MY FIRST JOB IN the restaurant business began in the bitterly cold, snowy January of 1984, as daytime assistant manager at Pesca, a San Francisco-inspired–Italian seafood restaurant on East Twenty-second Street. Among my tasks were taking reservations, typing out the daily specials, running to the copy store to get them Xeroxed, and stuffing them in Lucite holders to be presented at each table. I would check in waiters, host lunch by greeting and seating mostly regular guests, and—when I was really lucky—get to sit in on menu-planning meetings or wine tastings in the kitchen.
The busy restaurant—which had a successful eight-year run—was good, and ahead of its time. It offered fresh, imaginative “Cal-Ital” seafood dishes; had a breezy style; and was in an emerging trendy neighborhood. I adored meeting many fascinating people from the worlds of advertising, publishing, and photography—the new denizens of a neighborhood that had just been named the “Flatiron district” by New York magazine. My paycheck—$250 a week, down a bit from the $125,000 a year I’d earned as a commissioned salesman—did take some adjusting to and
getting used to. But I had to pinch myself: at last I was in the restaurant business, and I was jazzed.
I was at Pesca for just eight months, but in that short time I worked alongside some extraordinary people who would change my life. On my very first day on the job I literally ran into the woman who would become my wife, four years later, and then the remarkable mother of our four children. I was pounding down the narrow staircase to the basement office to pick up Pesca’s ringing reservation line when I encountered a beautiful, perky waitress named Audrey Heffernan making her way up. For three seconds we looked intently into each other’s eyes, and then we moved along. Suddenly I felt very optimistic about my new vocation. I couldn’t wait for day two on the job.
The next day, however, she was gone. A regional theater and commercial actress who had performed leading roles in Babes in Toyland, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oklahoma!, Audrey was on the road, this time to play Sarah Brown in a production of Guys and Dolls in Indianapolis. She had been at Pesca for two years and was so beloved by the owner, Eugene Fracchia—who called her “Saint Audrey”—that there was always a place for her when she came back to New York. I happened to be manning the reservation lines one day when she called Eugene to tell him she’d soon be home and wondered when she could get back on the waiters’ schedule. I wasted no time delivering the message to the general manager, Douglas Scarborough, who found a way to put Audrey back on the schedule almost immediately. She and I flirted for months without acknowledging our feelings or making any kind of move. In late April, as a ruse to get Audrey to see my apartment, I sent out invitations to a dozen members of Pesca’s wait staff for my annual “Meyer at the Wire” Kentucky Derby party. I was utterly dismayed to learn that her brother was getting married on that very day.
I would have to wait a little longer to see her outside the restaurant.
Another person whom I met at Pesca and who had an enormous influence on me was the restaurant’s bar manager, Gordon Dudash. He possessed a soul of pure hospitality that was exquisite and innate; behind his elegant good looks and warm smile was a welcoming aura you could sense half a block away. When I opened Union Square Cafe, he was the man I hired to be my bar manager, and eventually he became our general manager. I was devastated when, in 1989, Gordon died of complications from AIDS. (AIDS eventually claimed the lives of several of my former colleagues at Pesca, including the restaurant’s owner, chef, general manager, and bar manager, and at least one of the waiters.) Gordon made a profound impact on my appreciation of the importance and power of genuine hospitality, and I have always been grateful that he lived just long enough to see Union Square Cafe earn its first three-star review in 1989.
I also met a young chef named Michael Romano. Michael had just returned from a six-year culinary stint in France and Switzerland and was learning Pesca’s system as co-chef because Eugene wanted him to become the chef at Lola, a new restaurant he soon would be opening a couple of blocks west on Twenty-second Street. Sensing a rare talent and knowing that Michael and I would not be together at Pesca very much longer, I vowed to learn every possible thing I could from him. His deft chef’s skills were apparent. I had never seen anyone handle a knife the way Michael did; every dish he cooked just seemed to look and taste better than anything else I had previously seen at Pesca.
I was determined to get into the kitchen. Though the managers weren’t ready to let me give up my lunch shift at
the front door, I finally persuaded them to let me put on kitchen whites and cook during the dinner shift. The cooks welcomed me with bemusement, and it was trial by unsavory work: I was responsible for such tasks as “cleaning” boxes upon boxes of live soft-shell crabs, a euphemism for snipping off their faces and removing their guts, during Pesca’s hugely popular annual soft-shell crab festival. I worked my way up to a more permanent position on the line, stirring seafood risotto and tossing seafood pastas. After just a few weeks my suggestions for daily specials were welcomed—even by the very serious Michael Romano—and I was at last allowed to cook the staff’s meal. One night a week I was taking a course at L’Académie du Vin, taught by Melissa and Patrick Serré and housed in the basement of Lavin’s restaurant, one of the early New York restaurants to feature a deep selection of California wines. Each week our curriculum focused on wines from a different part of the world. I couldn’t take in the information quickly enough, and I’d eagerly share my enthusiasm with colleagues at Pesca whenever I could get anyone to listen.
