For our regular Capital Region Q&A feature, we ask local people questions about themselves, their jobs and the place we call home. Today's subjects are Vic Christopher, 42, and Heather LaVine, 39, of Troy, who met while working for the Tri-City ValleyCats baseball team, based at the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy. This week they are celebrating five years since the opening of their first joint venture, the Charles F. Lucas Confectionery. The wine bar became the basis for their Clark House Hospitality, a company that today also includes the café Little Pecks, funky fine dining at Peck's Arcade, the retail shop Twenty-Two 2nd Street Wine Co. and a dive bar called The Bradley, all in downtown Troy. Answers have been minimally edited for space and clarity.

Q: It's been five years since you poured the first glass at Lucas. When you were building it, did you talk about a sense of longevity?

Vic: Yes. The confectionery was around as a candy shop from 1863 to 1951. That's 88 years, and I had this vision that would motivate me on a daily basis that the confectionery would reopen in 2012, and then there'd be a period of time after which everybody would have forgotten that it was closed for those 61 years. We'd create something that would feel like it had been here since the day it opened in 1863.

Heather: I would never answer that question the way he just did. To me, with the original vision, it wasn't even clear to me that this would be a full-time job for either one of us, let alone be a full-time job for both and to have close to 50 people on our team. You could have asked me this question 10 different ways, and I never could have predicted what it would become.

Vic: I want to retract my initial statement. I didn't start thinking that way until after we'd opened. Once we opened, I had that thought, about being connected to the history.

Q: You both had been in customer service, in the entertainment business of sorts, in sports, but neither of you had been in restaurants.

Vic: It's the same job.

Heather: It's taking care of people. First and foremost, that's what we look at in terms of what we do. You welcome thousands of people into a baseball stadium on a given night, and you welcome guests into a restaurant. Your job in both is to make them feel good and not think about anything else going on in their lives. It's almost like a vacation while they're with you.

Q: What didn't you understand about hospitality before you served your first glass of wine?

Heather: Everything. The longer you do it, the more you realize how much you don't know.

Vic: We didn't really think about the job part of it. We wanted to do something cool in the city, but I don't think either of us realized how well suited we were for hospitality and how much we love it.

Heather: We both fell in love with it more than we could ever have realized we would.

Q: You had been married a couple of years when you opened the wine bar. What did opening the first business, then several more quickly over a few years, do to the personal relationship?

Vic: We created this thing, and it really became an all-encompassing focus.

Heather: We both have obsessive personalities about our work. The reason we connected to begin with was because we both wanted to be really, really, really good at our jobs. We ended up together because we were the first people in the office every day with the ValleyCats, and we were the last people to leave. And we respected that about each other.

Vic: We became best friends. We were hanging out every day. Although we're not married anymore, we still do that.

Q: Just as a point of fact, are you still married?

Vic: I refer to Heather as my ex-wife.

Heather: On paper we're still married. But we're separated.

Q: How long has that been?

Vic: A year and a half.

Heather: Not quite. Close to it.

Vic: I moved out a year and a half ago.

Heather: Because I told him to. Just for the record.

Vic: Yes, that's important. People think that I pushed for it. That's definitely not it.

Q: If things were strained on a personal level, did opening multiple businesses in rapid succession, which causes all sorts of its own kind of stress, make things worse as husband and wife?

Vic: Or did we work that hard and do so many things because we didn't want to face the fact that we didn't want to be married anymore?

Heather: It's a chicken-and-egg thing. It's so tough to say. What I'm certain of is that we both, at some point along the way, decided the priority was the business. For me, having the business together made the decision to separate a lot more challenging but at the same time a lot easier. The challenging piece was we had to talk to our team. We had to let people know we were splitting up but things were going to be OK.

Vic: They were skeptical.

Q: Did you believe that things would be OK?

Vic: Absolutely — 100 percent.

Heather: Yes.

Q: You believed it from the second Heather said, "Give me the keys and get out, you rat bastard," or whatever she said?

Heather: (Laughs.) There are moments when you get nervous. That's human nature. But, at the core, I truly believed that things were going to be good. The challenging part was conveying this to everyone who needed to know. The part that made it better was I knew he was still going to be a part of my life, that we were still going to get to work together every day.

Vic: Totally.

Q: Many couples have break-ups so acrimonious that they don't even want to see each other's faces.

Heather: That was the weird thing. We didn't have that.

Vic: None of it. Not at all. I love this company more than anything, and I know that there's not anybody better on the planet for the job than Heather. And she doesn't want any part of what I do.

Q: Let's lay that out: What exactly do each of you do? You've got a wine bar, a café, a fine-dining restaurant, a dive bar and a wine shop.

Heather: I run the wine program for everything; daily operations — the managers report to me, and all the people down the line; and the daily cash flow, the financial aspects. Wine, people, finance, and I manage the confectionery.

Vic: For me it's construction and maintenance of the real estate, public relations and media, and legal stuff — the city and government and permits and all that, and I manage The Bradley.

Q: Vic is voluble, prone to explosions in the press and on social media.

Heather: I'll say.

Vic: I definitely am.

Q: His passions and intensities and flying off the handle: Are they easier to tolerate now that you're going home to separate places?

