Parachute restaurant owners/chefs Beverly Kim, her husband John Clark (sitting on counter) and their staff raise a toast to their first night of business. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

Parachute restaurant owners/chefs Beverly Kim, her husband John Clark (sitting on counter) and their staff raise a toast to their first night of business.

Neophyte restaurateurs Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark ran through calculations on their Excel spreadsheet, something they've done plenty in the last year. They knew early on that the margin of error at their new Avondale restaurant, Parachute, was thin. “If we averaged 25 customers a day, five days a week, that wouldn't be good for us. That's just skating by, and we'd have to get rid of everybody,” said the 34-year-old Kim. “Ultimately, because we have our names on the line, if it comes down to only me and Johnny cooking back there, we would do that.” It was the prospect of husband and wife working together in the kitchen, doing what they loved and knew best, that brought them to their “jump off the cliff” moment. It happened on Nov. 1, Day One of their 3-year lease at 3500 N. Elston Ave., the day the romanticism of boundless possibility turned hard and real. They entered an unfamiliar world of decimal points, percentages, contractors, government licenses and seemingly endless paperwork. For Kim and Clark, who have a 4-year-old son, Daewon, their reputation, financial livelihood and ownership of their dream restaurant comes intertwined as a package deal: They have no plan B and are entering a restaurant business where, historically, success is as likely as betting against Vegas house odds. Then there's the mistaken belief among diners that ambitious restaurateurs serving $20-a-plate entrees are printing cash. At Parachute, Kim and Clark will each put in 80 hour-plus workweeks and expect to take in a combined salary of $35,000 this year. Several chef colleagues suggested they not take a salary at all their first year to help the restaurant's bottom line, but raising a 4-year-old renders that argument moot. “Look, we're one of the lucky ones. So many people are dying to open their own restaurant. I couldn't be more grateful,” said Clark, 33. “But as much as I love cooking, it takes a toll over the years when you realize you can't get anywhere with what you love to do. Sometimes the baby sitter makes more than me.” Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune Owners of Parachute restaurant, John Clark, and Beverly Kim and their son Daewon Clark, 4, wait for city inspectors to come and check at their new restaurant, at N. Elston Ave., while a man works on the front entrance. Owners of Parachute restaurant, John Clark, and Beverly Kim and their son Daewon Clark, 4, wait for city inspectors to come and check at their new restaurant, at N. Elston Ave., while a man works on the front entrance. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune) The silver lining, if you want to call it that: Living below the federal poverty line qualified their son for free Head Start preschool.