Soon I had demonstrated enough palate proficiency and taste memory that I was at last trusted to weigh in on the restaurant’s wine selections. As much as I wanted to talk to Michael about my love for food, he wanted to talk with me about wine. Michael told me he had accepted the interim position at Pesca with mixed feelings: what he really dreamed of was to parlay his years of training into becoming the executive chef at a classic French restaurant in midtown. We formed a friendship based on food, wine, and mutual respect.
While attending L’Académie du Vin I had become friendly with a lanky young journalist named Bryan Miller, who’d recently left his job at the Hartford Courant to write about food for the New York Times. Soon he was assigned to
launch a new Friday column called “Diner’s Journal.” His job was to uncover new restaurants, and he called on me frequently, both as a source for ideas and as a dining companion. (In those days before the Internet, it was part of a newspaper’s mission to be the very first to let the public in on new places. Today, we need only go to any one of several restaurant blogs to get even more up-to-the-minute information.)
Bryan once invited me to share a table at the opulent Russian Tea Room with the venerable food writers Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey. Among such icons, I alternated between being attentively humble and showing off. I have no idea if they thought I was interesting company or just a tagalong sycophant. But I was getting a priceless education by dining out with and hearing the thoughts of some of America’s most knowledgeable culinary giants. With Bryan I went to places as diverse as the intimate, chef-driven La Tulipe, the patron-driven ristorante Primavera, and the Chinese-style Pig Heaven. One night, following a horrible meal at a now defunct restaurant notable for its disastrous ser vice, we saved the evening by going to Le Cirque with Pierre Franey, just for dessert. Sirio Maccioni, the legendary restaurateur (and a front-of-the-house master), showered us with ten desserts and glasses of his favorite Sicilian dessert wine, Malvasia delle Lipari. I’m certain that I was all but invisible to Sirio, who was peerless at coddling his rich and powerful regulars. But I was there.
Despite the success of the Maccionis of the world, in 1984 embarking on a career as a restaurateur was still frowned upon, at least by families like mine. This was considered blue-collar work not befitting a liberal arts background. In those early days of “new American” cuisine, the one legitimate path to owning a restaurant was through the kitchen door, as a number of bold young chefs were
already demonstrating. Whenever I mentioned to people that I might become a restaurateur, they nodded politely and then winked, smiled, or gestured under the table. The common perception was that restaurants were a shady, cash-driven racket where money was always being passed illicitly and everybody kept two sets of books. This was not the career for which suburban parents sent their kids to college. (They were more than happy to dine at the establishment of a great chef. But allowing their own children to pursue such a career was another story.)
Yet during the early 1980s many American culinary stars were being recognized and celebrated. I began to follow the careers of Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, Paul Prudhomme, Jeremiah Tower, Joyce Goldstein, Mark Miller, Bradley Ogden, Michael McCarty, Larry Forgione, Jonathan Waxman, Anne Rosenzweig, and Barry Wine. These people were generating change and excitement, and they often had impressive university degrees. Tower founded Stars in San Francisco after earning a degree in architecture from Harvard and working at Chez Panisse. Mark Miller had studied anthropology and Chinese art at the University of California– Berkeley. Joyce Goldstein had graduated magna cum laude from Smith College and had earned an MFA from Yale. The new celebrity status of chefs, enhanced by their appearances on morning television shows that had features on cooking, was turning a few talented, charismatic chefs into household names, long before the advent of the Food Network.
So after eight months of building my own constituency of lunch regulars at Pesca in the new Flatiron district, I decided it was time to walk through the kitchen door and see where it might lead me. I made arrangements through a variety of resources, including my Roman family at La Taverna da Giovanni; my cooking teacher in New York, Andrée
Abramoff; and my father, to study cooking in Italy and France for the next three and half months.
These plans at last nudged Audrey and me into action. When she heard I was leaving Pesca, she blurted, “What?” Though we hadn’t had even one date at this point, we had been involved in a quiet but determined courting dance. We were the only people to whom we had not acknowledged our mutual attraction. “I think we need to go out to dinner before I leave,” I said. On the eve of my last day at Pesca, we went out, putting together a jam-packed all-night date that was a harbinger of our eventual style as a married couple—never enough hours for all we want to accomplish. We started with drinks at the Algonquin Hotel, barely made the curtain for Noises Off at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway, took a cab down to Tribeca for dinner at the Odeon (then perhaps the liveliest and most delicious late- night dining spot south of Canal Street), sauntered over to Le Zinc for after-dinner drinks, and walked all the way up to the West Village for more drinks and conversation at another late, favorite restaurant, Texarkana. We meandered up to Audrey’s apartment on Twenty-second Street, which was across the street from Pesca, where we listened to tapes of her singing Broadway tunes and talked until four in the morning. At that point I took a cab uptown to my own place; I was due at work at the restaurant in just a few hours. I got just enough exuberant sleep to have the wherewithal to write a thank-you card (my mother’s lessons were at last paying useful life dividends), which Audrey found slipped under her door when she woke up later that morning.
