NOVEMBER 20, 2004, WAS a day I’ll never forget. New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which to my art-loving family’s way of thinking vied for interest with the seven wonders of the world, had closed for major renovations in 2001. Now, on this red-letter day three years later, it was reopening after a stunning new expansion as the art world looked on in anticipation. And Union Square Hospitality Group was part of all this, opening not just one but four eating establishments within the museum’s complex. For us this was not just a matter of conceiving and operating all of the food ser vice at MoMA; it was about doing so during the high-profile relaunch of an internationally renowned institution. The degree of pressure and scrutiny I felt numbed me into a surreal sense of calm.
As a businessman, I listen to two internal voices. First, there is one urging me to succeed, expand, and grow. The other is a persistent ambivalent voice whispering, “Caution: go deeper, go slower.” Sometimes I have to get smacked in the face a few times before my competitive juices start flowing and I say, “OK, I’m ready for it.” I’d really wanted our company to win the high-stakes competition for the
MoMA contract, but now that we had it, I wondered if we’d bitten off more than we could chew.
The museum had been doing everything possible to overcome all kinds of complicated last-minute construction obstacles and delays so that it could be ready for its announced reopening on November 20, and it mandated that we be open that day too. Making matters even more challenging for us, MoMA had decided to offer free admission to the public on November 20—there would be 20,000 people descending on the museum that day. There was no way to tell them they couldn’t come to the restaurant; ready or not, we just had to serve them. Despite having only four days to train our staff, we managed to get Cafe 2, our fresh take on the traditional museum cafeteria, open that day, and we served around 1,500 people there.
We served another 500 hungry visitors at Terrace 5, our café for desserts and light fare; and 250 more guests in the Bar Room portion of The Modern, the only part of that restaurant which we were even remotely prepared to open on November 20. (For several nights leading up to the opening, I had uncomfortable visions of museum trustees and executives peering at us with disapproval, wondering why they had selected us, and why we weren’t yet on top of our game. And that was in addition to even sharper concerns about what the critics would have to say.) Because the museum prohibits open-flame cooking at Cafe 2 and Terrace 5 (the kitchen is in the basement, and with no ser vice- elevator access to the fifth floor), our inexperienced staff members were pushing white carts full of meals and dishes up and down the public elevators, riding cheek to jowl with the throngs of visitors.
Our new staff members brought a bright attitude to work that day, but I was concerned about whether we had done enough to prepare them for the onslaught I knew they were
about to face. In just over three months, we’d enlarged our overall USHG staff by nearly 50 percent, from 650 to more than 1,000 employees. And we’d engineered that buildup under substandard circumstances: We’d had insufficient time for careful interviewing, hiring, and training them. In fact we had no place to train them. Because construction delays meant there was no certificate of occupancy for the restaurants, it wasn’t until October that these spaces were even habitable. And even had we hired the staff, there was no locker room available—there was not even a staff bathroom. At one point on opening day, as I watched the snaking line of people waiting to get into Terrace 5 brush up against Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, I had two distinct reactions that encapsulated my ecstatic anguish at achieving this day at MoMA.
First: Oh, my God. We’ve just opened a restaurant with one of the art world’s greatest masterpieces hanging outside the front door!
Second: Oh, my God. The people wating in line to eat at my restaurant are going to ruin the masterpiece, and I’ll be responsible!
The courage to grow demands the courage to let go. Whenever you expand in business—not just the restaurant business—the process is incredibly challenging, especially for leaders who first rose to the top because of their tendency to want to control all the details. You have to let go. You have to surround yourself with ambassadors—people who know how to accomplish goals and make decisions, while treating people the way you would. They’re comfortable expressing themselves within the boundaries of your business culture, and content with the role they play
in helping a larger team achieve its greatest potential success.
Opening a new restaurant can make some of your existing customers irate. Each time we’ve undertaken a new venture, a certain percentage of our existing customer base opts not to come along with us. Some people won’t even try the new place; some others go just once out of politeness.
My first awareness of that reality was a crushing blow for me. You mean not everything we do is necessarily lovable to those who love us?
