COMMENTS

$100, ESSAY CAN WIN YOU POPULAR ORTING CAFE

By: Ed Murrieta June 17, 2008

Kim and Carl Scanson, the owners of Orting’s Around the Corner Café, faced reality: Their 17-year-old daughter, Kirsty, will enter the Air Force next year, and time is precious.

So Kim cooked up a plan to devote more time to family: a contest that will award the winner the keys to their restaurant, bargain rent, a built-in community of customers and a starring shot on a reality-television pilot.

“We want somebody that’s as passionate as we are but who might not normally have another opportunity to outright buy their own restaurant,” said Kim, 37, who bought the restaurant with her husband 31/2 years ago.

“We want to make sure that we don’t just sell it to anybody and have it go bad,” said Carl, 44. “We want to make sure that whoever comes in is successful and able to do a lot for the community.”

From now until Oct. 3, Around the Corner Café is accepting essays from people who want to take over the 75-seat restaurant and its place in the tightknit city of 5,000 residents. Essays may be submitted online, in written form or as a video, along with a $100 entry fee.

The Scansons hope 4,828 people want to vie for their restaurant. They said they need that many entries in order to raise $480,280 – an amount of money that will enable the Scansons to pay off the loan on their 100-year-old building and offer the incoming restaurant operator six months free rent followed by a five-year lease below market rate. The entry fee money will be held in trust.

“Want to pay off everything so the winner is able to take over without making payments,” Carl said.

If they don’t receive 4,828 entries, the Scansons said, they reserve the right to cancel the contest. If they get the required entries, or even if they come real close, they said, a team of judges – including Orting’s mayor, the Chamber of Commerce president and other community leaders – will pick five finalists. Finalists will be invited for weeklong tryouts – three days of training with the Scansons and four days of running the cafe themselves, from ordering to cooking to paying bills and processing payroll.

Around the Corner’s customers will help pick a winner.

A Portland production company will tape a television pilot that it hopes to sell to the likes of Food Network. Commercials promoting the contest are set to run on Comcast cable in Washington. The Scansons said they hope the commercials will run in Oregon, Idaho and Northern California.

Kim said successful applicants will answer these questions correctly:

• What skills do you have to be a successful restaurant owner?

• How are you going to ensure that the restaurant is a good place to eat and work?

• How are you going to give back to the community?

• Why do you want this opportunity?

“It’s really hard work,” said Kim, who works full-time as a social worker for Orting’s Communities and Schools, an after-school program for kids, while her husband works at the cafe “from open to close.” “It’s a good hard, but it’s hard.”

The new owners have will have some shoes to fill. Around the Corner Café won the Better Business Bureau’s 2007 Small Business of the Year award in Western Washington. Its customers are loyal in ways that transcend homemade pies and rib-sticking Hobo Hash.

“Small towns need good community places to meet,” said Dave Harman, the Chamber of Commerce president whose family has lived in Orting for 130 years. Around the Corner, he said, “is the good old hometown cafe where everybody knows your name.”

Even so, Kim, said outsiders are welcome to enter the contest. “Our hope is that if somebody from the outside does really well, then they’ll get to decide if they want to step inside this community,” she said.

She said she got the contest idea while watching Oprah Winfrey’s “Big Give” program, in which the TV host gives away $1 million. “We’re small-business owners,” she said. “Oprah has tons of money. Obviously, we don’t. But we have this, which is a huge gift.”

Whoever wins Around the Corner Café will receive their gift on Thanksgiving Day.

Ed Murrieta: 253-597-8678

blogs.thenewstribune.com/edsdiner


Around the Corner Café

301 Harman Way S., Orting; 360-893-1934; www.aroundthecornercafe.com/


To submit an entry for Around the Corner’s Café’s restaurant giveaway contest, visit www.onespecialcontest.com.

Reprinted from The Tacoma News Tribune: www.thenewstribune.com/soundlife/story/389531.html