Elm Street eatery offers Swedish, red sauce, ‘Thanksgiving’ and other variations
By John Fladd
Even after 28 years in the business Kevin Cornish finds himself relearning a basic lesson of restaurant ownership: it doesn’t matter how delicious a dish is if none of your customers order it.
“We had a vegetarian meatball,” he said. “After cooking them seven days in a row without one person ordering them, we had to get rid of it.”
Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs, on Manchester’s Elm Street, is Cornish’s new restaurant, themed around — perhaps not surprisingly — 1980s rock music and meatballs. After three decades of running his successful barbecue restaurant, KC’s Rib Shack, Cornish has decided to open a second place to indulge one of his other great passions, live music.
“I love live music,” Cornish said. ”It’s probably my biggest hobby. This place [the restaurant’s location] has been opened twice with different people running it and pretty much closed twice. Manchester hasn’t always supported live music all that much. Especially in something this size, you need a scene to create a scene. There’s got to be little, ragged rock clubs for big rock clubs to succeed. My band used to play at Mad Bob’s and if we brought 25 people it was great. It was a little hole in the wall and a little bar, but in New Hampshire you can’t have a bar — you have to have a restaurant.”
Cornish had seen a few meatball-specific restaurants on the West Coast and liked the idea. He and three partners decided to adopt that formula for their menu. Despite his number of years as a restaurant owner, though, Cornish found that developing recipes for the new place required a long process of trial and error.
“When it came to the meatballs,” he said, “for one day or several days, we’d just work on beef meatballs, or beef and pork meatballs, or chicken meatballs. For months leading up to this, my wife was so sick of eating chicken meatballs — she was like, ‘What do we have for dinner tonight?’ Meatballs, you know?”
Ultimately, developing the recipe turned out to be a group project.
“We would come in and we lined this whole bar up with all the ingredients we would need. Each of us would take a table, and a bowl, and work up a recipe. It was nice to get in here and cook seven different types of meatballs in an afternoon, and being able to try them right next to each other. By coming in here and having everybody make a different one … we were able to zero in on, ‘Wow, we really like the flavor of this, but maybe, but we like the mouth-feel of this one, maybe that’s because this one was made with bread as opposed to this one made with panko breadcrumbs,’ and things like that. So we were able to kind of tweak and zero in on it and that’s what we did.”
Even after the kinks in a recipe have been ironed out, there’s still no guarantee that it will work on the restaurant’s menu. Which brings us back to the vegetarian meatball.
Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs’ menu is centered around five core meatballs: a standard red-sauce one, a Swedish meatball in a creamy sauce, a brisket-macaroni and cheese one, a “Thanksgiving” meatball made with ground turkey and stuffing, and a chicken Parmesan one.
One of the biggest surprises, though, was an appetizer that sold well from opening day onward. “The escargot is great,” Cornish said, a bit perplexed. *It’s a very simple dish, and it’s selling great.”
Rock n Roll Meatballs
179 Elm St., Manchester, 931-3654, rocknrollmeatballs.com
Open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday 4:30 to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 10 p.m., and Sunday noon to 9 p.m. There will be live music twice monthly. Visit facebook.com/RnRMeatballs for notice of upcoming events.
Featured photo: Swedish Meatballs. Courtesy photo.