THE FOUNDER OF ANY new business has an opportunity to initiate the first expression of that businessโs point of view through a compendium of aesthetic and philosophical choices. The minute the business hangs its shingle on the door it is not only open for business, but open to public feedback and scrutiny. Effective businesses remain true to their core, but also know how to hear, respond, and adjust to constructive feedback. In my business, much of this input comes from restaurant critics and journalists.
The press loves covering restaurants, and with each year its voracious appetite continues to grow, in response, I assume, to the publicโs own insatiable interest in consuming and devouring information about dining out. On our best days, the media can be extremely helpful to our business.
When we err, or are perceived to have fallen short of someoneโs mark, or simply fall out of favor, negative press can set back our business. Imagine that Iโm standing on the shores of Manhattan and I am required to cross the Atlantic to France. The catch is that to get there, I have only two
options: I can either swim or ride there on the back of a shark. Swimming is obviously out of the question. Iโll tire, freeze, and soon drown. My only choice then, is to hop on the back of the shark and ride with exceptional care and skill, or Iโm lunch.
The shark, you see, is the press, and it needs to keep swimming or it dies. I can benefit from acting very carefully with that knowledge. If my riding technique is expert, the shark can be my vehicle to deliver me safely to my destination. In my experience of riding sharks, Iโve been tossed off, nipped at, and even bittenโbut not, so far, devoured. And Iโve always managed to reach my destination. Sometimes Iโve even enjoyed the ride.
Like most business owners and CEOs, I am responsible for articulating to the public the core principles and values for which we want our business known. I always try to use media interviews to elaborate on those business concepts, and thatโs when the ride begins. Itโs a high-risk game: play it well and you will fill seats, build the top line, and attract new employees; make a mistake and the penalties can be stiff, either for your business, for staff morale, or for your hard-earned reputation. With the exception of late-breaking news, most journalistsโ stories, even those based on fresh interviews, tend to rehash material from previous stories, accurate or not. You hope the good messages get repeated by other journalists and work hard to make sure the bad ones are snuffed out quietly, or at least live a very short life.
In the summer of 2004 our businessโand almost every restaurateurโs businessโsuffered during the Republican National Convention. It was just before the Labor Day weekend, and the city felt desolate. Many families were away on vacation, and thousands of other New Yorkers simply chose to flee the city to avoid the influx of
conventioneers or from fear that the convention might once again make the city the target of a terrorist attack. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had optimistically touted the convention as a boon for business. Perhaps it was in the long term, but for that week, business was dead.
In an interview, Randy Garutti, who was then the general manager of Union Square Cafe, candidly acknowledged to a reporter from theย New York Postย that the restaurantโs business was off 25 percent, which was true. (I have always encouraged our managers and chefs to speak openly and directly to the media, and to make other efforts to connect with the public beyond the walls of our restaurants by teaching classes, joining community organizations, conducting cooking demonstrations, and serving food at fund-raising events where food and wine aficionados gather.) But the paper mistakenly quoted Randy as saying that our business was off by 75 percent. That โnewsโ made other newsโand theย Postโs error was picked up as fact and subsequently reported on by everyone from Fox News to David Letterman. Union Square Cafe unwittingly became a prominent symbol of business losses during convention week. This incident was far from fatal, but it was nonetheless an irritating shark bite.
Fortunately, the vast majority of the actual reviews that our restaurants have received from critics have been quite positive. With each review, I always have two primary concerns: how might it affect the restaurantโs business, and how might it affect the collective morale and individual egos of the hardworking members of our team? Iโm thankful that, thus far, not one review has put our business in peril. On the other hand, I have felt bruisedโboth personally and on behalf of our teamโwhen a critic takes what I consider a painful swipe, particularly after weโve just opened a restaurant.
In New York, being first on the scene is a journalistโs rite and right. There is a large subsection of the New York dining public, too, who will descend on a new restaurant just after it opens simply to fulfill a need to boast about the hottest new place: โBeen there, done that, and I got there first.โ But savvy diners know that it takes a fair amount of time for a staff, no matter how talented, to learn to work together smoothly. A restaurant can take months to understand which of its dishes work and which donโt; the fine-tuning of the menu can easily take up to a year. In fact, it generally takes two to three years for our new restaurants to even approach their ultimate potential for excellence. And this is because it takes that long for a restaurantโs soul to emerge. I tend to hold my nose for the first three months, and I donโt begin to have any real fun for six months. Itโs usually a full year after one of my restaurants has been open before I begin to feel truly proud.
By the time I feel confident, however, the critics and the people who simply do not share our chemistryโthose who never will enjoy our restaurant, no matter how much it eventually improvesโhave already moved on to the next new restaurant.
To be sure, a restaurant is fair game for a critic the moment it starts charging patrons. Both the public and the new restaurant can actually be shortchanged by the very early reviews, because these snapshots rarely provide an accurate preview of what that restaurant will eventually become.
Am I suggesting that critics or the dining public just stay away from a new restaurant? Of course not. Itโs useful to know how a restaurant tastes and works when it first opens, but itโs also helpful to understand what to expect down the road. If I buy a case of a newly released wine, Iโll usually
drink a bottle right off the batโeven if I know itโs too young
โjust to have a point of comparison as I follow its development. Thatโs not a bad thing to do with a new restaurant, as long as you trust that the restaurant will continue to grow and evolve. Indeed, opening a restaurant is a little like making wine. The wine is often clumsy or โdumbโ when itโs initially bottled, but wines with a solid pedigree almost always improve over time. Iโm a hedonist. I drink wine to enjoy it when itโs at its best, once the components have settled into delicious harmony. Similarly, I go to a restaurant to enjoy it at its best. (Weโre fortunate in New York, and indeed across the country, to have an abundance of evolving and evolved restaurants. This means that I have the luxury of patiently waiting before trying a new restaurantโI donโt have to try it before itโs at its best.)