But this has happened so regularly that I’ve had the chance to analyze what’s going on. Sometimes our loyalists are unable to embrace a new restaurant, just as an older child may not fully celebrate the arrival of a newborn sibling. Customers have a natural fear that we might forget them. You can almost hear some of them saying, “Why the hell is he going into Indian food? Now he’s going into the barbecue business? Is he off his rocker? What? Another one? Frozen custard? This is the end. I’m done. He doesn’t love me anymore.”
One of the first people to express that concern to me was Paul Gottlieb, then publisher at Harry N. Abrams. Paul began eating lunch at table 24 at Union Square Cafe in 1985 and continued to do so on more days than not for the next eighteen years. He became a great friend—always providing caring feedback—and we talked frequently. His reactions were typically paternal and direct, starting with the first time I told him about my plans to open Gramercy Tavern in 1994. “You’re not going to open a second restaurant!” he said. “We’ll never see you here again. It won’t be the same.”
Paul, who was also a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, expressed the same concern about my expanding four
years later, with the opening of Tabla and Eleven Madison Park. Yet, ironically, it was he who in the early 1990s, even before Gramercy Tavern existed, had first tried to persuade me to open a restaurant at MoMA. We met at his office, and Paul spoke on behalf of the board of trustees. The museum then had a restaurant on its second floor called the Members’ Dining Room. I had been fascinated with MoMA since I was a child: people on both sides of my family were serious collectors of modern art, and my mother had run an art gallery and was a trustee of the St. Louis Art Museum.
Our kitchen calendar was always from MoMA, and our home was furnished with all kinds of products from the museum’s design collection. In fact, for the twenty-five years my parents were married, the bond they most consistently shared, beyond their children, seemed to be their mutual affection for contemporary art.
Paul’s entreaty was compelling, but after two or three enticing meetings and lots of careful thought, I told him that I simply wasn’t ready to open a second restaurant, and that if I ever did, I couldn’t imagine opening one in midtown. I lived downtown and understood how important being able to walk to all my restaurants had been as a factor in our success. Nor did it seem to make economic sense to operate a restaurant in which people could eat only during museum hours. This would essentially be a lunch restaurant—and one that didn’t have its own separate sidewalk entrance.
Paul remained a close friend and source of sage advice through the years. One day in mid-2001 he called and said he had something very exciting to tell me. “We’re closing the museum,” he confided when we met. “There’s going to be a fantastic expansion and renovation unlike anything in our history.” He added, “We want to put a restaurant in the new MoMA, and this time we’re serious about the food. The
museum is ready to discuss a stand-alone restaurant with its own street entrance.”
Recalling our discussion a decade earlier, he said, “This time around, you need to take it seriously. What you and your team could do with dining at the Museum of Modern Art could be amazing. There will definitely be others competing for this, but you must submit a proposal.”
That meeting was one of the last times we ever spoke.
Paul died suddenly a few weeks later at the age of sixty- seven, long before those who had the honor of knowing him were prepared to say good-bye. His revelation about MoMA’s historic expansion—and his insistence that we be a part of it—started me on a passionate pursuit whose outcome ultimately became a legacy of our long friendship.
In November 2001, David Swinghamer and I had our first introductory meeting with the two senior executives at MoMA: James Gara and Mike Margitich. We learned that the museum would reopen not just with a restaurant but also with three cafés—two for museum visitors and another for its staff. The restaurant organization selected for this opportunity would also become the “preferred” (but not exclusive) caterer for museum events. The museum executives urged us to consider opening a concession stand at MoMA QNS, the museum’s temporary quarters in Long Island City, Queens, during its three-year absence from Manhattan. They enthusiastically told us about the throngs of people who would be attending the forthcoming blockbuster Matisse-Picasso show at MoMA QNS. From our conversation, it seemed implicit that whoever ran the temporary concession would earn their favor and enjoy a competitive edge in landing the big deal when MoMA eventually reopened on West Fifty-third Street.
At about this time, my assistant, Jenny Dirksen (now our director of community investment), shared a priceless expression her grandmother had taught her: One tuchas can’t dance at two weddings. It’s nice to be invited to a lot of parties. But as much as you may want to attend them all, it’s important to acknowledge that you can be in only one place at a time, and do one thing well. My own grandfather used to express similar wisdom: Doing two things like a half-wit never equals doing one thing like a whole wit.
