By Richard Bell
The Rose & Rooster will soon be celebrating its 10th anniversary. I sat down with co-founder Sarah Zollinger (with partner Jeff Adams) to talk about the rigors of starting a restaurant, and what it’s taken to keep it going through Covid and the arrival of two children.
What advice would Zollinger give to a young person today who was thinking of starting a restaurant? Before I could even get to the end of this question, Zollinger was rolling her eyes and quietly mouthing “Don’t,” before breaking into laughter.
“It’s just so hard, starting a business in the country,” she said. “I feel like I’m always at capacity.
The business takes as much space as I will give it. I remember early on, how I finally said to myself, ‘I’m taking a day off,” and how hard that was, taking just one day off, which eventually turned into one day a week.” But there are important benefits as well, starting with a flexible schedule to deal with daycare and school for their two boys. And the ability to trade shifts to get in some early morning surfing.
Like many other people in the area, it was surfing that brought Zollinger to Seaforth. She came east for a Masters in Architecture from Dalhousie. She picked Dal because it’s one of only two architecture schools in the country close to good surfing.
Zollinger met partner Jeff Adams surfing at Lawrencetown Beach. “I was surfing 4 days a week for a whole summer, and our schedules lined up,” she said. They started making bread, which they sold once a month at the Seaforth market. “We went to once a week,” she said, “and people were starting to come by the house looking for break. Jeff bought a big 50-amp oven in our 100amp house. Every time we turned on the oven the lights would dim and the house would shake! We still have that oven in the restaurant kitchen.”
The building housing the Rose & Rooster started off as a general store, and went through three or four restaurant iterations before Zollinger and Adams came in. “We still meet old-timers who remember buying candy here, or playing pool in the back room,” Zollinger said. They thought it would take 3 months to renovate the space, going down to the studs, and doing most of the work themselves, with the help of a few YouTube videos.
“It took 8 months,” Zollinger said. “It got to be the beginning of August, and I said, ‘We have to open,’ and we could figure how to do the rest later.”
“We opened thinking we could sell bread and coffee,” Zollinger said with a rueful laugh. We quickly figured out we needed to have more to offer. People were asking for more almost right away, first breakfast, and then lunch.”
Zollinger emphasized the importance of employee Krista Gillis to the restaurant’s longevity, especially through the Covid lockdown. “Krista’s brought so much to the business for the last six-and-a-half years,” Zollinger said. “Krista’s been able to make the Rose & Rooster into what Jeff and I imagined it could be. Good local food was our motto, and most of our suppliers are local. Krista manages that. And when there’s so much produce in the summer, she makes pickles and freezes things that we use to get us through the winter. I couldn’t have imagined doing that, but there Krista was.”
Zollinger describes herself as “a really invested member of the community. Living in Halifax, I’d felt like an outsider. When I moved to Seaforth, I remember thinking, ‘What if I really invest in a community, put down roots, make connections?’ Almost like an experiment, to really live here.”
And as to the origins of one of the richest pastries around, the Millionaire Bar, Zollinger’s Mom is Scottish. “We would visit her family every few years, and millionaire shortbread was common.”
(See the Rose & Rooster’s Facebook page for more details on the anniversary date.)
[Photos: left, Opening Day, 2012; right, 2022]