Pesca had been an invaluable experience both for the things it taught me to do and for the things it taught me not to do. Ownership and top management were highly secretive about the restaurant’s finances. We had no idea
what a budget was, much less how to compute a food, beverage, or labor cost. We could only assume, rightly or wrongly, that the restaurant was profitable. Also, the owners ran the restaurant more emotionally than professionally, with their prevailing mood being the primary cues for our performance that we were given on any given day. The owners dined and entertained frequently in their own restaurant; and for those meals no money was exchanged, no records were kept, and no tips were offered to the employees. Some servers were favorites of the management; others were not. Job interviews often began with an up-and-down physical assessment before any dialogue took place. In fact, that’s how my own job interview had begun. I’m amazed that I got the job, when I consider my preference for wearing Wallabees and corduroys. I was a sponge with eager eyes, and I noticed everything. It was now time to leave, and to gain other perspectives on how to run a restaurant.
I SPENT THE LAST 100 days of 1984 soaking up culinary life in Italy and France, much of the time as a stagiaire, or chef’s apprentice. That’s a romantic way of saying I did those kitchen tasks no one else wanted to do, and in which there was no fear that my rudimentary kitchen skills might lead to disaster. In Rome, I worked with and learned cherished recipes from the wonderful family at La Taverna da Giovanni. I was twenty-six years old, and I seized every free moment to eat my way through the Eternal City, as well as Florence, Bologna, Genoa, Piedmont, and Sardinia. It was heaven. My two bibles were Victor Hazan’s groundbreaking book Italian Wine and the blue pocket-size American Express Guide to the Restaurants of Italy.
I spent mornings wandering through food markets such as Florence’s overflowing mercato centrale or Bologna’s supernal kitchen specialist Tamburini, feeling vegetables, smelling fruits, eyeing the oils and vinegars, ogling strange creatures from the sea, marveling at unusual cuts of meat and hung game, sniffing wild mushrooms, and savoring salami, cured meat, and cheese. My brother Tom joined me for two of those weeks as Scrabble partner, comrade, and, as important, extra mouth and stomach. We stayed in cheap pensioni, as I had vowed to spend my limited budget not on my pillow but only on my belly. Everywhere, I scrutinized menus and analyzed restaurant design. I scribbled in my journal, chronicling and decoding every component that defined the distinctive allure of a trattoria or ristorante.
Beyond describing dishes I had loved, the journal entries included notes and sketches for lighting fixtures, menus, architecture, flooring, and seating plans, and—tellingly— notes about how I felt treated wherever I slept or dined. I was developing my vision of my future restaurant by getting to know myself. Never before had I been alone for so long, and the experience was forcing and allowing me to think about and feel what truly mattered to me.
The next chapter of my training began inauspiciously in Milan, where I spent three of the longest weeks of my life apprenticing with a cooking teacher named Savina Roggero. Andrée Abramoff had put me in touch with Savina, whom she described as the “Julia Child of Italy.” After about two minutes with Savina, I had my doubts about the analogy.
Savina was overweight, perspiring, disheveled, and exactly two hours late for our first meeting, owing to a car accident she had been involved in that day. She asked me to forgive her and assured me that tomorrow would be another day.
But the next morning brought more of the same: I showed up at the appointed hour, but there was no Savina. Even
though she was charging me what seemed like a huge sum of money for the privilege of learning from her—$500 per week—she was only rarely present in the kitchen to instruct me. I did most of my cooking with her willing, wide-eyed assistant, Pina, who fortunately was a gifted cook and a patient teacher. I did end up with a handful of very good recipes. Still, although Savina had indeed published nearly thirty cookbooks, she was no Julia Child. Perhaps I caught her at the wrong end of her career, but in any case la signora Savina was not delivering the goods for which I had journeyed to Milan. To make matters worse, I was renting a tiny room in a depressing, industrial neighborhood; and autumn in Milan was wet, cold, and gray. At night, I could pick up a crackly, faraway radio station that broadcast the presidential debates between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan, and then Geraldine Ferraro and George Bush. And I missed Audrey, to whom I was writing regularly. I longed for the rendezvous we were planning in November, though I didn’t quite believe it would ever occur. I couldn’t wait to leave Milan.
I was relieved to finally board an overnight train for Bordeaux. My experience had done nothing to dampen my deep affection for Italy, but to this day I have little interest in visiting Milan.