Regrettably, the timing for the concession in Queens could hardly have been worse. We were still in the throes of preopening construction at Blue Smoke, and it didn’t take long to determine that we did not have the wherewithal to do both projects well. It was extremely difficult to turn MoMA down again, but that was the right decision. Still, we assured the museum that we would be very interested in discussing the larger project down the road; and to keep our relationship with MoMA alive, we conducted several more meetings with executives, curators, and trustees over the next year. One opportunity presented itself when the museum temporarily shifted its basement film center to the Gramercy Theater on East Twenty-third Street off Lexington Avenue—a short walk from three of our restaurants. We created a co-marketing deal: museum members who came to see a MoMA film received a certificate good for dessert at Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, or Blue Smoke. We kept our irons in the fire until late 2002, when the museum set the deadline for receiving proposals.
Serving food in MoMA seemed like a remarkable opportunity, and yet we weren’t entirely sure we really wanted to win this thing. Having received countless pitches from real estate developers over the years, we had always
had the luxury of being selective about which ones to weigh seriously. Having the tables turned and being judged by others was uncomfortable. I also had my usual nagging mixed feelings about the pace at which we were now growing and at which we would continue to grow if we were to prevail. The MoMA project would transform our business by bringing us into the world of institutional dining, quick- ser vice cafés, and catering. And all the new employees it would require to staff four new dining establishments and an off-premises catering facility would make the company balloon in size. Wasn’t this the kind of expansionist dreaming that my more sober-minded colleagues and relatives had always counseled against?
But something unusual happened. The people in my life whom I had always counted on to ask, “What are you thinking, Danny?” were actually encouraging me. Right up until he died, Paul Gottlieb, who had groaned with dismay every time I opened another restaurant, was relentless in urging me to submit a proposal to MoMA. My mother, whose skeptical view of business growth had been colored by my father’s failed expansions, was now a member of MoMA’s Prints and Illustrated Books committee and was tickled by the idea of our opening a restaurant there. My grandfather Irving Harris had been a generous supporter of MoMA. He was now in the sunset of his life, but he urged me on. And then there was my own voice. I was increasingly confident in the capacity of the leadership team I had surrounded myself with. Most important, I trusted myself and my own motives.
So, the chance to create something for the Museum of Modern Art excited me. This was one venture I viewed not just as a business opportunity but also as a tremendous privilege. Then Audrey, who knew how consuming this project would be for me—and for our family—said, “Of course you’ve got to go for this!” That settled it.
I didn’t know (and still have no idea) whom we were competing with in the selection process, but I did know that the thorough, painstaking evaluations (conducted for the museum by PriceWaterhouseCoopers) would be focused on three broad categories:
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Our overall creative vision—how we would conceive of the restaurant, the cafés, and the catering for museum events.
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The value of our financial package to the museum (what kind of capital investment we’d propose making along with the museum to build the restaurants, and how much we’d propose paying in rent).
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What we brought to the table in the way of relevant experience and organizational capacity to indicate that we’d actually be able to pull all this off.
Conceiving the restaurant itself, would no doubt be challenging, but it seemed relatively straightforward in terms of our prior experience. Tackling the two very different visitor cafés within the museum as well as the cafeteria for MoMA’s staff would be a fresh challenge. And the blueprints for the museum didn’t indicate enough space had been allocated for a catering kitchen, so it was clear we’d have to lease space and build an additional kitchen elsewhere.
Funding all this would present its own steep hurdles, but the biggest question was whether we could actually juggle all those plates at the same time.
If ever we were to launch a restaurant outside the familiar precinct in which we had done business for twenty years, MoMA felt like the ideal place. The museum is viewed in the world of art precisely as I dreamed our restaurants
might be in the world of fine dining: an institution that endures and is at once forward-looking, sensibly grounded in tradition, and relevant today.
