When Bill Oliver re-launched the Zebu Forno café in Morristown two summers ago, he had a dream.
This would be “Cheers without the liquor license, where people could hang, have a cup of coffee, say hello, and have meetups and music and art, all local,” he recounted on Monday.
Zebu achieved much of that–but not enough to keep Bill’s dream from becoming a financial nightmare. The South Street eatery will close its doors on Tuesday.
“The bottom line was, I wasn’t making a bottom line,” said Bill, 55, who has three children to put through college. “I wasn’t getting close enough. I couldn’t afford to do it anymore.”
Nine employees, including Bill’s daughter Kate, will lose their jobs. Patrons expressed sadness that another community-minded business is following Greenberry’s and Gallery Egan into oblivion.
R.I.P. Zebu Forno. Please click icon below for captions.
“I’m sad in the truth that people vote with their dollar and that Morristown votes for bars,” texted Danielle Merzatta, who produced Art at the ‘Bu exhibitions at Zebu and ran Sunday night drawing sessions there.
She likened Zebu to a nonprofit institution: It offered free live music, book- and game nights, a venue for fundraisers and family fare including pizza and pastries.
“I am really upset,” said Kadie Dempsey of the Arts Council of the Morris Area. “It was such a community place. They really tried to energize the community through art shows and music. It’s really too bad.”
Jens Velasquez held a party at Zebu for his Frisbee camp last year, and his son Aaron performed at Zebu as a beat-boxer.
“I feel really bad because Bill’s a great guy,” said Jens, who liked the food, too. But rents around the Green are “astronomical,” he said. And a key ingredient to the success of the fictional Cheers of sitcom fame was its fictional liquor license.
Without liquor, Jens said, “you’ve got to sell a lot of food just to pay the rent, let alone your employees.” Restaurants come and go all the time, he said, and this town is especially tough. “Morristown is one of the few places where McDonald’s failed.”
Loretta Hagan live at Zebu, October 2011.
Why did Zebu fail?
Staffer Atalie Gimmel said only chains such as Starbucks and Roots Steakhouse (owned by Harvest Restaurants) can afford Morristown rents. The recent Morristown High School graduate started working at Zebu a year ago. This was her first job, and she is grateful to Bill.
“I owe him so much,” said Atalie, who will attend Loyola University in Maryland this fall. “I had no experience when he hired me. I learned so much– how to manage my time, how to be responsible, making sandwiches, how important customer service is. Bill was really big on that.”
Jackie Schribbs spent nine months working at Zebu after graduating from the University of Oregon.
“Bill was awesome,” she said. “He really wanted to bring something to the community that was lacking. He really cared about the community.”
Despite free WiFi and good coffee, however, “a lot of people had no idea what Zebu Forno was,” Jackie said, suggesting more advertising might have helped. Or not. As Greenberry’s discovered, “There’s not enough business. It’s not enough to sell coffee and pastries and sandwiches.”
Coffee shop? Bakery? Pizzeria? Zebu’s fuzzy identity was part of its charm, according to Danielle Merzatta.
Artists flocked to the place for Sunday Portraits & Pizza sessions “because it was so unusual,” she said. For $10, artists got pizza, lattes and live models.
But Bill said none of his experiments–print ads and coupons, pizza delivery, $1 pizza slices–created the volume he needed to survive.
“No one knew what I was doing. People would be saying, ‘You have great pizza–I didn’t know you had pizza,” he said.
Now the Chatham resident is agonizing over details large and small. Should he have pushed breakfasts harder? Could he have done more to pump up evening business?
“At night, with all the bars going, there’s no place to park,” Bill said. “If you’re going to Roots, people are willing to pay for parking. But if you’re getting pizza, you’re not paying for parking.”
The return of Starbucks last year did not help Zebu’s chances, either. But Bill does not blame the chain for Zebu’s demise.
Before taking the restaurant plunge, Bill worked in real estate development. He became a fan of the original Zebu Forno in Red Bank while doing projects there. (“Zebu” supposedly refers to an ox that transports coffee beans in Africa; “forno” is Italian for oven.)
He struck up a friendship with the owner, which led to the franchise opportunity in Morristown, where prior franchisees had quit after only a few months in 2009.
Bill will miss his staff, he said, but not the headaches.
“Going through this is a little like a divorce,” he said.
On Monday night a sign on Zebu’s door announced the impending closure “with great sadness and regret.”
“It has been two years since we opened in pursuit of our dream,” Bill wrote. “Many new friends have walked through the door, and I leave with many fond memories. I will truly miss all of you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and patronage. Hopefully our paths will cross again soon.”
ZEBU’S LAST DAY: ‘EXTRA CHEESE, PLEASE’
Jamming at the ‘Bu, November 2011
Bill Oliver would have been lucky to be Hispanic in this case. If he were Hispanic Tim Dougherty would have never let him open the place and he would have saved a lot of money. Bill you should find a few Latino houses that are all in a row and tell Tim Dougherty that you have a plan to kick them out and put white people in them. It will go over better with Dougherty if the hispanics you kick out have families and no place to go.