Tsatsu Gbedemah Is Building His Own Table

The subject line read "In need of a manager?", and with it, a 20-page PDF. Tsatsu Gbedemah had put together a full presentation of himself replete with background, philosophy, and a vision for the Mile-Ex bar-brewery WILLS, sent cold to founders Alex and Ethan Wills.

"I remember looking across the table from Alex and Ethan when I signed the contract," he says, "and I asked very clearly: how can this work?" They gave him two answers. Curiosity and beer.

Before Tsatsu rebuilt anything the more visible elements of the menu, staff, or beer-forward identity the bar now wears with swaggering confidence, he started with the backend, like the minutiae of a Google Drive. "If you can't do that," he says, "then you can't do the next thing."

Tsatsu describes himself as an artist at heart (his first ambition was to be a film director), but he came to understand early that restaurants and bars are businesses first. "A lot of restaurants are open because of artists," he says. "But the business of restaurants is a science. And sometimes when you have the artist trying to do the science, it doesn't always work out."

Shipshape

Navigating that pitfall, what he's built at WILLS over the past year is the product of applying that logic to a space that had been running largely on feel. That's because WILLS had gone through several identities before Tsatsu arrived. The industrial address on Esplanade had previously housed Alexanderplatz, a bar that closed in winters—a pattern WILLS itself continued. The location hadn't previously been built for foot traffic, and it was more of a destination than a neighbourhood hangout proper. In the past, the bar had developed an extensive natural wine list, well-curated but misaligned with both the location and the central fact of the operation: WILLS makes its own beer.

Tsatsu cut the wine down significantly, keeping a focused selection rather than a comprehensive one, and pushed beer to the front of the menu. He also made a point of hiring staff who had genuine interest in beer — not as a credential requirement, but because it changes how people talk to customers.

Working alongside Alex and Ethan, he institutionalized weekly tastings with WILLS' head brewer, attended by Tsatsu, the owners, and the bar management team, with the expectation that information moves outward from there to the floor staff. "We make beer right next door," he says. "We want to sell it." Now with Tsatsu, for the first time in the bar's history, beer is now the top-selling category.

The other major operational call was keeping WILLS open through this past winter — the first time the bar had stayed open through the cold months. It was a harder decision than it might appear. Without reliable foot traffic and without the terrace that makes WILLS an easy sell in warm weather, winter is a test of whether people will actively choose to come. "Winters can be dark and stormy, but we just have to keep it open," he says. "Just letting people know we're here, we exist, and we're worth coming to."

The payoff of the compounding presence has been real: by spring, a single good Friday brought numbers comparable to a major ticketed beer event.

The staff situation at WILLS is where Tsatsu's management philosophy becomes most legible. His hiring process is deliberate to the point of being unusual. He put together a questionnaire for candidates that included questions like: if your friend is visiting from out of town, which restaurant do you take them to? What's your last meal? Are you a Hellman's or Miracle Whip person? "I wanted to see who, in an industry where we mostly talk to people, can I have a conversation with this person?" he says. "Beyond that, okay, these are the hops in the beer."

The logic traces back to Danny Meyer's Setting the Table, which Tsatsu read early in his career and describes as having changed his life. Meyer's framework—staff first, then customers, then suppliers, then management, then stakeholders—is essentially how Tsatsu orders his priorities at WILLS. "I try to slow down, take your time, one step at a time," he says. "Value the different stakeholders. Number one being the staff."