Aaron Lenz, a Perry native and 2001 PHS grad, started in Monday as the new general manager of the Hotel Pattee, working closely with the hotel’s new owner, Tom Maxwell, and outgoing owners, Jay and Denise Hartz, to keep the wheels of service turning smoothly through the transition in leadership.
“I would say I haven’t gone an hour in this building when somebody doesn’t recognize me and start up a conversation of some kind,” Lenz said Thursday, “maybe reminiscing about how they used to know me and what they heard I’ve done. It’s spectacular.”
Maxwell also could not be happier. Finding a top-drawer manager was lucky enough, but finding one with Perry roots was like a dream come true.
“This is great,” Maxwell said, looking over his open laptop. “Aaron’s perfect for the job.”
Lenz’s journey away from and now back to Perry took him first to Ames for a bachelor of science degree in hospitality management from Iowa State University. From there he moved to New York City for further study at the Culinary Institute of America, where he perfected his method.
“They teach you technical skills really well,” Lenz said, “and you get a lot of exposure to ingredients and various cuisines of the world. But I’m more into designing something well, like a system, and then put it in place and let the chefs of the world actually be the creative ones.”
Lenz took his skill set to some of the finest restaurants in New York City, Atlanta and Denver, with a few years spent in the higher realms of Breckenridge, Colo. In Atlanta he manged five restaurants in a quarter-mile stretch of the Atlanta Airport.
“That got me exposed to very high-volume, multi-unit restaurant management,” he said. “It was unique. We did a lot of covers. We’d serve 1,500 people a day out of one of my restaurants. It was busy, and that restaurant was no bigger than the restaurant here.”
It was in Denver that he met his wife, Amanda, also an Iowa native from Orange City. The couple soon had two young children, and they started thinking of home.
“We decided we couldn’t raise our kids on our own in the mountains of Colorado,” Lenz said, “and they needed to be around their family, so we came back.”
They moved to Des Moines last September, and Aaron was working for another company when Hotel Pattee opportunity presented itself.
“When Tom came to town and made the announcement that he was buying the place, he was talking to some of the people in the community,” he said, “and somebody mentioned to Tom that I was here. He was looking for somebody to run this place, so he called and said, ‘Hey, this is who I am. This is what I’m trying to do. Are you interested?’ So we sat down for lunch and talked for probably three hours. He told me what his vision is, and I loved it. He’s a fantastic guy, and I’ve always loved this hotel. It’s not an opportunity that falls in your lap everyday.”
The game plan for the Hotel Pattee boils down to taking a winning business strategy and making it better, a goal both Maxwell and Lenz share.
“I want to maintain the integrity of the hotel as it is,” Maxwell said last month at a community meet-and-greet event. “I want to grow it, if I can, but I want it to be what it is for the town of Perry and for the community. I don’t want to change that. I want to build on that.”
Lenz is on the same page, and he looks to combine Roberta Green Ahmanson’s original vision for the hotel with the financial sustainability brought by the Hartzes.
“We’re pretty much just taking what the Hartzes have worked so hard to create here and just tweaking it and making it better,” Lenz said. “I bring a skill set — they’ve said this too — a skill set to this now that they’ve never had, so I’m just building upon their successes now.”
Preserving the heartbeat of Perry is the point of their efforts.
“Something had to change between the Ahmanson vision of what this hotel was because it never made any money until the Hartzes came,” he said. “They turned a corner that has never been accomplished before and however they got there, it worked. That’s why we’re sitting here now, and it’s not going into the hands of some bank somewhere. That’s all we can do is hope that we can build upon that and continue to grow this in a very business-savvy way that keeps it in operation forever. This hotel is the heartbeat of this town. It can’t go away.”
Lenz couldn’t go away for long either. The journey that started in high school with a cooking job at Breadeaux Pizza in downtown Perry, where El Buen Gusto now operates, and led out into the wider world has brought him home older and wiser.
“It’s come full circle somehow,” he said.