In planning this culinary adventure, my father had insisted vehemently that I commit at least as much time to France as to Italy. Before leaving, I hadn’t been sure if he was trying to quell my burgeoning passion for Italy or if, perhaps, his incantations about France were on the mark. In the end, I had decided to trust him and assume that he both wanted and knew what was best for me. He had allowed that Italian cooking was brilliant in its simplicity—combining just a few extraordinary ingredients—but he was orthodox in his insistence that I go to France if I truly wanted to learn
technique. He called on a number of his friends from Relais et Châteaux and eventually connected me with an acquaintance who owned La Réserve, a hotel and restaurant in the town of Pessac; and the restaurant Dubern in the center of Bordeaux. Luckily, it was the autumn harvest, the most compelling season to be there; and I could soon see that my father’s advice was sage: I was in for a powerful and unforgettable education. Both of the restaurants were closed on Sundays, so on that day I would drive to selected châteaux with La Réserve’s maître d’hotel to get a lesson on the great vineyards of Bordeaux. We began at a little-known château in Saint-Émilion, moving on to bigger players like Château Lascombes in Margaux and Château Léoville- Barton in Saint-Julien. My most memorable Sunday excursion was one we took to Château Mouton-Rothschild, where we “robbed” and tasted the first growth from barrels, and where I first learned of a new collaboration being formed with Robert Mondavi, to be called Opus One. We traveled west to the coastal village of Arcachon, where I learned to slurp down briny blue-fleshed oysters along with dried sausage, brown bread, and butter. Each morning at dawn, I accompanied La Réserve’s short, bespectacled head chef, Pierrot, to Bordeaux’s food market to learn how he selected all the products for his larder. I visited Château Guiraud in Sauternes and went hunting for palombes (wild pigeon) and foraging for girolles (chanterelles) and cèpes (porcini). Building on my experience at Pesca gutting soft- shell crabs, I advanced to tasks like opening oysters, carving lemons, chopping shallots, and plucking feathers from dead birds. Occasionally I was invited to cook meals for the staff. Ironically, the young French cooks loved my recipes from Savina Roggero. But their favorite dish of mine was côtes de porc—also known as my grandmother’s version of St. Louis spareribs.
One day, La Réserve collaborated with Château Calon- Ségur to cater a grand luncheon in a beautiful palace in Bordeaux. I was bursting with pride to be part of the kitchen brigade when we received applause at the end of the meal. And for the first time, I felt accepted by the équipe when I was allowed to join the cooks in drinking every remaining drop of the 1979 Calon-Ségur that had been left in the bottles.
After my stage ended in November, I took the train up to Paris for the week I had so eagerly anticipated: Audrey was flying to Paris for an eight-day rendezvous with me. As usual, I had turned to my father for his advice on both my culinary and my romantic itinerary.
The night before Audrey arrived, anxious, I had eaten myself silly dining solo on a massive copper pot of cassoulet at Lamazère. I remember sleeping for all of three hours that night, both because I was stimulated with excitement and because of the three portions of cassoulet I had consumed. (Every time the incredulous waiter had offered more, I’d smile and say, “Oui, merci.”) The cassoulet was expanding in my stomach as I rolled around perspiring in my lumpy bed. Audrey and I continued the Parisian eating affair. We began with foie gras and Sauternes in our shabby hotel room; and we dined at the two-star Chez Michel, the one- star Pile ou Face, the brasseries Vaudeville and Au Pied du Cochon, and the bistros Allard and Benoît. From Paris, we took the overnight Orient Express to Venice, where we feasted on razor clams and seppie at Corte Sconta, and risotto with tiny clams at Osteria da Fiore. Then it was on to refined tasting menus at La Frasca in Castrocaro Terme, not far from Bologna; and at Enotecca Pinchiori in Florence.
There were also more rustic dinners of finocchiona (fennel- flecked salami), coniglio arrosto (rabbit), bistecca alla fiorentina, and endless portions of fagioli drowned in deep
green olive oil and black pepper in the trattorias Acqua al Due, Del Fagioli, and Anita. From there, we motored down to Torgiano in Umbria, and then on to Rome, so that I could introduce and show off Audrey, my ragazza, to my Italian family at La Taverna da Giovanni. Of course, they approved, and began whispering to me that she should soon become my fidanzata, or fiancée.
Audrey flew back to New York, and exhausted, I dragged myself by train back up to Florence for the much anticipated family celebration of my mother’s fiftieth birthday. My advice on where to shop, eat, and sightsee was in great demand, and it was then that I realized just how much I had learned over the past several months. My time in Italy and France had provided a crucial introduction to the real work of restaurants, and nothing I had seen or learned had dissuaded me from continuing to follow my passion. I liked the kind of people I kept meeting in the business, felt blessed being around so much good food and wine, and was intoxicated with the idea of taking an unexpected career path. In my many solitary moments during those 100 days, I’d had ample opportunity to contemplate, feel, and envision the kind of restaurant I now knew I had to open.
One role I decided not to play myself was chef. Though I had fantasized early on about leading the kitchen (and in fact had seen being a chef as my only legitimate avenue into the business), it increasingly dawned on me that as much as I loved to cook, I was much more suited to becoming a restaurant generalist. My culinary education in Europe had provided the necessary foundation with which to communicate clearly about food with chefs in their own language. Firing myself as chef (or at least abandoning the notion that I might one day become a chef ) turned out to be one of the smartest business decisions I have ever made. My flight home from Rome was a scribble-fest. There were
barely enough minutes within the eight-and-a-half hours for all the notes I was making on my time in Europe, and my plans for New York.
BACK IN THE CITY, I was a twenty-seven-year-old guy from St. Louis who’d worked in the restaurant business for a mere eight months. I knew just a few people in the industry, and very few people beyond the walls of Pesca knew of me.
What I did have was an intense desire, a burning sense of urgency, and—having sold my Checkpoint stock—enough cash to get things going. According to my calculations, I’d need somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million to open the kind of restaurant I had been dreaming of. The good news financially was that I was thinking of something rustic, not refined, in an off-Broadway rather than a Hollywood style. I knew I would need to raise some additional money in order to open, but I wouldn’t know how much, or from whom, until I first found the ideal restaurant space.