Weโre constantly on the lookout for guests who appear to have a natural affinity for our productโthe food, staff, and designโeven when it is new, flawed, and rapidly evolving.
On such a foundation of trust, respect, and enjoyment, we can get their reactions and begin to develop a meaningful dialogue, especially early on, when there is so muchโ almost too muchโfeedback from the general public. For instance, when Tabla opened in 1998, a frequent criticism from some early guests was that Indian food would never succeed in a sensual, fine-dining guise. We listened, but that input was not particularly helpful. Another criticism was that, good as Tabla was, it was just too loud. That was more constructive. In fact, weโd anticipated before opening that noise might be a problem. I had insisted on using a beautiful, rich wood called padauk for the floor. The restaurantโs ceilings were untouchable because of the requirement to restore and preserve their historic ornamentation, so sound-absorbent tiles were out. Tabla was loud, and a chorus of complaints led to several subtle fixes that greatly lowered the noise level. We hung plush
curtains, stuffed balls of fabric underneath our tabletops to capture noise bouncing off the floors, and upholstered the seat backs of our chairs. One lesson we learned from the experience is that every little thing you do to mitigate noise helps a lot. This is because when a restaurant is noisy, a cumulative effect occurs: each guest has to speak a little more loudly to be heard over the ever-increasing din.
When we have failed to tune in to our guests who let us know where we have a real problem, weโve risked hearing about it from someone with a megaphone. This happened with our most popular dessert at Tablaโkulfi, an extremely dense, decadently rich, cone-shaped ice cream. After observing guests early on struggling to cut this very hard frozen dessert, I told Tablaโs general manager that we needed to provide an easier way to eatย kulfi: serve it with a serrated grapefruit spoon. โGreat idea,โ he said.
Months went by and somehow my reminders were not working. People kept orderingย kulfi; it was still frozen solid; and the restaurant still hadnโt found the right spoons. A restaurant critic beat us to the punch: โTheย kulfiย โs delicious once you get it in your mouth,โ he wrote in his newspaper, โbut it slid halfway across the table when I tried to cut into it with my spoon.โ
Reading that was exasperating for me, an unnecessary, public black eye for the restaurant, and an undeserved slight for the pastry chef. This delicious dessert need not have been panned. In fact, within one day the manager had found serrated spoons for it. The experience taught me yet another lesson about trusting my instincts and holding others accountable.
For the first two years at Tabla and at its less expensive downstairs cafรฉ, called Bread Bar, we had another unusual
problem. Most of our early guests had never before experienced Indian spices paired with local, seasonal ingredients, hip cocktails, s*xy music, and modern art; and the curiosity generated by Ruth Reichlโs three-star review in theย New York Timesย kept Tabla packed for the entire first year. But then in the second year business tailed off a little, and our performance in the third year was flat (it was especially hurt by the 9/11 attacks). This was the first time one of our restaurants had failed to post consistent, steady, year-over-year growth.
But we hadnโt built Tabla to be a flash in the pan. So I did something different. I ran some focus groups with a few loyal guests and included chef Floyd Cardoz, our general manager, Randy Garutti, and our director of operations, Richard Coraine. We consistently heard two distinct observations, seemingly at odds: โI would dine at Tabla far more often if it were more Indian,โ and โI would go to Tabla far more often if it were a little less Indian.โ So we hit on a solution. We would emphasize the bold-flavored Indian food downstairs in the Bread Bar and emphasize refined, gently spiced food upstairs in Tablaโs main dining room. We believed that this would satisfy both constituencies. And we had the input from our guests to thank for making those changes. Almost immediately, the food critic Eric Asimov of theย New York Timesย noticed the new format. He gave the newly Indianized Bread Bar a rave in his column โ$25 and Underโ that instantly recharged the restaurant and returned it to its earlier business levels.
We made a different kind of adjustment at Eleven Madison Park not long after it opened, also thanks in part to feedback from our guests. I arrived at the conclusion that my original concept for this restaurant had been flawed, and that the guests were picking up on it. Eleven Madison Park looked and felt far more like a grand, gorgeous restaurant
than the breezy brasserie we had envisioned. As a consequence, rather than exceeding the guestsโ expectations for a brasserie, we were falling short of their expectations for a grand restaurant. The food was indeed better than that of a typical brasserie, but not as refined as one might expect from the restaurantโs majestic, urbane dรฉcor. This seemed to be a two-pronged challenge. We had to find a way to muss up our hair a littleโto make the restaurant a lot more funโand to meaningfully improve the quality of the dining experience at the same time.
When it opened, Eleven Madison Park had received a handful of very good (but not excellent) reviews, much to my dismay. (In fairness, though, it did earn four stars from theย Daily News,ย a James Beard nomination for best new restaurant in America, and a coveted place onย Esquireย magazineโs annual list of Americaโs best new restaurants. Also, the intense anticipation surrounding its sassier next- door sibling, Tabla, which was opening a month later, didnโt help.) Part of the problem, we figured out, was that people werenโt having enough fun at Eleven Madison Park. The restaurant is a breathtaking, soaring space in a monumental, marble-filled historic art deco building. No matter how we accessorized the place to make it look like a brasserie, its elegant bones were not going to change. It looked like a special-occasion restaurant, and that was that. Richard Coraine urged me to consider one straightforward solution: we needed to book more large parties. On opening, we had decided to limit tables to six or eight. That, we had believed, would give the kitchen an advantageโcooking better food for fewer people. โPeople are constantly calling us, wanting to use this restaurant for a big party,โ Richard said.