Heather: Oh, my gosh — 1,000 times easier. It used to stress me out so much, and now the things that would bother me, don't bother me at all. I'm able to separate them.

Q: You're able to see it as not reflecting on you?

Heather: I have my own thoughts and opinions, and I know people get much less likely every day to look at us as a unit. That said, Vic's voice is still so loud that I choose to just not say anything, because I think, for the business, that oftentimes makes the most sense. We both don't need to be loud.

Pop quiz: Vic, you always say you're up on stuff related to city government.

Vic: I am.

Q: According to the proposed 2018 Troy city budget, how much debt outstanding debt is there?

Vic: Well, they just took out more —

Q: It's a simple question: In the proposed city budget, on the first main page, it says "Summary of city debt." Within a million dollars, what is that number?

Vic: I haven't looked it, but I know they're carrying old debt, they just added another $7 million, so I'd say, $40 million, maybe $45 million.

Q: Close. It's $50 million.

Pop quiz: Heather, the wine shop has a section dedicated to women winemakers. What percentage of California's 3,500 wineries have a woman as the chief winemaker?

Heather: Eight percent?

Q: It's 10 percent.

Heather: I was going to say 10! I really was!

Q: Your businesses are all so close together. Three are physically connected, one is down the block, the other a five-minute walk away, and you live right here too. What do you do to get away?

Heather: I run, and I work out. I start my day by 5 or 6 a.m., which is crazy for the hospitality business

Vic: I start at 10 a.m.

Heather: That was one of those little issues that became a big issue in our relationship.

Vic: Daytime and nighttime people.

Heather: So true.

Vic: I manage Paulie Gee's, a wood-fired pizza place in Brooklyn, on Sundays. Heather and I are investors, and it gives me a break from Troy, and I love the staff down there, and it's enabling me to look at things down there and see how we can apply them here.

Q: You two are conventionally credited in the press, sometimes by people including me, with jump-starting the recent Troy restaurant renaissance. Not being falsely modest, do you accept that as legitimate praise?

Vic: Yes, we have to. But knowing that inspires us.

Heather: I agree, and we also recognize there were many people before us — Michael Cocca, of Franklin Plaza, was a major catalyst. But even knowing what Vic and I have done in the last five years, there is not one morning that I wake up and feel great at what I do. I always know that we can be better, whether it's in the way that we take care of our team, the way that we handle our cash flow, how we make decisions every day — everything.

Q: A restaurant return of 5 percent annual profit is considered good. Are you in that range — say, 4 to 8 percent?

Heather: Overall, yes.

Vic: The businesses balance each other out. I love that we have a diverse group of customers from all walks of life in Troy.

Pop quiz: Vic, you are a huge Mets fan. Of the last 10 years, what season had the highest annual attendance for the Mets?

Vic: I'd say 2009 or two years ago.

Q: No. In 2008, annual attendance was about 4 million, the highest recently.

Heather: That makes more sense. They'd want to go during the last year at Shea Stadium.

Vic: It was a bigger ballpark! Of course attendance was bigger at Shea! They went from a 66,000-capacity ballpark down to a 47,000-capacity stadium. That's a genius question. Obviously if we'd had a chance to debate it a little, we'd have gotten it right.

Pop quiz: Heather, you adore spicy food. The record for the hottest chile pepper today is the Carolina Reaper, which measures 2.2 million on the Scoville scale. How does that compare to police-issue pepper spray on the Scoville scale?

Vic: It's got to be about the same.

Q: Shhh. This is her pop quiz, not yours.

Vic: She helped with mine.

Q: Shhh.

Vic: I'm kicking myself about the Mets question.

Heather: Back to him!

Q: It's 5.3 million for pepper spray vs. 2.2 million for the Carolina Reaper. Pure capsaicin is 15 million, and sweet bell peppers are zero, but they taste like burps.

Heather: They're pretty awful.

Q: Your attempt at an Italian restaurant, Donna's, failed after just six months. You'd been charging along for five years, and that flopped. Did it give you pause about future projects?

Vic: Yes.

Heather: Absolutely.

Vic: That was a reality check. People talk about the difficulties of the restaurant business. We definitely learned them with Donna's. I realized I'd never fully understand before when everyone said how difficult it was to run a restaurant. That was a humbling, humbling moment.

Q: What's next that you're ready to talk about?

Vic: We're actively working on opening the final storefront on Broadway, at 207, which used to be Broadway News. We're going rebuild the storefront, and we're unveiling a grand staircase, a beautiful steel structure that we've been building over the course of two years. That's the lobby of the Clark House Hotel, the original use of the building, and that's what it's going to be again.

Heather: That's not finalized. It's finalized in Vic's mind. We haven't agreed on anything yet.

Vic: We talking about doing a lobby bar.

Heather: That's what he's pushing for.

Vic: Heather keeps pushing for it.

Heather: No.

Vic: She does.

Heather: I want the space completed. I don't want to look at the empty space anymore, but that's it. We haven't decided on anything beyond that.

Q: Are these disputes easier now than two years ago?

Heather: For me —

Vic: They were never difficult.

Heather: Way easier.

Vic: They were never difficult.

Heather: The way that I feel having these conversations now is so much better.

Vic: That's the way you feel.

Heather: Exactly.

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