I scoured the city, sometimes with brokers, but more often just hunting on my own for unlisted places—seeking the right place in the right location. I had two nonnegotiable needs: I wanted to open in an emerging neighborhood; and I wanted to have the right to assign my lease to someone else if my restaurant should go out of business. Having experienced my father’s bankruptcies, and knowing something about how many new restaurants went belly-up, I was soberly aware that failure was a real possibility.
With regard to the first point, I wanted to be in an area that could provide a strong lunch business. (I had learned from Pesca that a vibrant lunch ser vice could help a restaurant to meet fixed costs, and furthermore that the kind of business clientele attracted by lunch could give the
place an added identity.) I also wanted a neighborhood where a modest rent would allow me to offer excellent value to our guests. Part of the adventure of dining out, for many people, is venturing to new surroundings. A dynamic neighborhood would bestow a freshness that could rub off on the restaurant. As for the lease, my dad, now a restaurateur himself—he had opened a French bistro, Chez Louis, in St. Louis—had consistently pointed out that if my restaurant were to fail, the lease itself would be my only tangible asset. (To this day, getting an assignable lease is the first piece of advice I give any new restaurateur.)
In my search for the ideal spot I had visited more than 100 prospective restaurant sites in at least ten distinct downtown neighborhoods. One place that captivated me was just off Union Square, an old, stale-smelling vegetarian restaurant on East Sixteenth Street called Brownies. I had been to Union Square just once or twice since I began living in New York, so I was only vaguely aware of its greenmarket
—then a small twice-a-week outdoor gathering of cash-crop farmers and a specialist in heirloom apples. This was the closest thing in New York to the markets I had fallen in love with in Italy and France. Though only six blocks from Pesca, Union Square felt half a city away. At night, I knew Union Square as the stomping ground of Andy Warhol, Max’s Kansas City, and The Underground nightclub. By day, the neighborhood was home to the men’s garment industry, and the side streets off Fifth Avenue were clogged with rolling racks of slacks and coats. There was a seedy-by-day, dangerous-by-night feel to the area. Where Zeckendorf Towers now stand there was a faltering S. Klein department store. An equally outdated landmark was May’s department store on Fourteenth Street; a few doors to the east, Luchow’s restaurant was in the twilight of its life. I still wasn’t sure the neighborhood’s future was promising, but the deteriorating conditions made me believe that it would
at least offer an opportunity for an excellent lease. The farmers’ market was intriguing, and according to Ellen Giddins, the real estate executive who first urged me to follow my instinct on Union Square, this was precisely where the advertising and publishing industries would soon be relocating to escape the escalating rents in midtown.
I had never even heard of Brownies, and no brokers had ever listed it. In the front window was a middle-aged Hasidic Jew sitting in a creaky swivel chair at the cash register, ringing up the bills after people had eaten at the very long lunch counter or in the restaurant’s dark, low-ceilinged dining room in the back. Just to the west of Brownies was a vitamin store of the same name. Drawing on my salesman’s skill at cold-calling, I approached the cashier and asked if the owner was there. He peered suspiciously at me and said, “No, the owner’s not here, why you ask?” I explained that I was looking for a restaurant space. I gave the cashier one of my old Checkpoint business cards with the phone number of my home office. “If the owner should ever be interested in selling, I might be an interested buyer,” I said. There was no doubt in my mind that the word chutzpah had crossed his mind.
The penetrating cold during that winter of 1985 was relentless. Primarily on foot, I scoured Tribeca, the area around Lafayette Street (I liked the idea of being near the Public Theater there), and even considered Little Italy, the West Village, and the meatpacking district, which was then very rough. Disillusioned with what I was and wasn’t seeing in New York, I even contemplated going home to the Mid- west. I checked out Chicago’s River North neighborhood—it was being gentrified—and briefly imagined what opening there would feel like. Audrey reluctantly agreed to visit it with me, but the Chicago winter—six degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind-chill factor that made the temperature feel like
minus twenty-five degress—made New York seem warm by comparison. Also, Audrey’s family lived on the East Coast. Both factors put the kibosh on any fantasies I had about returning to Chicago.
Despite all the uninspiring spaces I was seeing, I continued to reject the prevailing maxim: “Location, location, location.” This is the idea that you somehow need an upscale address to be considered a great restaurant. But to afford an acceptably swank location, restaurants had to pass on their huge overhead to the guests, charging way too much money for lunch and dinner. Back then, an excellent restaurant was too often confused with an expensive restaurant.
I was determined to go against the grain. I was no expert in New York real estate, but I understood on a gut level that if I handicapped the location correctly, and could successfully play a role in transforming the neighborhood, my restaurant, with its long-term lease locked in at a low rent, could offer excellence and value. This combination would attract smart, adventurous, loyal customers, in turn giving other restaurants and businesses the confidence to move into the neighborhood until a critical mass had been reached and the neighborhood itself changed for the better. Moreover, were I to go belly-up after a few years in such a neighborhood, I was confident that I could find someone else who would be eager to pay my below-market rent on the remaining years of my lease. I sensed a lot of upside and felt protected against the downside.