We began pushing tables together in nearly every possible configuration and started welcoming parties of
eight, twelve, and even eighteen. Next, we expanded our wine list, adding California wines to a list that had been exclusively Frenchโa narrow approach that had been part of my hubris at the beginning. Now, each evening, animated mini-parties sprouted up all around the dining room, and suddenly Eleven Madison Park became a bustling, lively restaurant. We hired a dynamic maรฎtre dโ, Derek Watkins, who seemed to remember every customerโRichard described him as a front door โsmoochie.โ Later we added Stephen Beckta, another thoroughbred dining room and wine manager, who lit up the room like a swank circus master. The menu was rethought and refined; and within six months, Eleven Madison Park made the cover ofย Wine Spectatorย as one of New Yorkโs best new restaurants for wine lovers. It soon earned a James Beard Award of Excellence for its ser vice; and it has landed a spot inย Zagatโsย top twenty most popular restaurants almost every year since. In 2006 we made another bold move by bringing in an immensely talented, young Swiss-born chef, Daniel Humm, whose very refined cooking style would trump any last vestiges of brasserie feeling at Eleven Madison Park.
The restaurantโs design had convinced our guests, and us, that it was meant to be a great, grand restaurant.
The opening problems at Blue Smoke werenโt so easily fixed, though we considered just about every shred of the tons of feedback we were getting from the people who ate there in our early days.
To begin with, we were totally unprepared for the mobs of people who came to sample our barbecue restaurant almost from the first night. We had never quite believed that so many suave New Yorkers would be willing to loosen their ties and pick up bones with their fingers. Would-be patrons could not get through on the phones to make reservations.
Tables were overbooked and double-booked because of our
own inadequate preparation, frustrating and angering the very people we most needed to have on our side. One night that spring of 2002, during the annual meeting of the American Booksellers Association, we inadvertently booked two parties on the same balcony, which has room for only one group. These werenโt just any parties, either. One host was an important editor, publisher, and friend; the other was also a celebrated publisher, introducing the latest book from Steven Raichlen, the countryโs top-selling barbecue author. This incident required us to eat crow, and it still makes me shudder. Each party insisted that theyโd be happy only on the balcony, until I got involved and persuaded one to switch to our more spacious rear dining room. Then all I had to do was answer to the forty or so guests who had made regular reservations for tables in the rear dining room. It was embarrassing, chaotic, and costly.
Part of the explanation for this mistake and many others was that we had deliberately hired a younger, far less seasoned staff than we usually would have for an opening team. My initial idea was that Blue Smoke would become our organizationโs โfarm systemโ for talent. We would be able to hire 51 percenters whose technical skills might not yet be refined enough for a job at Union Square Cafe, Tabla, Gramercy Tavern, or Eleven Madison Park. I reasoned that they wouldnโt need those more advanced restaurant skills in a barbecue joint; but if and when they acquired enough ability to earn a promotion to one of our other restaurants, we would be ready with a job. And we would nurture โgreenโ managers in precisely the same way.
This scheme proved to be a serious miscalculation. I learned that no matter what our concept is, people expect three specific things of our brand: culinary excellence, knowledgeable ser vice, and gracious hospitality. At any price point and for any kind of foodโbarbecue or black
trufflesโour guests expected excellence and hospitality, and we were falling short. And my idea of Blue Smoke as โfarm systemโ was also offensive to high-quality employees who may have been qualified for a job at one of our more โrefinedโ restaurants, but who simply preferred the relaxed, fun atmosphere of Blue Smoke.
By heeding our guestsโ constructive criticisms right away, we were able to make crucial adjustments and begin to solve some of our most daunting problems. First, we removed one-fourth of the seats in our dining roomโa costly change, but one that we hoped would allow us to take charge of the place. Next, we increased the number of dining room and kitchen managers by half, transferring some very talented managers to Blue Smoke from a couple of our other restaurants.
To help deal with late-seated reservations and to take care of people who made a spur-of-the moment decision to drop in for some barbecue, Richard Coraine urged that we set aside as much as 50 percent of the business each night for walk-ins. This strategy was effective in two ways. First, we regained control over how busy we would be on any given evening, since once we had seated the guests to whom we had promised tables, we still had discretionary control over whether or not to seat the other half of the dining room. Second, since we knew that aficionados are not used to planningโor interested in planningโfour weeks in advance to go to a barbecue joint, we were able to satisfy their desire to enjoy barbecue on the spur of the moment.
Encouraging walk-ins also attracted a whole new population to our business: barbecue lovers who wanted to drop in for some ribs and a couple of pints of beer, hang out with friends, and hear some great live music downstairs or on the jukebox upstairs. They werenโt inveterate foodies
surfing the Internet for reviews and wondering what the food bloggers were chatting about. By eliminating the requirement to reserve in advance, we had removed the โspecial-occasionnessโ of Blue Smoke, and almost instantly we encouraged and attracted hundreds of new patrons who packed the bar four and five deep, actually enjoying the experience of waiting as much as an hour for a table to free up. Of course, the most important adjustments would be those we made as we persevered in our quest to serve top- quality barbecue.