When Kim was the executive chef at Aria, inside The Fairmont Chicago hotel, she was making $70,000 a year, great money for a cook. The downside: The job often required 90-hour workweeks, which meant her husband was Daewon's primary caretaker. Being a stay-at-home dad became Clark's full-time job, even more so during the two months Kim was away to film Bravo's “Top Chef” in 2011. (Kim wasn't paid for the show.) Clark earned his degree at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., the country's most prestigious cooking school. As much as he loved raising his toddler, Clark yearned to put his training to professional use. The opportunity came for Kim and Clark to become co-executive chefs at Logan Square's Bonsoiree in 2012, which back then had just earned one-star status in the Michelin Chicago guidebook. Here was the chance for Clark and Kim to work side by side while evening out parental duties. Even with Kim's decreased salary, their combined wage at Bonsoiree would still be higher than her Aria tenure solo — $85,000 between the two. Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune Daewon, 4, takes a treat from his dad, Parachute restaurant owner/chef John Clark, towards the end of Parachute's opening night. Daewon, 4, takes a treat from his dad, Parachute restaurant owner/chef John Clark, towards the end of Parachute's opening night. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune) But after three months, Clark and Kim pulled out of Bonsoiree. Not enough customers walked through the doors to sample their upscale interpretation of Korean cuisine. They left on their own accord, they said, and Bonsoiree was converted into an Alpine dining concept. Suddenly, Clark and Kim were without full-time jobs, picking up freelance dinner gigs and one-off cooking classes where they could. Clark found an hourly position at Prairie Grass Cafe that paid $12 an hour. Kim taught advance-level cooking at her alma mater, Kendall College, a class that simulates running a fine-dining restaurant. What was supposed to be one school quarter at the start of 2013 lasted through much of the year. Still, they lived paycheck to paycheck. Kim was expecting to teach the summer quarter at Kendall, but the class was canceled because not enough students enrolled. They had to withdraw Daewon from preschool for a few months until they could afford the tuition in the fall. “Nothing ever seemed to keep going and connect,” Kim said over lunch recently in a Peruvian restaurant not far from Parachute. “Even though it's hard, you follow what you love to do. My dad keeps telling me, ‘A drip of water doesn't seem like much, but if it keeps dripping it could cut through stone.' Sometimes it takes a few steps backwards to go forward.” The thing to know about Clark and Kim's situation is they are not the anomaly. Granted, established head chefs at large-scale operations can earn north of six figures. (TDn2K, a Dallas research firm that tracks 30,000 restaurants nationwide, said the average executive chef of an upscale Chicago restaurant earns $70,500 annually.) But even at luxury establishments like Alinea and Grace, starting cooks earn $8.25 an hour plus overtime. It's not uncommon for, say, four cooks to room in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood far from their job. The margins are even tighter for an upscale startup like Parachute. Clark, Kim and their son live in a $810-a-month apartment in Roscoe Village, where the walk-in closet was fitted with the couple's bed so Daewon could sleep in the master bedroom. I asked why is it chefs pursue this field when the money and hours are lousy. Kim: “We think about food all the time. I've invested my whole adult life into cooking, and I can't see myself doing anything else.” Clark: “I've thought about quitting a lot. Then I'll work construction for a month, and then I tell myself, ‘I don't care if I'm making double here, I want to go back to cooking.'” Once they decided to become owner-operators, then came the question of what kind of restaurant to pursue. If they spent $100,000, they could afford a takeout spot, no larger than perhaps 800 square feet, a space limiting their output to a small menu. The revenue generated from such a restaurant would require Clark or Kim to supplement with a second full-time job, and the point was to work together. But if they spent $250,000, they could finance a sit-down restaurant with a roughly 40-seat capacity. They opted for the latter, the higher-risk, higher-reward option.

“We thought about it a lot. Did we want to open a shack or our dream restaurant?” Clark said. “In our research, we found that around the country, the average is somewhere around $450,000 to open a restaurant. We're doing it at half that.” Kim's family loaned the couple $110,000, while a close friend gave them $6,000, no strings attached. Clark and Kim submitted Parachute's business plan to their bank, and in September they were approved for a $120,000 loan. Next was finding a space. This was the most difficult and time-consuming part of their process. For a full year they searched from Bridgeport to Rogers Park, but nothing clicked. The biggest problem was many spaces required too much renovation behind the walls — bringing plumbing and electrical systems up to code — and that quickly eats up construction costs. In September, they visited an available space at a Mexican bakery and taqueria in Avondale called Dos Sabores. The room was long and rectangular, 1,500 square feet, with a working kitchen that included a ventilation hood. The clincher was most of the internals were in place and functional, meaning the construction budget could be devoted to cosmetic work and decor, rather than tearing the place up and building from scratch. “That's probably our largest saving,” Clark said. They projected opening Parachute would require $255,934.57, of which $57,159 was budgeted for construction. But they expected that number to fluctuate. Hand-weaving the seats of their DIY stools brought that figure down $2,000. Hiring a second person to epoxy to floor after the original contractor did a subpar job cost them an extra $1,000. Finding a functioning kegerator on Craigslist: $1,000 savings. Making the required change to pass their health inspection (install hand sink, additional shelves) cost them $3,546 extra. Other do-it-yourself projects, such as building the banquette seating cushion out of furniture pads used by movers, simultaneously saved money and help achieve their aesthetic. The six months spent converting the space from a taqueria to a contemporary Korean-American restaurant was a seesaw of ledger balancing. A few things helped them prepare for the inevitable unexpected costs. They solicited the public via Kickstarter, promising incentives like buttons, signed menus and recipe booklets. They exceeded their $15,000 goal, with 123 backers raising $21,578. Even after Kickstarter and the credit card company take out a combined 8 to 10 percent in fees, Parachute had an extra $19,743 than originally projected. As they built out Parachute, Clark took an early morning prep cook job at Logan Square's Lula Cafe. He arrived for his shift at 4 a.m. and worked until 1 p.m., then spent 5 p.m. to midnight at Parachute. His knees swelled up from the workload, and he had to walk with a cane for two weeks. “I'm in that flight-or-fight mode, and I feel like I'm always fighting,” he said. “I can't say when I'm tired now. I just crash. Recently I woke up on the bathroom floor. I passed out. Just dropped.” Cooks who succeed, Clark said, work in one tempo, and it's 100 miles per hour. “I feel like we don't have a choice. This is what we have to do. How can I be a prep cook for the rest of my career? This was the risk we had to take in order to move forward.” Kim also saw her stresses manifest in physical ailments. “My chest feels like it's going to fall apart; it's this crushing feeling,” she said. “And I'm a pretty healthy person.” Their income level in 2014 qualifies them for Medicaid.