One bone-chilling Saturday night in February—still without a site—I decided to bundle up and trek from Union Square all the way downtown. Maybe I’d get lucky and fall in love with a location that gave hints of being available. If you weren’t busy on a Saturday night, I reasoned, you were for
sale. I began on West Fourteenth Street and downed a kir at the bar of Quatorze (packed) before crossing the street for a Dos Equis at a Mexican joint (full enough). I wandered through the meatpacking district along the cobblestones of Gansevoort Street. I thought it resembled a hauntingly beautiful stage set, and I remember thinking that it had the potential one day to be a great restaurant neighborhood, but not just yet.
Using the illuminated towers of the World Trade Center as my compass, I continued on foot all the way down to Chambers Street, stopping at a few places along the way, hoping to gather some intelligence as to their desirability and availability. Soon I was in Tribeca, where I tossed back my fourth or fifth drink of the night at El Internaçional (which years later became El Teddy’s). I sat at the lively tapas bar and took in the layout: the long bar, a square dining room toward the back, and another rectangular dining room through a doorway off to the side of the bar.
The place felt like one big party, with all kinds of more intimate episodes unfolding within. Then it hit me: El Internaçional’s layout was a virtual mirror image of Brownies, if only the wall between the vegetarian joint and its next-door vitamin shop could be torn down and the spaces combined. Until that moment, I had actually put Brownies out of my mind. But suddenly I began feverishly scribbling and sketching on the tiny, translucent paper napkins provided for tapas.
First thing Monday, I called Eugene Fracchia at Pesca; he had a penetrating eye for design, and I asked him to visit Brownies with me. We tried to be inconspicuous as we walked in. Eugene took one look and gave the space a thumbs-up: “Why is it that you’d wait? Of course you can tear the wall down!”
When I came back later by myself, the cashier remembered me. “The owner’s here,” he said. “He’d be happy to see you now.”
Minutes later out came Sam Brown, a short, balding man who looked to be in his seventies, wearing brown sandals with socks. In a soft voice he told me he had opened Brownies, the first vegetarian restaurant in the United States, in 1936. Back then Union Square was the locus of frequent workers’ protests, and vegetarianism was considered a left-wing political movement. A kind man suffering from what sounded like an asthmatic cough, Mr.
Brown was planning to retire and told me he was open to discussing a deal.
We hit it off and agreed after only our second meeting that I would purchase the last fourteen years of Brownies’ twenty-year lease. Two meetings later we consummated a deal. To celebrate, Sam, now the former owner of America’s oldest vegetarian restaurant, took me to Sparks Steak House on East Forty-sixth Street. He was a neighbor and friend of Pat Cetta, who, with his brother Mike, had founded Sparks in 1966 on East Eighteenth Street. For a decade, I learned, Sam had been sneaking out of his own vegetarian restaurant to splurge on sirloin steak at Sparks.
That night at Sparks, Pat Cetta sat down with Sam and me for three scintillating hours of steak, storytelling, red wine, and repartee. Somehow, Pat also decided to adopt me as a mentee. He regaled us with stories about getting screwed by restaurant critics (and how he’d screwed them back) and stories about his favorite restaurateur, Barry Wine of the Quilted Giraffe; and he swore he would never use any ice cream other than Bassett’s from Philadelphia. He took pride in the coarse, dust-free black pepper he served, in the magical way his waiters changed their tablecloths between
the entree and dessert, and in how unbelievably much money he was making selling steak.
When I think back on it now, and when I consider all the things that can and do go wrong when you’re starting a restaurant, it’s amazing how many things just fell into place in the process of launching Union Square Cafe. One day, early in the spring of 1985, trying to learn more about the neighborhood in which I would open my new restaurant, I made a cold call on a construction space I’d passed on Fifth Avenue at Thirteenth Street to learn if a restaurant was being built there. I wanted to know if I’d have more competition. After the workers told me it was to be a clothing store, I introduced myself to the construction manager, Tom Hanratty, who was both genial and helpful.
He said his crew was actually looking for its next project. I called him a few days later, followed up on a couple of references, met his boss, and then hired them to build my restaurant. I now know how critically important it is to be careful in the selection of a construction crew; but at the time, I just wanted to get started, and fortunately my naïveté went unpunished.
I also had no clue how to find a good architect on my own. As I was discussing the situation with my grandfather and his second wife, Joan Harris, she mentioned that she knew the Kander family from her hometown, Kansas City. ( John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote such Broadway classics as Cabaret and Chicago.) Joan mentioned that she had heard that Warren Ashworth (husband of Susan Kander), was a terrific architect whom I should meet. Susan’s brother, John, had taught me tennis at Camp Nebagamon. That was that: I felt comfortable enough, after just one interview, to hire Warren and his boss Larry Bogdanow to design Union Square Cafe. Larry was earthy, cerebral, and intense.
