Behind the Business is a new series from the Insider. Real stories from the people who signed the lease, took the loan, and found out what it actually costs to open the doors you asked for. First up: Smash House.
The moment Smash House became more than a burger idea was not when Jon Kerley and Dave Helm served their first customer. It came later, when they sat down to sign the loan documents for their own restaurant and realized exactly what “all in” actually meant.
There is something sobering about signing your name on paperwork that turns an idea into a serious personal commitment.
Long before they reached this point, Smash House was a Blackstone in a backyard.
Jon had spent time in California, where he became interested in the smash-burger culture spreading across the state. He returned to St. Mary's County, took an IT job that wasn’t scratching the itch, and carried the idea around without doing much about it.
Restaurants were already part of the family story. His grandfather had owned a doughnut and ice cream shop, and Jon once came close to opening one of his own. Before COVID, he looked seriously at a lease, then backed away. He had the idea, but not yet the confidence or equipment to make it real.
The burger plan started looking like a business when Jon teamed up with Dave, an old friend who had managed Cheeseburger in Paradise (throwback for those who have been here for a while). The two later bartended together, getting off work late enough to notice that the county offered few choices beyond a drive-thru to satisfy that late night hunger grumble.
They started cooking at home. Then came one Blackstone, followed by a second, and pop-ups behind Brudergarten Beer Garden. The burgers were not perfect. They were still learning how to get the hard sear that makes a smash burger more than a thin patty, and Dave was still working out the sauce that would become Smash Sauce.
They were learning in public, which turns out to be a recurring part of the Smash House story.
Jon and Dave knew how to make burgers. They did not know how to open a restaurant in St. Mary’s County. They had managed Morris Point together, where they learned the less romantic parts of the business: licenses, inspections, vendors, staffing, and who to call in a pinch.
Their first attempt at a more permanent location fell through the day before opening. The equipment was in. The burgers were ready. Suddenly, they were back at the beginning.
So they started looking for another way in. The more Jon described the process, the less it sounded like following a checklist. It sounded like discovering the checklist one missing page at a time.
The owner of Shepherd's Old Field Market offered them another way in. A food stall had opened up. It would need work, and taking it meant signing a three-year lease. For two guys running pop-ups from backyard griddles, that was the first real bet.
They signed.
The market became their proving ground. It gave them a place to build a following, learn how much food to order, and find out whether the county actually wanted what they were making.
Three years later, they made the larger bet: a full restaurant in downtown Leonardtown.
The new location had been a flower shop in its previous life. Turning it into a restaurant meant more risk, more employees, a liquor license, and a construction process they had never managed. Plans changed constantly. Things cost more than expected. Problems appeared in the order least convenient for solving them.
The small business loan documents were the detail I kept returning to after our conversation. People talk about small-business owners “taking a risk” so casually that the phrase barely means anything. On paper, the risk stopped being an idea. It became a number, a signature, and the understanding that the commitment was now theirs.
Money alone does not explain how Jon and Dave finally opened Smash House. People do.
Friends and family sacrificed weekends. Landlords made room for an unproven idea. Other restaurant owners answered calls, shared contacts, and explained steps Jon did not know existed. Inspectors became people to work with, not obstacles to fight.
What struck me was how much of the local small-business network lives outside the official system. It is carried in phone contacts, remembered mistakes, and the willingness of one owner to tell another which form comes first in a long administrative process.
There may be no blueprint. There is, however, a group text.
The one thing Jon and Dave refused to improvise was the beef.
Jon estimates that they visited around 30 farms across Maryland and beyond before choosing Sassafras Farms in Dunkirk. He learned about cattle genetics, aging, grass feeding, grain finishing, and the awkwardness of telling a farmer you need "a lot" of beef when you have no idea what a lot will mean once the doors open.
Sassafras raises Registered Black Angus cattle, dry-ages its beef, and worked with Smash House on a custom blend. Larger distributors have repeatedly offered cheaper ground beef, which would make the math easier, but Smash House has not switched.
Smash House treats the beef as nonnegotiable, but the menu has to change with the customers.
One of Jon's biggest lessons is simple: do not make a menu only for yourself, then take it personally when customers disagree. A restaurant is not a monument to the owner's taste. It has to work for the people walking through the door.
That lesson extends beyond food. Leonardtown's lunch crowd is not its dinner crowd. Families need different things than bar customers. A menu, a room, and even the price of a burger have to make sense to the people actually showing up, not the customers an owner imagined in a business plan.
This is the part of restaurant ownership customers rarely see. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when Smash House is closed, Jon and Dave are still working. There is payroll, scheduling, pricing, repairs, training, merchandise, and the next improvement to the building. Six months into the Leonardtown location, and they are still jumping into the kitchen to smash some burgers.
Customers see the burger, but running the business means managing everything surrounding it.
Jon and Dave are trying to make that surrounding space feel welcoming to families. They want parents to be able to bring children without spending the meal bracing for judgment. There is usually a kids’ movie playing. If a toddler has a loud night, nobody acts like the family has committed a crime.
I related to that immediately. When my own kids were babies, there were stretches when going out hardly felt worth the stress. One scream could make you feel like the entire restaurant wanted you gone.
Jon and Dave built Smash House with those families in mind. They also hire teenagers working their first jobs. Jon encourages young employees to solve small customer problems without waiting for a manager. The question is not always, “Who do I ask?” Sometimes it is, “What would I do if this were my business?
That is a surprisingly large question to hand a 16-year-old, and a good description of how Jon and Dave learned.
Jon's advice to anyone thinking about opening a business here is to accept that there is no blueprint. Take the free advice. Filter it, because not all of it will fit. Ask for help. Stay humble. Be decent to the people whose work intersects with yours.
And if you are serious about starting something in St. Mary's County, he says to come talk to him. Other owners shared what they knew when Smash House needed it. He intends to do the same for whoever tries next.
When I wrote about the people betting on St. Mary's County, this was the part I wanted to understand.
We usually meet a business after the sign is mounted, the room is finished, and the opening announcement reaches Facebook. We see the thing that worked. We rarely see how many versions of it did not.
Smash House started with two friends, a Blackstone, and a burger that still needed work. It grew because they were willing to risk more, listen when the plan failed, and ask other people how to try again.
There was no map for any of it, but they opened anyway.
St. Mary’s County needs more entrepreneurs to take the plunge and create something new.
Who should we feature next? Shoot me an email at [email protected].
See you out there, St. Mary's.
