Restaurant combines experience and passion for success

Patty Rice Groth

Gill Duryea brings his career expe­ri­ence with food, man­age­ment and dis­tri­b­u­tion together at Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue, 625 Lex­ing­ton Ave., Mans­field. The casual din­ing restau­rant is open for lunch and din­ner serv­ing authen­tic smoked meat with side dishes hand-made on site.

By PATTY RICE GROTH

Inquirer Cor­re­spon­dent

How does a man with a degree in crim­i­nal jus­tice end up own­ing a suc­cess­ful bar­be­cue restau­rant here in Ohio? By fol­low­ing his dreams, by lis­ten­ing to his fam­ily when they encour­age him to fol­low his dreams, and by care­fully research­ing ways to make his dreams come true.

At least, that is how Gill Duryea came to own and oper­ate a Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue restau­rant on Lex­ing­ton Avenue in Mans­field. The road may have been cir­cuitous but any­one who has vis­ited the restau­rant is very happy to sup­port Duryea’s dreams.

The road Duryea has trav­eled started in Ben­nettsville, South Car­olina, the small town in upper east­ern part of that state where he was raised by his par­ents, Lee and the late Mary Duryea. The roots of his dream were encour­aged when he met trans­planted Mans­field native Julie Fox at Bennetts-ville High School.

After grad­u­a­tion from high school, Duryea earned an asso­ciates degree in crim­i­nal jus­tice from Florence-Darling-ton Tech­ni­cal Col­lege. The biggest les­son he learned there, says Duryea, was that he had no inter­est in a career in crim­i­nal justice.

The cou­ple relo­cated to Atlanta where both attended DeVry Uni­ver­sity. Julie earned a bach­e­lor of sci­ence degree in com­puter sci­ence and Gill earned a bach­e­lor of sci­ence in busi­ness. Dur­ing the ten years they spent in and around Atlanta, both devel­oped suc­cess­ful careers. As chil­dren started to come along, how­ever, the desire to develop close fam­ily con­nec­tions brought the fam­ily back to Ohio where Julie’s par­ents, Alphonse and Nancy Welch, had returned.

Julie was able to con­tinue her telecom­mut­ing career with Hewlett-Packard and Gill had no prob­lem putting his busi­ness expe­ri­ence in man­age­ment and dis­tri­b­u­tion to good use. Until the recent eco­nomic cli­mate changes, that is. As so often hap­pens today, loss of a job has turned to oppor­tu­nity for self-employment and achiev­ing one’s dreams.

Duryea has always loved to cook. Since he was a teenager in South Car­olina, Duryea has enjoyed being in the kitchen.

As a mem­ber of Galion’s St. Joseph Catholic Church Knights of Colum­bus, he had chaired fish fries and chicken bar­be­cue fundrais­ing events for many years. For the last eight years, he has planned and cooked monthly out­reach meals served to this com­mu­nity in the Knights of Colum­bus’ activ­ity cen­ter here.

Encour­aged by his fam­ily to look for oppor­tu­ni­ties to com­bine his career expe­ri­ence with his pas­sion for cook­ing, Duryea began his research, dis­cov­er­ing that qual­ity smoked meat bar­be­cue — the kind com­monly avail­able in his native South — was not avail­able here in this part of Ohio — in fact, not any­where in Ohio!

After con­tact­ing Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue Gill and Julie vis­ited the company’s head­quar­ters in Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, tour­ing a num­ber of the pop­u­lar fran­chise loca­tions in the area. Impressed by what they saw, the peo­ple they met and the qual­ity of the prod­uct, they started the wheels turn­ing in Octo­ber of 2010 to open the first Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue restau­rant in Ohio.

Duryea said most of the time between Octo­ber and June of this year when the restau­rant opened was spent look­ing for the right loca­tion. In March he deter­mined the loca­tion on Lex­ing­ton Avenue had the right amount of road traf­fic and acces­si­bil­ity for suc­cess. The shop­ping area was already home to other suc­cess­ful busi­nesses, and the spot right out front was just what he wanted.