Warren was dry, irreverent, and sharp. Each was brimming
with imagination and enthusiasm for the project. The two had little experience with restaurants (they spoke of only two very small projects to date), and they reacted politely when I told them I wanted to design a restaurant that looked as if no architect had ever been there.
I suppose I could have picked my favorite trattoria in Rome and instructed Warren and Larry to go there and simply reproduce it in New York. Other restaurateurs have done that brilliantly. (Years later, Balthazar, in Manhattan’s SoHo district, became such a perfect reproduction of a brasserie that I would almost rather go there than to half a dozen authentic brasseries I know of in Paris.) That is an awesome accomplishment, but replicating something already in existence isn’t where my own business or design sense has ever guided me.
Instead, I had asked my architects to create a restaurant that would be easy, comfortable, and timeless—that would look as if it had been there forever. (On the occasion of Union Square Cafe’s twentieth anniversary in 2005, Larry wryly observed, “Now it has been there forever.”)
Given what I presented them to work with, my instructions may have been easier than I knew; there was only so much an architect on a modest budget could do with this awkward three-level space. The kitchen is cramped, and if you’re a waiter you literally can’t make coffee or cut bread without being bumped into by somebody carrying food out of it. The coatroom is claustrophobic and the bathrooms are minuscule. The dining rooms are low-ceilinged. The wooden staircase to the balcony is narrow and steep—and half of the meals eaten at Union Square Cafe require someone to carry plates up the stairs. To the dozens of couples who have gotten engaged at our “most romantic table,” it may come as a surprise to know that their cherished table 61 on the
balcony sits on the former site of Sam Brown’s lavatory. The balcony itself was for nearly half a century his office.
Union Square Cafe is the least s*xy and most ergonomically clumsy restaurant space that I own. But Warren and Larry came to understand that I wanted a look that would endure, rather than something frozen in the prevailing design trends of 1985. The restaurant remains today an odd amalgam of their aesthetic sense combined with notes I scribbled in journals in Italy and France and on tapas napkins at El Internaçional. I believe it became a wonderful restaurant because of its imperfections, which helped build the kind of team character necessary to overcome adversity. One of the core business lessons I have taken from the continued success of Union Square Cafe is that willingness to overcome difficult circumstances is a crucial character trait in my employees, partners, and restaurants.
The combined cost of paying for the assigned lease, the design, and the construction of this 5,000 square foot restaurant in 1985 was just a little over $700,000—an absurdly gentle figure by today’s standards. With my
$350,000 of cashed-in Checkpoint stock, I still needed to raise an equal additional amount. Even though my family (except, of course, for my uncle, Richard Polsky) continued to think I was crazy to be getting into the restaurant business, there was evidently enough loving confidence in me that I managed to raise almost all the additional backing from the family, much of it in the form of loans, allowing me to retain most of the equity. A couple of associates of my grandfather Irving Harris helped me to figure out how to put the deal together, and also how to explain the investment to various members of my family. I decided not to invite my grandfather to be a financial participant, despite his offer to help. That was, in a sense, one final protective measure to
avoid my father’s resentment. And even though my father seemed to be back in the black, I chose not to ask him to invest either.
I did, however, take my dad’s advice on a name for the restaurant. During my months in Europe I had passed a lot of idle time sitting in piazzas or on trains, dreaming up prospective (and remarkably forgettable) restaurant names, like Bimi (my grandmother’s nickname), Blue Plate Cafe, Gorgonzola, and—once I had the location—Piazza del Unione. Wincing at these ideas, my father had a straightforward suggestion for me: “Why don’t you just call it what it is? It’s Union Square Cafe. In San Francisco Union Square is the premier address.”
“In San Francisco, yes, it is,” I said. “But in New York, Union Square is not an especially prized location.” I described what I knew of the fringe neighborhood with some unsavory details.
“You can help make this square a premier address in New York,” he persisted. “Name the restaurant Union Square Cafe!”
Construction began on Memorial Day and was completed in less than five months. The experience was a cliff-hanger. We had settled on October 21, 1985, as our opening date, but with one week to go, we were still finishing the cherrywood floors and applying wainscoting to the walls. It was impossible to lead any kind of meetings or training sessions amid the noise, smells, and chaos. I conducted all staff interviews on the sidewalk while sitting on a sawhorse next to a Dumpster. Intuitively, I was searching for employees with the kind of personal style I’d find compatible with my own. My brain was looking for people
with restaurant skills, but my heart was beseeching me to cultivate a restaurant family.
The job application form I wrote was idiosyncratic. I typed questions like, “How has your sense of humor been useful to you in your ser vice career?” “What was so wrong about your last job?” “Do you prefer Hellmann’s or Miracle Whip?” If you’re trying to provide engaging hospitality and outstanding technical ser vice, there must also be a certain amount of fun involved, and those bizarre questions gave me an idea of whether or not applicants had a sense of humor. They needed one, too, as our training sessions necessarily took place in the middle of Union Square Park.
I’d buy a bushel of Jonagold apples and we would sit on the grass, munch on apples, and play-act ser vice scenarios.
