For Alfred Rubin, life is a party. Actually, it`s one party right after another.
In the past year, he has fed more than a half-million people at 6,000 events ranging from intimate dinners for a few to lavish week-long affairs for thousands. And 1989 is projected to close out a banner year for his business; enriching Rubin company coffers by about $7 million.
Party time is show time, Rubin says, and as chairman of the board of Naperville-based Culinary Enterprises, he`s the ex officio master of ceremonies for each and every production.
”Our dinners are theatrical productions, only we don`t get a dress rehearsal,” he explained. Under Rubin`s direction, an event is staged from music to menu. Food, he said, isn`t something that`s simply prepared and dished out; it`s an artistic medium. The Culinary cooks are artists, ”food stylists,” Rubin insists, and their edible sculptures must debut in a setting befitting such status.
Margaret Link, owner of Camelot Caterers, Naperville, has been a Rubin competitor for more than six years. ”He`s the biggest guy in the
marketplace,” Link said. ”Al is well known in the community, and he`s a very respectable businessman. When I came to town, it was a tough road for me. I felt like a salmon swimming upstream. I was the new kid on the block.” But luckily, she said, Rubin turned out to be the kind of guy, who, on occasion, would give a newcomer a break: ”Several times when he`s been overbooked, he`s sent me referrals.”
After more than three decades of catering to the rich and famous, and the middle class and ordinary, and just about everyone else, Rubin, at 68, is a self-made millionaire. The Rubin guest-of-honor list reads like a global Who`s Who: Pope John Paul II, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, talk show host Oprah Winfrey, then Vice President George Bush, the Rev. Billy Graham, actress Gloria Swanson, dancer Rudolf Nureyev, Gov. James Thompson and a succession of Chicago mayors from Daley, the elder, to Bilandic, Byrne and Washington.
Not bad, Rubin allowed, for a kid born Dec. 10, 1920, in the second floor four-bedroom flat above his father`s shoe and dry goods store at 222 South Main Street in then hamlet-sized Naperville.
Not bad for a kid who raised chickens in the alley, played in the streets and grew up to became an influential local politician, winning school board, city council and park district elections, today serving as the president of the park board and chairman of the United Way (Naperville chapter) 1988-1989 fund-raising campaign.
Not bad for a kid who went off to World War II and came back a hero, earning three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, an Oak Leaf Cluster and a mention in Cornelius Ryan`s book ”The Longest Day” about the invasion of Normandy.
Not bad at all for a kid who would do almost anything to make good.
”It was very important to my father and mother that we got proper and deserved recognition in the community,” Rubin related. The operative word was deserved, he stressed. Rubin was weaned on the work ethic. In a community where anti-Semitism was not unknown, said Rubin`s oldest sister Lucille Gutman, the Rubins, who were Jews, were taught to give discrimination no quarter. Achievement and self-worth were measured by how well a job was done. Al Rubin`s father, Sam Rubin, kept his store open seven days a week, and if it was closed when a customer came to the door, ”it was immediately open for business then, too,” Rubin said. By the age of seven, Al was waiting on customers. Farmers with eggs to sell would dicker with him on a price, and purchase goods at the store with the proceeds. If a pair of new shoes were part of the bargain, Al would fit them.
”My father believed in working hard, and the job was not complete unless it was done 105 percent. My mother (Ann Rubin) struck a better balance; she encouraged me to have a little fun too.” But work was so much a part of his childhood that Rubin said he couldn`t help feeling ”a little resentful when my friends were out playing.”
The upside to Rubin`s upbringing is ownership of a successful business conglomerate. The downside, he said, is never learning how to relax, or, for that matter, operating at any speed short of all-you-got. It has taken a toll on his personal relationships and on his family. ”I`m too critical and impatient,” Rubin said. ”I have a short fuse when it comes to incompetence, maybe too much so . . . . It wasn`t just the business, I gave a lot of time to public service. I think I would have enjoyed spending more time with my family, and I would have liked to have had more kids.” Rubin and his wife Naomi have three children, Jenny 35, Steve, 33, and Lydia, 23.
Steve, who is the vice president of finance and administration at Culinary, said in many ways he is very much his father`s son, with a few important differences: ”I`m like my father in the sense that I care about doing a good job. The same intensity is there. But I think I can separate my personal life and hopefully put it on an even priority with my work. . . . My father put his business and his family, at times, second to his bigger family, his community, the city of Naperville.
