8. It was one of the six critical violations that closed Blanc for several hours that day. A follow-up investigation August 13 found no violations. A judgment in United’s favor was issued August 29 by a Jackson County Circuit Court. Crane says: “That fits a pattern of behavior, a pattern of Ernesto leveraging other people’s financial risk and harvesting all the gain.” Peralta, who won’t disclose his salary, says, “I’ve never gone into my pocket and taken out cash. Every single employee and vendor that has worked with us has been paid.” Some of those former associates remain unhappy — less because of money than because of something lost. “We should have stayed in Westport,” Evans says. “I’ve never found the happiness and family I had at Blanc.” “A lot of people miss Blanc Burgers + Bottles, Cook says of the failed Nebraska restaurant. “It was their favorite place to go.” Blanc’s first address is still a favorite place for a lot of people. The Westport Café & Bar took over 419 Westport Road from Blanc, and today it’s part of a restaurant renaissance that’s again turning empty storefronts into vibrant spaces. It’s a resurgence that Blanc helped start when it opened in a neighborhood whose reputation relied mostly on bars. But Peralta is done with Westport. “I love Westport,” he says, “but we can never go back there because we’re on the Plaza now.” If Peralta can sound defensive about his business, though, he also can’t stop framing Blanc as a success. “I’d love to open up a third restaurant in Kansas City,” he says. (He mentions downtown Overland Park as a potential target.) “I’d love to eventually open up the brand outside Kansas City. But it has to be with the right financial support.” On the Plaza, an early winter lunch crowd has thinned. It’s 1 p.m. on a Friday, and a boy and his mother have the back section to themselves. The child rolls one of the french-fry shopping carts across a white shelf. The place isn’t empty, though. The number of people here would have been a good-sized crowd in the Westport space. “If the Plaza space was half the size,” Peralta says, “we’d be twice as profitable.
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