WEโRE CONSTANTLY SEEKING TO increase the mind share each of our restaurants enjoys with the public. Itโs crucial that our establishments remain on the tip of peopleโs tongues, because we have hundreds of seats to fill every day and night in a city that offers the public thousands of options for dining. I am also well aware that people are pummeled with more information each day than our ancestors received in an entire lifetime. Therefore, our messages have to be useful and have to be sticky if we are to stand any chance of earning a piece of your mind share. And they must be presented in a context that supports our larger business point of view, or they will be confusing at best and damaging at worst.
One winning idea was a wonderful segment on theย Today Showย featuring chef Kerry Heffernan. In addition to being an avid fly fisherman, Kerry is an expert on anything that breathes through gills. The segment showed him on a boat catching a fish, cleaning it, and then cooking it in the studio. It sent the message that the chef of Eleven Madison Park is authentically knowledgeable about fish, cares for the environment, and is also a nice guy. It generated not only a
lot of business for the restaurant but excellent feedback for Kerry as well.
This was a great fit, but an appearance on Donald Trumpโs showย The Apprenticeย would not have beenโno matter how colossally successful the show was. The producers called one day and asked me to be part of a competition. As I understood it, the plot was that two restaurateurs would each be challenged to create, build, and open a new restaurant, within a week. Then theย Zagat Surveyย would send in its troops to vote on which one was better. At the time,ย The Apprenticeย had some of televisionโs loftiest ratings, but I knew it was not for us. People told me I was crazy, that it would be great for the company to appear on a show that everyone in America was watching. What I saw instead was a high-profile opportunity to become distracted from our business, and perhaps to send conflicting messages about our seriousness as a company that exists to develop enduring restaurants with soul.
Iโve tried to pick our media moments carefully.ย Yesย to Julia Childโs visiting my home kitchen onย Good Morning Americaย in 1990.ย Yesย to profiles inย People, Town and Country, CBS Sunday Morning,ย and theย New York Times. Yesย to a national ad campaign for American Express (more on that later).ย Yesย to a segment with Martha Stewart learning to cook barbecue from the pitmaster Kenny Callaghan in the kitchen of Blue Smoke, or playfully apprenticing herself at Shake Shack.ย Noย to my own national talk show on Lifetime.
Noย to national advertising campaigns for a fragrance and a line of menswear.ย Noย to a story in theย New York Timesย about why I think Union Square Cafe deserved a Michelin star. (If I were Bibendum, the Michelin man, Iโd have a comment.) Andย noย toย The Apprentice.
The first time I chose to participate in a high-profile media opportunity was in 1992, when I was invited to appear in a radio campaign and, later, a national television campaign for American Express. It became one of the first examples of a national cause-related marketing campaign by a global corporation. I had agreed to do the spots, which were filmed at Union Square Cafe, on the condition that their focus be on American Expressโs efforts to help fight hunger. Those ads dramatically elevated the profile and positioning of Union Square Cafe. They were also the seeds of what would become a multiyear, $20 million โCharge Against Hungerโ program waged by American Express and Share Our Strength, the exceptional organization founded by Billy Shore to relieve hunger and poverty. Iโm more proud of that than almost anything else Iโve accomplished in my career, but not because it put me on television screens and in Sunday newspaper magazines across the country. That fame was fleeting. What endured was the impact on real kids who for the first time got school breakfasts, or who were enrolled in failure-to-thrive clinics, or whose parents learned how to stretch their food dollars and to buy and cook nutritious meals. All thanks to American Expressโs funding of Share Our Strength programs, and all because of the early positive consumer feedback generated by those ads.
But there was an underbelly to this story. In the aftermath of the very successful Amex campaign of 1992, I was in Washington, D.C., at Red Sage, Mark Millerโs red-hot new restaurant, to attend a meeting of the board of directors of Share Our Strength. Just as we were about to break for lunch, a host beckoned me to the restaurantโs crowded maรฎtre dโ stand to pick up the telephone. One of my managers at Union Square Cafe was on the line, calling to tell me that our restaurant was at that moment being marched on by a group of gay and lesbian activists under
the banner โNew York Boycott Colorado.โ They had formed a picket line blocking the front door of Union Square Cafe to protest my agreeing to travel to Colorado to host a seminar on Italian wines at the upcomingย Food and Wineย Classic, the magazineโs annual event in Aspen, which I had been attending as a speaker since 1987. I was dumbfounded.
I could understand why the group was incensed about Coloradoโs forthcoming vote on a state constitutional amendment that would effectively abridge civil rights for gays and lesbians. But I was baffled by its strategy of picking me as a linchpin for the protest. The only way the activists even knew about my participation on the wine panel was thatย Food and Wine, owned by American Express, had capitalized on my exposure through the recent ads, and had promoted my participation as a speaker in Aspen. I had read about the proposed amendment and happened to agree with the protestersโ position on it. But I was stunned to have become a target. A picket line in front of the Union Square Cafe? I found that incomprehensible. The boycottersโ thinking seemed to be: โIf we can pressure Danny Meyer to pull out of Aspen, that will help convince voters to support us.โ But there was no connection between my wine class and the disputed amendment. I knew that my decision whether or not to participate would have no impact on how any citizen of Colorado might decide to vote.
For days I felt trapped in this situation, which was growing worse by the minute. I was being inundated with absurd, angry faxes accusing me of homophobia and threatening to hurt my business. Some of the writers maintained that if the amendment had been relevant to a Jewish issue, I would long ago have refused to go to Aspen. The restaurantโs office floor was covered with such a mess of thermal fax paper that it looked as if the Torah itself had scrolled from our fax machines. Exasperated, I contacted
friends at American Express andย Food and Wine, and we all agreed that despite my intention to follow through on my commitment to speak, it would be best if I stayed home.