The next three months were spent build­ing out the space to accom­mo­date kitchens, stor­age, serv­ing and seat­ing areas to suit Duryea’s dreams.

Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue is a hands-on com­pany, explains Duryea. Rick Ivey, CEO of the com­pany, spent a lot of time assist­ing with the open­ing of the restau­rant, includ­ing the first week it was open for busi­ness. Ivey par­tic­i­pated in train­ing the staff, stock­ing the kitchen and freez­ers, and help­ing tweak things dur­ing the first days serv­ing the pub­lic. On Fri­day of that week, Ivey headed back to Rich­mond. Fri­day evening, he checked in with Duryea to hear how the first week­end was kick­ing off.

The restau­rant had been swamped! That’s a good thing in any new busi­ness, says Duryea, except that he was run­ning low on ribs! Such a thing as “run­ning out” could not be allowed to hap­pen. Demon­strat­ing his com­mit­ment to his fran­chise hold­ers, Ivey and his wife, Nina, vis­ited a num­ber of the Rich­mond area restau­rants col­lect­ing cases of ribs before load­ing their car and head­ing back to Mans­field to per­son­ally deliver the supplies.

Duryea said when the cou­ple arrived at his restau­rant at about 6 p.m. Sat­ur­day evening, he was down to just one full rack of ribs! The Iveys deliv­ered 15 cases in time to assure a suc­cess­ful Sat­ur­day evening and hold the restau­rant until its next order could be delivered.

In the 10 weeks since he opened, Duryea advises he has served about 750 racks of ribs from his Lex­ing­ton Avenue location.

Duryea reports he cur­rently receives twice a week deliv­er­ies of meat from the North Car­olina smoke­house which serves all Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue restau­rants. The com­pany chose the smoke­house because it could pro­vide con­sis­tent qual­ity meat to all its fran­chises. Cus­tomers who enjoy Mans­field Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue meals will not be sur­prised by loss of fla­vor or ser­vice at any other of its restaurants.

“Part of qual­ity food is food safety,” says Duryea. Until he can expand his stor­age capac­ity, he will con­tinue to receive fre­quent ship­ments of fresh product.

Except for the smoked meat, every­thing else he serves is pre­pared on site. Fresh onion rings are hand-dipped and fried in Duryea’s kitchens under his watch­ful eye by his hand-picked staff. He is exper­i­ment­ing with desserts, the only fran­chise in the com­pany to offer sweet sides.

Find­ing job appli­cants with the right expe­ri­ence from among the approx­i­mately 40 job appli­ca­tions he has on file is a chal­lenge. At this point, Duryea is only able to offer part-time employ­ment to his employ­ees. Right now, the restau­rant is fully staffed.

In addi­tion to his daugh­ter Kayla, a junior at North­mor High School, and a few other trusted Galion-area peo­ple, most of his employ­ees are com­mut­ing from loca­tions nearer the restaurant.

With his new respon­si­bil­i­ties to his busi­ness, Duryea will not be able to con­tinue to per­son­ally over­see cook­ing in the kitchen at the K of C hall in Galion, though he has retained respon­si­bil­ity for plan­ning and order­ing sup­plies for events there.

Two of the Duryea chil­dren, Kris­ten and Jes­sica, still attend St. Joseph Catholic School in Galion, and the fam­ily is still active in the school and congregation.

The family’s strong con­nec­tions to Galion help sta­bi­lize the con­fu­sion about where the fam­ily lives. Duryea says their home in the coun­try has a Mans­field mail­ing address, a Johnsville tele­phone exchange ser­viced out of Williamsport, and the mort­gage com­pany says their prop­erty is in Galion.

“As long as I know my way home,” says Duryea, laugh­ing, “I don’t care what they call it.”

Vir­ginia Bar­be­cue is open seven days a week at 625 Lex­ing­ton Avenue, Mans­field, right next door to the Mans­field YMCA. In addi­tion to counter ser­vice, lunch and din­ner orders can be placed in advance by call­ing 419–522-RIBS(7427) or fax­ing an order to 419–522-7431. Cater­ing ser­vices are also available.

Posted by Staff Reports on Sep 7 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.