In early May, what worried Clark and Kim most was the waiting game. Parachute had passed all health inspections and was ready to open. They held their practice dinner for a small group of friends and family, cooking through their entire menu as their inner circle offered blunt critiques. What they needed was two sheets of paper: liquor licenses from the city and state. When they took out the $120,000 bank loan in September, they calculated that, assuming their restaurant opened on schedule in May, they had a financial cushion of three months. Even if no customers walked through the door after it opened, they could operate through August before burning through the $50,000 in reserve cash. In a sense, this scenario was already playing out. They were paying rent, utilities, garbage pickup, insurance and payroll for nine other full-time positions without having served a single diner. “Once money comes in, it slows down the trickle of money coming out,” Kim said. “It's all the money going out before any money comes in that scares us. The waiting is the part we can't control.” When I asked Bret Thorn, senior food editor at Nation's Restaurant News, he said, anecdotally, it typically takes new restaurants at least one year for their finances to go from red into the black. “The reason most restaurants fail is because they're undercapitalized,” Thorn said. “New restaurants don't realize how long it can take to turn a profit or just how narrow their margins would be.” Kim and Clark said they would prefer to have a six-month cushion, but given their bank loan, they had to make do with three. They concluded the two magic numbers they need to hit were $42 and 250: They need to average 250 covers each week (“cover” is restaurant lingo for customers). Each customer would have to spend an average of $42 on food and drinks (before tax and gratuity). Hitting those marks — $10,500 in net revenue each week — wouldn't be considered a wild success, but it would keep the restaurant steady and afloat. After taking away food and beverage costs, plus monthly pays like rent, utilities and insurance, what's left doesn't amount to much for the hired hands. The National Restaurant Association publishes an annual report tracking operational costs across the industry. Its most recent report showed that for businesses where the check average is $33 and over, a restaurant spends a median cost of $19,673 a year on payroll and benefits for every full-time employee. This is why tips are the lifeblood of a restaurant server. Matty Colston, who came from Telegraph as its bar manager, was present when Clark and Kim first met five years ago. In a sense, he's the third leg of Parachute's tripod. Colston will take a nominal hourly wage as beverage director, so most of his income will come via the benevolence of his customers. (The restaurant finally received its liquor licenses May 9.) Hours before the restaurant opened its doors for paying customers, we sat at Parachute's long, room-length concrete bar. I asked Colston what's the point in slaving away 14 hours a day for a pittance?