I had studied and worked in politics, and I understood that activists need tractionโand a good target. But this protest had become a perversion of what was originally a positive media effort by American Express (and me) to relieve hunger. The experience left me profoundly wary of the potential downside of media exposure.
A dozen years later, something similar happened. Toward the end of summer 2004, the Missouri delegation to the Republican National Convention rented Blue Smoke to throw itself a party. We had booked the business not only because it was highly profitable for us to do so during a week when business in New York was quite slow, but also because the โMissouri connectionโ was a great fit for the restaurant, given my roots in St. Louis. Then, just days before the convention, Missouri passed a new amendment to its state constitution, banning same-s*x marriage. When word got out that the stateโs delegation had selected Blue Smoke for its party, gay and lesbian activists arrived at the front door of our barbecue joint ahead of time and gave a special welcome to the โShow Meโ state. The protestors pelted the delegatesโ buses with eggs and yelled at the delegates as they entered the restaurant. I missed the action, having been inside the restaurant to greet the Republican guests, including Senator Kit Bond. (Not wanting to broach politics at this particular party, I steered the conversation toward things we had in common, like barbecue and the St. Louis Cardinals.) As soon as I had made my rounds, I left the party. As I walked out the door, the protesters began chanting at me: โShame! Shame! Shame!โ
Astounded, I looked at them and asked, โMe?โ
โYou!โ someone roared back. And then they began chanting, โYou, you, you!โ
A reporter bounded out of the pack and asked me to state my position on the amendment. โIโm against it,โ I said bluntly. โThereโs no story here.โ
More recently, in 2005, activists advocating a ban on foie gras began protesting and handing out gruesomely illustrated fliers every few nights on the sidewalk outside both Union Square Cafe and The Modern. (Those protests didnโt dissuade more than a few people from entering our restaurants, and to date, sales of foie gras remain where they have been for the past few years.) Our restaurants are among hundreds in America that serve foie gras, but once again, we seemed to be an attractive target for activists.
Thatโs way beyond anything Iโd imagined when I first got into the restaurant business. Itโs an odd aspect of success and one of the ironies and risks of having a public profile. Still, thereโs value in being the target of a protest: it certainly opens the door to learning more about a controversial subject. To think that, back in 1985, people laughed at me when I said Iโd be parlaying a political science degree into a career as a restaurateur!
SUCH EXPERIENCES HAVE CONDITIONED me to try to fly
under the radar as much as possible when Iโm opening a new restaurant. There have been two times in the course of my career as a restaurateur when I found myself and one of my restaurants at the center of a feeding frenzy by the media. The first was upon opening Gramercy Tavern on July 21, 1994.
What set the craziness in motion was an unprecedented cover story by Peter Kaminsky inย New Yorkย magazine, which
hit the newsstands the day the restaurant opened. The cover was simple enough: a photograph of a box of Gramercy Tavern matches, underscored with four gold stars, and the cover line: โThe Next Great Restaurant?โ
We hadnโt known about the cover in advance, but to a lot of New Yorkers it smacked of blatant self-promotion, as if we were boasting about the new restaurant, presenting ourselves with four stars, and calling ourselves the next great restaurant. Target practice commenced, with Gramercy Tavern in the crosshairs of practically every restaurant critic in New York. Most business owners, especially restaurateurs in a media capital like New York, would kill for the kind of buzz generated by an appearance on the cover ofย New York. You canโt buy that kind of advertising. But whatever interest it generated, the open invitation to eviscerate the new restaurant was even greater.
Just one week before the story appeared, I found myself in the absurd position of being the first to inform the magazineโs food critic, Gael Greene, that Gramercy Tavern was going to be the subject of a feature story. Sheโd called me to find out when the restaurant was to debut so that she could include a short blurb in โCue,โ her restaurant listings at the back of the magazine. I was faced with a difficult choice: inform her for the first time that we were to be the subject of a major feature (this was before I knew weโd be on the cover) and incur her anger over not having been told, or withhold the information and invite even more wrath for being disingenuous. When I told her about the forthcoming feature story, she blurted,ย โWhat?โย and then uttered bitter invectives against her own editor for not having communicated the information to her. I didnโt blame her for being outraged, but I knew we were in for trouble. Before it had served its first meal, Gramercy Tavern found itself in the
doghouse with one of the most influential food critics in New York.
Predictably, Gael did launch an assault on the restaurant in her review; she was responding as much to her own magazineโs hype as she was to her sense of the restaurant itself. That her editors had shown disrespect for her by not telling her about the cover story certainly added to her distaste for Gramercy Tavern.
In case we wondered about its impact, the cover ofย New Yorkย was referred to in subsequent reviews of Gramercy Tavern by other critics. For example, Ruth Reichl in theย New York Timesย cited it in her reviews. If the restaurantโs aspiration is four stars, the critics seemed to be saying, Iโll tell you what I think! Gramercy Tavern remained busy throughout the torrent of reviews, but they were a painful distraction from making the kind of improvements that would eventually allow it to evolve into a great restaurant. The story ratcheted up expectations and made it almost inevitable that we would fail to meet them.
But the opening reviews of Gramercy Tavern paled in comparison with what was written about Blue Smoke eight years later. The initial scorching reviews for Blue Smoke tested the limits of our customersโ loyalty and our employeesโ morale.