I asked David Swinghamer to do much of the legwork for the proposal. We didn’t go nuts trying to create the s*xiest- looking presentation of all time, although we did enlist the professional support of Eric Baker, the imaginative graphic designer we had worked with on the logo for Blue Smoke, as well as many other projects. The proposal was a simple eleven-page document, describing our identity and why we saw ourselves as being a good fit for MoMA. Our financial offer assured MoMA that we’d have plenty of skin in the game (in terms of how much of our own money we’d be investing in the build-outs, as well as what percentage of sales we’d be paying to the museum as rent); our ideas for the restaurant and cafés were creative, reasoned, and sound; and as for relevant experience, that would be entirely up to MoMA to judge.
During the selection process, we chose not to lobby anyone connected to MoMA, even though I was well aware that a number of regular guests at our restaurants were trustees who might be involved in the selection. If we were chosen, I wanted the choice to be based on merit. Later, there would be plenty of opportunity to compete with passion at making the restaurant, cafés, and catering operations the best they could be. We were asked to participate in a few intensive interviews with members of the museum’s senior executive team. I felt fully prepared to field their questions, and the experience was exhilarating.
About ninety days after we had submitted the proposal, we received a call from MoMA’s chief operating officer, James Gara: we had been chosen. Within moments, another call arrived, this one from a trustee, Bob Menschel, who was
warm in his congratulations and generous in his praise. At first the news was numbing; in a flash I began to imagine the extraordinary amount of work that lay ahead of us. And being MoMA’s choice didn’t mean that we had a deal. As it turned out, eight months of detailed work and negotiations still remained before we would actually sign our deal in November 2003. During those eight months we were not permitted to announce or discuss our selection with anyone.
We batted around different rent structures for our various food businesses and established that MoMA would have control over what kinds of art could and would be displayed in our dining rooms. We determined that the museum would have approval rights over our design of the restaurants, as well as in our choice of chef and general manager. (The museum’s reasoning was that our dining facilities would be a representative extension of the museum experience, and that this high level of control would insure the institution against inappropriate or poor hiring decisions on our part.) We went back and forth over real-estate issues, debated design layouts down to the inch, struggled to find adequate space for our back-of-the-house offices, debated whose phone system we would use, and agreed about which museum restrooms were available to or off-limit for our staff.
Not long after signing our deal, I came up with the name for our fine-dining restaurant. I remembered what my dad had taught me during the naming of Union Square Cafe. “Just name it what it is.” “The Modern” answered that challenge. I bounced the idea off trustee Ronald Lauder, who had taken a generously supportive and nearly proprietary interest in the restaurant project, and when he later expressed the board’s enthusiasm, the decision was made.
AS MY TEAM AND I began to think about what we might add to the dialogue on museum dining, I asked myself: “Who ever wrote the rule that you can’t enjoy an elegant, intimate fine-dining experience in a warm, hospitable ambience within the traditionally institutional context of a museum?
And who ever wrote the rule that you can’t get a warm welcome and have excellent food, hospitably delivered to tables in what is traditionally a tray-ser vice museum cafeteria?” In both cases the challenge was to take what has historically been an institutional, captive audience experience and make it feel warm, personal, and worthy of becoming a dining destination on its own.
What was there to add to the dialogue on museum cafeterias? To begin with, we acknowledged the basic reasons museum visitors patronize a cafeteria: it gets you off your feet, feeds you quickly, and charges a reasonable price. Museum cafeterias are typically designed to appeal to a very broad swath of customers: older people, younger people, Americans, foreigners, locals, tourists, students. Not being permitted to cook in the cafés due to their proximity to the art galleries would add an element of challenge. We would have to come up with a delicious menu that could be prepared in our basement kitchen, delivered to the cafeterias, and still taste fresh and delicious.
We identified two aspects of museum cafeterias we thought we could improve upon. First, most people don’t really like having to carry a tray and look for a cafeteria table, especially with young kids hanging on them, or while they’re trying to assist an aging parent or grandparent.
Second, cafeteria food—no matter how fresh it may once have been—has already been prepared and plated and has
invariably been sitting out for some time in a steam table or wrapped in plastic.