”When I was young I was somewhat resentful. When he went to school board meetings, I felt other kids were reaping the benefits of his work, and, of course, so was I. But their fathers weren`t at meetings; they were with them at home. At the same time I was proud that my father had an impact on this city.” (Al Rubin said one of the promises he made to his son when Steve signed on at Culinary after a six-year stint in the Marine Corps was ”I wouldn`t give him a guilt trip when he took time off” to be with his family.) Culinary Enterprises is the corporate umbrella for six food-service divisions employing more than 500 workers, 105 of them full-time. Colonial Caterers is Rubin`s flagship business, which he started in 1952 in the basement of his home with, he said, a little luck, lots of work and a few farmer`s wives who were good cooks. Continental Kosher Caterers, which specializes in kosher foods, was a Colonial offshoot. Two well-known Chicago catering businesses, Gapers and The Mixing Bowl, were acquired in late 1985 and early 1986, tripling his sales by the end of the year. ”If you can`t beat `em, buy `em,” Rubin quipped.
Rubin`s Delicatessen in Oak Brook opened four years ago as the business diversified into other food markets. Colonial Food Service, which was launched to serve business and industry clients on their premises, contracts with the Aurora Civic Center Authority to provide banquet and daily luncheon service at North Island Center, Aurora.
Rubin`s father, Sam, was his role model, but Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald`s restaurant chain, was his mentor. ”He was almost a father-figure to me. I admired him. He was a man who came from nothing, and at the age of 52, he started a business that ended up becoming the biggest food business in the world. Ray Kroc didn`t hesitate to take corrective action if it was needed. He`d give somebody a boot in the tail if they had it coming.”
Rubin catered Kroc`s corporate meetings and later acted as special consultant to Kroc at McDonald`s international conventions, which included jaunts in Bermuda, Hawaii, Canada, Japan and England. Rubin said his job, working with the hotel staff to make sure things were done right, earned him little good will among food-service workers: ”I got to be known among the hotel people as Kroc`s `insultant` because I was so tough on the staff.”
Rubin`s dedication to his work almost killed him. In 1980, he suffered a heart attack at a McDonald`s corporate convention in Chicago. His symptoms were misdiagnosed for two days as indigestion, so he stayed on the job. He later underwent cardiac surgery, which slowed him down for a while. His only concession today to the illness, Rubin said, ”is swallowing one aspirin tablet daily.”
Kroc tried to interest Rubin in coming to work for him at McDonald`s, but Rubin turned him down. He needed to be independent. Kroc, cut from the same cloth, said he understood, Rubin related, noting proudly that his inscribed copy of Kroc`s best-selling book ”Grinding It Out” reads, ”To Al Rubin, a creative genius.”
Rubin`s kitchen expertise started at the elbow of his mother, Ann. His tutelage came in handy when he got a job as a cook`s helper at a sorority house at the University of Illinois where he was a pre-med student. World War II derailed medical school plans.
After the war, Rubin went to California with hopes of breaking into the textile business. He changed his mind and came home to Naperville. In 1946, he opened his first business, a restaurant called the Rafter House, with his sister Gish Levy, who now lives in California, as does his younger brother Norman.
Levy recalled that their debut as restaurateurs was a calamity: ”The first Sunday we were open we had chicken soup on the menu. We were both pretty nervous. Somehow, when I was stirring the soup, my arm caught the cord of an old toaster (unplugged), which fell into the soup. We strained the soup through towels and then we boiled it. It was the only time anyone asked for our chicken soup recipe.”
Rafter House was sold in 1952 and today is the site of Washington Square Restaurant. Rubin also owned a second eatery, Colonial Restaurant, from 1949 to 1958. It`s now the site of Boulder Terrace Animal Hospital, 1586 West Ogden Ave.
Ward Stearns, president of Harris Bank of Naperville, is a Rafter House alumnus. As a young student at Naperville High School and later at North Central College, Stearns worked there, washing dishes, sweeping floors and waiting tables. Not coincidentally, Rubin became a member of the bank`s board of directors in 1973, three years after Stearns was named president. ”It was more than friendship; it had to be,” Stearns said of his recommendation to name Rubin to the board. ”It was his community leadership and his business experience.
”I consider Al one of my mentors. I remember him more as a leader than a manager. He always was a very hands-on boss. I think that`s why his employees respect him so much. He was that way in the old days at the Rafter House, and he still is. Even now, if the business has a big party booked, he`ll show up just to check, just to make sure that everything is exactly the way it should be.”
”Al isn`t afraid to do anything, whatever it takes to get the job done,” said Richard Ringelstein, president of Culinary, who has worked for Rubin for 16 years: ”I came to this company thinking I could teach him a thing or two. I`d worked for another caterer for 14 years. I was dearly surprised. Al taught me what catering really is. . . . I remember catering a dinner with Al for McDonald`s chief executives. At the end of the evening, we were both in tuxedos. Al was washing the dishes, and I was mopping the floor.”