For the first time in my career the criticism felt personal and mean-spirited. One Wednesday in March 2002, I was on my way to Chicago for an early morning business meeting with family members. My grandfather was in failing health, and there were important matters to discuss concerning his philanthropic activities. Knowing that theย New York Postโs review of Blue Smoke was running that day, I picked up a copy of the paper just before boarding the plane. Flipping to
the food page, I turned pale as I saw the headline, โSmoke Blows It.โ The critic declared, โI know barbecue and this ainโt it.โ There wasnโt much in that criticism we could use to improve our performance. I could only feel bad, and I did.
Then I picked up that same morningโsย Daily Newsย and read an article about how the Internet was becoming a popular place to post anonymous musings about restaurants. Blue Smoke, the article noted, had already attracted more than sixty postings on one site, many of them scathing. A barrage of negative, often hostile reviews followed, creating the impression that by its very existence, Blue Smoke was committing a capital offenseโand that it would probably not survive. The subtext of a lot of the press was: โWho the hell is Danny Meyer to be opening a barbecue restaurant? What could he know about it? See? Aha! Blue Smoke will be his Waterloo!โ I wondered if there had ever been a more intensely scrutinized barbecue restaurant than Blue Smoke. In most parts of the country, when a barbecue joint opens, the world takes scant notice.
I tried hard to see beyond every pronouncement to find something constructive. I knew Blue Smoke was not performing anywhere near its potential. In fact, the ribs were not as good as they should have been, and not nearly as good as they would eventually be after we figured out how to make necessary adjustments to our smokestack. But the critics werenโt taking on just the ribs, pulled pork, and brisket: they seemed to be assailing my credibility, and my justification for opening a barbecue place in New York. Theย Postย pounded away with a vengeance. In one piece, one of their writers called our opening night โthe worstโ heโd ever experienced. A week later, in its review, theย Postย gave us zero stars. Its gossip column โPage Sixโ piled on by noting that Al Roker of theย Today Showย had thrown his book party at the โcritically pannedโ Blue Smoke.
I was feeling raw, reading nothing but scarring reviewsโ yet somehow we remained packed every night. Either the public wasnโt reading the reviews, or people just didnโt care what the critics said. Or perhaps people were taking a grisly interest in witnessing and even getting a taste of a train wreck in progress.
New Yorkย magazine was up next. When our fourth child, Peyton, was about to begin nursery school, the school asked Audrey (who was by now the mom of three young alumni of the schoolโHallie, Gretchen, and Charles) if she would help welcome new parents of the kids who would be in Peytonโs class. Coincidentally, one of those new parents was Adam Platt, nowย New Yorkโs lead food critic. At the open house for new families, Adam was introduced to Audrey. I was unable to attend, and the next day Audrey debated whether or not to share with me what he had told her: โI donโt know if your husband is going to like the review of Blue Smoke thatโs going to run Mondayโ he had said. โBut I do like his other restaurants.โ
I was sleepless all weekend, anxiously waiting for a damaging review. By Monday morning, I understood why Adam had warned Audrey. Heโd found Blue Smokeโs pit barbecue so-so and noted that while he loved the salmon we were serving, a friend heโd brought along who was a barbecue connoisseur refused to even try it. โSalmon does not belong on a real barbecue menu,โ the friend had told Adam.
Much of our early guest feedback felt like what weโd heard at Tabla: half the people would go to Blue Smoke more often if only our barbecue were more authentic, and the other half would go more frequently if only it were less of a barbecue restaurant.
New Yorkย struck again, when Gael Greene, still writing for the magazineโs listings section, suggested that the ribs were โwimpy,โ and that I had never been in front of a pit in my life. That did it. I had to respond. I wrote Sally and Nardie Stein, the longtime owners of Camp Nebagamon, and asked if they could unearth any photograph showing me as a fourteen-year-old in front of the fire the night I was declared the cowinner of the Chefโs Cap outdoor cooking contest.
Inveterate archivists, they managed to find it, and sent a copy to Gael Greene along with a good-natured letter about my early prowess as an outdoor cook.
One important lesson I learned while doing research for Blue Smoke, traveling through North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri, is that people love to discover barbecue places off the beaten pathโand that thereโs a correlation between oneโs affection for barbecue and the adventure of the road trip itself. I began to understand that opening a barbecue place in the middle of Manhattan denied โcue seekers the thrill of trekking to, or happening upon, something obscure and fabulous. If the same restaurant, even with all of Blue Smokeโs early flaws, had been opened by an upstart restaurateur in a remote part of Brooklyn or the Bronx, its arrivalโno, its discovery by the pressโwould have been heralded all over town: โFinally, we have great barbecue in New York!โ
Blue Smoke seemed to turn everyone into an instant expert on barbecue. Self-proclaimed connoisseurs suddenly bombarded me with their prized techniques for smoking, their secret family recipes for sauce, and their preferred regional styles. People sent me their ribs to try, and I also received pints of coleslaw, barbecue sauce, cheese crackers, and potato salad from well-meaning patrons who thought their recipes could help. Everyone felt entitled to
judge barbecue because itโs an essentially American product with a common point of reference. Nobody had ever gone to Tabla and asked, โDidnโt Grandma make a much better pulled lamb and mustard-mashed potato sandwich on toasted naan drizzled with fresh lime juice and chilies?โ
For months, Blue Smoke remained a big, juicy target. Theย New Yorker,ย which had rarely published negative restaurant reviews, wrote in its column โTable for Twoโ that Blue Smoke belonged โin a strip mall in Disney World.โ After theย New Yorkerย piece I called Eric Asimov of theย New York Times.ย One week after we opened, he had written a long feature on Blue Smokeโs novel fifteen-story smokestack, and his piece had helped create an inordinate amount of early interest and hype (and subsequent antipathy). I began by asking him, โYouโre not going to be reviewing us, are you?โ Ericโs weekly review โ$25 and Underโ never assigned stars to a restaurantโunlike the featured weekly review written by William Grimes.
