By Kevin Greer
Lakeside Communications Manager
Eric Foltz owns four successful businesses. He is adding the Hotel Lakeside Dining Room to his list and his plan seems simple to make the restaurant thrive.
“I basically want to serve good food, meet good people and run a successful business that will complement the hotel,” Foltz said. “I want people to come to the hotel because there’s a great restaurant here. Those two things go hand in hand.”
Foltz brings over 40 years of restaurant experience to Lakeside. He worked for the Friendly’s Restaurant chain for 21 years until the company based out of Springfield, Massachusetts, started to close all its Midwest locations. In 2001, Foltz decided to go on his own and brought Cravin’s in New London. The walk-up restaurant serves lunch and dinner items that customers can top off with scoop or soft serve ice cream.
A year later, he took over Cold Creek Café in Castalia, where he also started a catering business that has grown significantly. He schedules theme nights, or what he calls “gimmicks,” like a monthly bingo dinner. The seafood buffet is very popular and doesn’t just draw a local crowd.
“I get people who drive six to seven hours for our seafood buffet,” Foltz said. “I get a group of guys who come down from Michigan every single time.”
Foltz purchased The Invention restaurant in Milan, where he currently resides, in 2016. He said the customers are mostly regulars, but gets a lot of guests who visit the birthplace of Thomas Edison and racing fans heading to Summit Motorsports Park. Just a short walk down Church Street, he opened Village Confections, a candy shop that includes many Amish goods. Foltz plans to sell some of the store’s most popular items in the Dining Room.
“We’ll have old fashioned candies like haystacks, peppermints and homemade buckeyes,” Foltz said. “I can just see that stuff selling nicely.”
Candy is a small part of Foltz’s plans for the Dining Room. The daily breakfast buffet will include biscuits and gravy, corned beef hash, eggs, sausage, bacon, French toast sticks, mini pancakes and oatmeal.
“It’s not going to consist of powdered eggs and processed stuff,” Foltz said. “A lot of hotels have done continental breakfasts that just don’t cut it. The quality isn’t great. I don’t like to eat it and I don’t want to serve it.”
The dinner menu will have fettuccine alfredo with either chicken or shrimp, prime rib, perch, walleye, citrus salmon baked cod, baked chicken, salads, angus beef burgers, appetizers and homestyle specials. There will also be a kids’ menu with all the regulars like burgers, chicken fingers and mac and cheese.
“I’ve got a more upscale dinner menu, but affordable to everyday people who aren’t going to be able to just go out every night,” Foltz said. “I think you have to hit all groups when you’re running a business in a community like this.”
The lunch menu is still a work in progress. He’s thinking of having grab-and-go items like sandwiches Lakesiders can eat on the Hotel Lakeside Porch or in one of the parks. Sundays will have a breakfast buffet until 10 a.m., followed by a brunch buffet until 2 p.m. No dinner will be served on Sundays.
Foltz needs servers and cooks and is currently hiring. He’s looking to have at least 40 employees to make things run adequately. Anybody interested can call Foltz at 419-577-0508. He wants the staff to get to know patrons on a personal level because that has worked at his other locations. Foltz is confident people will like working for him.
“Anybody who has any hesitation about working for me, I would encourage them to contact my current employees,” Foltz said. “They will speak volumes for who they work for. I treat them right and make sure that they are compensated correctly and everything’s aboveboard. People respect that. They know that I’m fair.”
Foltz says one of the main reasons for his success is his girlfriend, and business partner, Pepper Richardson. Foltz said she does about 90% of the administrative work and will be putting all the menus into the computer system.
“She’s put up with a lot of stuff with me,” Foltz said. “I couldn’t operate without the things that she does.”
Foltz has a sense of humor, and that showed when asked about why he decided to take over the Dining Room.
“I think I have a compulsion,” Foltz said with a laugh. “Lots of my friends and family tell me I’m nuts, but I just like the challenge. I don’t think there’s anything here that we cannot handle.”