One day in the park, I looked over my shoulder to see Bryan Miller and Pierre Franey taking notes on what we were doing. While I was cooking in France, Bryan had written to tell me that he had been named Mimi Sheraton’s replacement as chief restaurant critic at the New York Times. I wrote back, congratulating him and telling him of my concrete plans to open a restaurant in New York. Upon my return in January 1985, we dined out together just once, but the dinner proved uncomfortable for each of us. The restaurant that Bryan had picked to review that night was La Caravelle, whose new chef was my former colleague at Pesca, Michael Romano. I felt uneasy to be surreptitiously complicit in the judgment of my friend’s cooking, and I felt unscrupulous to be a future restaurateur dining with the current restaurant critic of the New York Times. Though Bryan and I had become good friends, we agreed that night not to speak for a long while, and to cease dining out altogether. I was beginning to feel the heat.
I didn’t hire the opening chef for Union Square Cafe until well after I had signed the deal for Brownies. (Though I had already decided against it, on some level I was still flirting with the fantasy of being my own chef.) Months before, Bryan had introduced me to a robust Frenchman named Marc Sarrazin, the top meat purveyor to French restaurants in New York, who also served as an unofficial headhunter for restaurants and adviser to the city’s top culinary talent.
Marc knew all the chefs, especially in the French houses; he visited them in their kitchens and knew which talented young cooks were interested in making a move. Marc also knew where the job openings were. He was a rainmaker, and so I asked him to help find me a chef. Within days, he introduced me to a young, baby-faced fish cook named Ali Barker. Ali had been the saucier and chef poissonnier at La Côte Basque, which at the time was a great training ground for a number of promising young chefs including Todd English and Charlie Palmer. I was also interested in two sous-chefs: Scott Campbell, a young cook recommended by a culinary teacher named Peter Kump (whom I had also met through Bryan); and Marcie Smith, a cook at Barry and Susan Wine’s four-star Quilted Giraffe.
I arranged tasting auditions in the kitchen of my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street. Taking a page from the outdoor cooking contest I had competed in at camp as a twelve-year-old, I gave each cook a chicken breast, some butter, an onion, garlic, fresh herbs, and a tomato to see what he or she would do with them. Ali’s chicken was juicy and seasoned just properly; impressively, he subsequently used the chicken bones and onion to make a delicious stock. When I hired him as executive chef, we agreed that he would give the job two years—which was acceptable to me since it was about as far into the future as I could see.
Staffing was a study in the blind leading the blind. I hired a chef who had never been a chef or sous-chef—and who was even younger than I was. Naively, I made myself the opening general manager, responsible for things I knew little or nothing about, like setting the staff’s schedule, overseeing repairs and maintenance, and conducting performance reviews. I’d lured Gordon Dudash from Pesca to be my second in command as manager, but he’d managed only an inanimate bar before, never a live staff.
Our bookkeeper was an incredibly nice man with no previous bookkeeping experience, and one of our waiters surprised me during our two days of training by insisting on opening a bottle of champagne with a corkscrew.
One day, a week or two before we opened and while the restaurant was still under construction, Uncle Richard brought by an acquaintance to offer me some advice. This white-haired culinary lion—who was in charge of the food and beverage program at New York’s Harvard Club—looked down his aquiline nose at me and asked, “Just what kind of restaurant is it that you are planning to open?” He cleared his throat.
“I’m not really sure what you would call it,” I said.
“I see. Well, then, what kind of food will you be serving at your restaurant?”
“We’re going to offer some pastas in small appetizer portions. I’ve got this idea for filet mignon of tuna marinated with soy, ginger, and lemon. We’ll also have a couple of French things like confit of duck with garlic potatoes. And—”
“It’ll never fly,” he said with conviction.
I paused for a moment before continuing: “We’ll be serving my grandmother’s mashed turnips with fried
shallots as a side dish and black bean soup with a shot of Australian sherry.”
“Stop! It won’t work,” he sputtered. “When people go out to eat, they say, ‘Let’s go out for French, or Italian.’ Or maybe even Chinese. But no one says ‘Let’s go out for eclectic.’ You’d really better rethink your concept.”
This expert had scared the shit out of me. With days to go before opening, I couldn’t tinker with my menu even if I wanted to. The fact was that I didn’t know what kind of restaurant this was going to be. What I did know was that I was champing at the bit to share my enthusiasm for the foods and recipes that I loved—and to treat people the way I wanted to be treated. Wasn’t that enough?
On the evening of October 20, 1985, we served our opening-night party. It was a numbing, surreal moment, and an emotionally loaded night for me. I broke into tears as soon as the doors flew open, realizing that this moment marked the culmination of a lot of professional research as well as a lifetime of personal development. Seventy-five people showed up, all of them friends or family members.
There was something bittersweet in the air as well. My dad was not present. He apparently had gone on a business trip. Were my tears in part about his not being there? Or were they because I now knew that I didn’t need him to be there? In any case, this was my moment to achieve something on my own. I had spent nearly two years doing my best work ever as a student, and now it was up to me to show what I had learned and what I was capable of doing on my own two feet. However the restaurant might ultimately fare, this opening night was a breakthrough, in my career and in my life. These were tears of intense joy and sadness, relief and release.