Eric said, โNo. I wish I were, but Blue Smoke is high- profile, so Biff Grimes really wants to do it.โ
โTell me, is Blue Smoke really as bad as everything theyโre writing?โ I asked.
โWell, there are things you need to work on,โ he said cryptically, โbut youโre on the right track.โ He didnโt elaborate.
All that was left for would-be patrons who had read the reviews was the rather perverse pleasure of finding out for themselves what was wrong with the place. And then something odd happened. Some of our colleagues actually rallied on our behalf. Tracy and Drew Nieporent, of Myriad Restaurant Group (Montrachet, Tribeca Grill) went out on a
limb to defend us on the website Citysearch, writing, โLook, we are competitors with these guys but I have to tell youโ Blue Smoke is and will be a great restaurant. You donโt understand what goes on there.โ It was an amazing and welcome gesture of loyalty and friendship.
Not long after this, Eric Asimov called me. โIโve got two things that will surprise you,โ he said. โI am, in fact, writing the main review for Blue Smoke. I also want you to know that itโs running tomorrow as the starred review, and not in โ$25 and Under.โโ He explained that the newspaperโs regular critic, William Grimes, was unexpectedly taking a leave of absence and that theย Timesย had asked him to be the interim critic. Eric had been given only one weekโs lead time; and after having just spent the week visiting a restaurant called Smith and writing its review he had just learned that it was closing. โSomehow, Iโve got to get a review in tomorrow,โ he said, โand Blue Smoke is the only other restaurant I have eaten in three times.โ
In fact, he had been to the restaurant two times during the first days we had opened and had been in for a third visit the night before he called me. I had seen him that night and said hiโalthough it hadnโt crossed my mind that this might beย it. I had urged him to try our collard greens and for dessert, our special: a green tomato pie.
I sat there at the phone silently wringing my hands, thinking,ย The restaurant has already improved so much since our first weekโwhy canโt we have just one more month before theย Timesย weighs in?
Eric gave Blue Smoke one star (โgoodโ), and his review marked a powerful turning point for two reasons: one, it contained none of the vitriol and anger present in so many of the earlier reviews; and two, it was balanced,
constructive, and fair. He wrote about Blue Smokeโs trajectory, describing the opening of a barbecue restaurant in Manhattan as a formidable and, some might say, crazy task. He observed that it had started off awkwardly but that improvement had been dramatic and that this restaurant and its mission to bring real pit barbecue to New York deserved to be supported. The last three words of his review were encouraging: โGo, baby, go!โ
Eric also made a television appearance on the local cable news channel New York 1 in conjunction with the review. He put things in perspective on television, โThis is the first time theย New York Timesย has ever given even one star to a barbecue restaurant.โ
Sometimes the critics do come back for a second look, as Bryan Miller did in first promoting Union Square Cafe to three stars back in 1989, and as Ruth Reichl did when she upgraded Gramercy Tavern to its third star in 1996. At the end of 2002, Adam Platt became the first critic to return to Blue Smoke for an update and to write enthusiastically about its vast improvement. His decisive reversal helped make it safe for others to reexamine their early pronouncements as well. By 2003,ย New Yorkย was declaring Blue Smokeโs brisket โthe best barbecue in New York.โ
Previous success in any field invites high expectations and scrutiny the next time around. People are less forgiving when a winner falters than they are when an up-and-comer stumbles. But a mark of a champion is to welcome scrutiny, persevere, perform beyond expectations, and provide an exceptional productโfor which forgiveness is not necessary.
IT WOULD BE FASCINATING to look up all fifty-two weekly restaurant reviews in theย New York Timesย over the last ten
years, or compile theย Zagat Surveyโs โTop Five Newcomersโ each year, and count how many establishments are still in business. My guess is that it would be shocking to see how much ink gets wasted on places that start out hyped and hot but eventually donโt go anywhere. Restaurant criticism tends to be an ephemeral snapshot of an opening, providing little to no perspective on where the restaurant might end up.
Iโve observed that, with a small group of critics, the outcome of a review can be positively influenced by a free meal. One writer for an important paper wrote harshly about Blue Smoke during our opening. He was probably correct in his judgment, but a less naive approach on our part might have persuaded him not to share that observation with his many readers.
He had dined that evening with a well-connected publicist whose clients included an A-list of New York restaurants. We queried the publicist after reading the pan and said, โGee, we must have really screwed up in a big way with you guys that night. What happened?โ
The reply left no room for misunderstanding: It didnโt help that we had charged them for their meal, especially since they were sure they had seen other guests throughout the dining room being โcomped.โ That was true. It was one of our first nights, and in lieu of throwing an opening party, we had opted to invite a few friends to sit down at some of our tables as our guests. They did see Tom Brokaw and Brokawโs wife, Meredith, longtime regulars and friends; and yes, we were hosting them that night. James Carville, another loyal friend, was dining with our compliments at another table. Seeing this, plus being charged after having been on the receiving end of painfully slow ser vice,
understandably infuriated the writer. Clearly, I had played this one wrong.
One critic who had given Tabla a no-star rating when it opened was about to review Blue Smoke. He wrote for another influential publication in New York, and I understood through the restaurateur grapevine that he welcomed being โhosted.โ I had also heard that whether or not he was hosted might even affect the tone of his review. When one of my managers spotted this critic in Blue Smoke one night, she let me know. To that point, I had never comped a critic before in my entire career. I had learned that most newspapers and magazines prohibited their writers from accepting freebies in order to avoid any conflict of interest. But after weeks of watching the restaurant take a public beating, I decided to experiment. With the miserable reviews we were getting, there was nothing to lose. And since critics arenโt public officials, I reasoned that hosting them wasnโt illegal. As instructed, the manager went to the criticโs table and said: โDanny is honored that youโre dining with us tonight and he wants very much to welcome you as our guest for your first visit.โ That one visit was enough to produce a glowing two-star review, one of the very best we got early on. The strategy had worked so well that I tried it again, this time with a freelance reviewer doing a piece for a downtown magazine. Another shining review: two for two. In seventeen years I had never tried to stage a comeback by hosting critics. Choosing to do so in those circumstances was testimony to the pain from the scar tissue that had been forming on my rear end.
SOME RESTAURANT REVIEWS DEFY explanation. One of these ran in theย New York Timesย in late February 2005, just shortly after The Modern had opened, and it blindsided us.
Unexpectedly, it was not a review of our new restaurantโ The Modernโbut rather a rereview of six-year-old Eleven Madison Park. I had actually hoped for some time that weโd get another look from theย New York Times.ย Ruth Reichl had given the restaurant a โvery goodโ two-star rating three months after we opened (to the dismay of the staff and chef, who had been hoping for three stars and were actually in tears on receiving the news). After six years of continual evolving and improving, I felt that we were very close to deserving a third star.
The first half of the review, by Frank Bruni, now theย Timesโs lead reviewer, read like a valentine: โIf anyone has cracked the code for high-end restaurants in this fickle city,โ it began, โit is Danny Meyer.โ Our way of nourishing and nurturing guests had, Bruni wrote, transformed them into โbesotted loyalists,โ while enabling us to โachieve sophistication without self-consciousness, polish without pretension.โ He also took note of the smile in the reservationistsโ voices on the phone, the smile at the front door, the smile on the waitersโ faces. I was loving itโat least until I continued on to the next column.
Abruptly, his tone veered sharply from a valentine to damning with faint praise to outright scolding. True, the roasted lobster with lemongrass veloutรฉ was โunforgettable,โ but the zinfandel-marinated beef cheeks tasted like โday-old pot roast,โ the chicken was โovercooked,โ and the sweetbreads were โdry.โ Only the pastry chef Nicole Kaplanโs dessertsโโpure pleasureโโ survived unscathed. By the time Bruni was done dissecting our offerings, he reversed course. He had initially praised our hospitality but now he issued the cynical suggestion that the welcome was all a facade. โAlthough the dining room is flooded with those smiling servers,โ he observed,
โtheir dance is less a ballet than a military drill, glaringly mechanized.โ
The last line was painful to staff members at Eleven Madison Park, and to me. The restaurant retained its two stars, but this was not, in the end, just a review of Eleven Madison Park. It felt like a sweeping judgment about the genuineness of our hospitality. I couldnโt find a scintilla of usefulness in being told by a critic that our hospitality was not sincere, or that it was executed by roteโespecially when his experiences with us, detailed earlier in the review, seemed to imply caring treatment by warm human beings.
I had no clue as to what Bruniโs motivation was in admonishing Eleven Madison Park. He summarized his review as less a โcomplaintโ than a โrumination on the limitations of all formulas, even Mr. Meyerโs.โ I was anguished about his observations and pained to see them shared with hundreds of thousands of readers. Believe me, if someone has that big and loud a megaphone, Iโd much rather it was one of our โbesotted loyalists.โ
Frank Bruni had been right about those loyalists; in fact, he had stirred them to action. Clearly, a three-star review would have put the wind at our backs by generating more first-time guests; but no review could have produced as strongโas protectiveโa reaction from our enormous following as this one had. We got many dozens of letters as well as e-mails and visits from people who found his comments off base and contrary to their own experience. I was stopped at my sonsโ school the next morning by a mother. โThis just makes us want to come to the restaurant all the more,โ she said indignantly.
I felt a need to address our staff at the restaurant. I immediately reminded them that Iโm the first one to
Embrace constructive criticism with an open mind. If the beef cheeks at Eleven Madison Park are too dry or the service is too slow, itโs our duty to address and resolve the issue. In a detailed email to my chefs and general managersโwho shared it with their teamsโI expressed my thoughts candidly.
โIt was deeply unsettling that Mr. Bruni used Eleven Madison Park as a lens to evaluate the performance of all our restaurants,โ I wrote. โBy suggesting our hospitality is on โautopilot,โ he implied that the warm welcome we offer is somehow insincere or mechanical. It felt as though Mr. Bruni was trying to dissect the very essence of what our guests treasure most about their experiences with us, only to criticize us for it. Thereโs simply no way our team could win the hearts of countless discerning New Yorkers with fake smiles and robotic service.โ
I concluded the message with wisdom my late grandfather, Irving Harris, often shared: โPeople will say many wonderful things about your business, and some unkind things too. Remember, youโre never as good as the highest praise nor as bad as the harshest criticism. Stay grounded, be clear about your values, aim for continuous improvement, and always treat others with decency.โ
Thatโs what I hope our restaurants will always work towardโjust as we have done since day one.