We realized that if we could quickly assemble fresh ingredients to order and eliminate trays and prepackaged, preplated, prewrapped foods, we would have something special. I remember scratching my head, thinking about all the world cuisines that actually benefit from having been cooked in advance. What came to my mind most conclusively was the Roman rosticceria, one of the world’s original quick ser vice concepts, and one I had always enjoyed when I was a student in Rome. These places serve seasonal foods that have already been braised or roasted, as well as cured meats or cheeses, plated to order. This kind of cooking has been done for ages in Rome, but it was a fresh approach for a museum eatery. It was a solution that suited our model perfectly: a classic culinary concept within a new framework.
In the style of ser vice that we had in mind, you would order your food from a cashier, who would give you a number; then you’d go find your own seat; and soon we’d come find you with your food. Other restaurants had successfully done it in the past. In fact, David Swinghamer first brought the idea to us, having seen it used by his former colleagues at the Corner Bakery, and then I saw it again at Culver’s (a frozen custard and burger specialist) in St. Joseph, Michigan. I was skeptical at first, but on seeing the system work in Washington, D.C., at a Corner Bakery, I was sold. As with almost everything else we’ve ever done, we were rearranging familiar, existing notes to play a fresh- sounding chord.
We looked at the respective roles of the three MoMA dining experiences we were creating as replenish, refresh, and restore. Cafe 2 would be for replenishing, filling your
body with fuel. Terrace 5 is situated opposite the gallery in which are hung masterpieces from the museum’s permanent collection—Cézanne, Seurat, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and more. Not a bad address for a restaurant! We imagined Terrace 5 as a place to refresh visitors after the fatigue that can set in after seeing so much good art. We would serve lots of things that featured the stimulating triumvirate of sugar, alcohol, and caffeine. The very location of Terrace 5 added significantly, in our view, to the dialogue on museum dining (and, in fact, the whole museum experience). Being able to view Starry Night or Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon after enjoying a martini, a glass of wine, or an ice cream sundae and a cappuccino could allow you to see it as you’d never seen it before. The Modern would be for restoring. It would serve as a restaurant both for New Yorkers and for museumgoers whose choice was to sit down, eat well, and also be taken care of. The Modern was conceived to nurture food lovers as well as to nourish them.
WE WERE RELIEVED WHEN the museum agreed to select our longtime architects, Bentel and Bentel, as designers for the restaurant. Their family’s deep modernist roots made them perfectly suited for the complex task, and our experience collaborating on four previous restaurants would be an important advantage in order to tackle MoMA’s challenging project under a very tight timeline.
Another crucially important artistic decision for this project was selecting the chef for The Modern. I wanted The Modern to become a critically acclaimed destination restaurant—not just an excellent version of a museum restaurant. My initial thought was to find one chef for the restaurant and another to oversee the cafés and catering.
By dividing these duties, I believed we’d have a better chance at excelling in all areas. I ran through my own mental Rolodex of many prospective chefs, most of whom, on reflection, would have been completely wrong. When I thought about someone who was cooking primarily Italian, it didn’t make sense. If I thought about someone who was cooking with southwestern flavors, it felt odd (this was not the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum). So did anything else ethnic, such as Indian, Asian, Chinese, or Japanese.
The modernist art movement was rooted primarily in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and France. Not only would the new restaurant be taking its design cues from the museum’s existing architecture and from modernism; it would also be looking out onto the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller sculpture garden, with famous works by the artists Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Ellsworth Kelly, Joel Shapiro, Gaston LaChaise, and Alberto Giacometti. If that was going to be the elegant backdrop for our restaurant, then our cooking had better present an entirely consistent foreground.
At one point I had made a list of thirty prospective chefs, and others called me to throw their toques into the ring.
One leading contender took himself out of the running when the very complicatted scope of the project became apparent to him. Indeed, the reality of this complexity was catching up with me. The clock was suddenly ticking down to 365 days for an opening in November 2004, and we needed to hire a chef to get up and running by then, as well as to overcome major issues of design and construction that were suddenly no longer a matter of “what if”—they had become real. On New Year’s Day 2004 I was at a party in the home of Dorothy and Doug Hamilton, founders of the French Culinary Institute, the most prominent culinary trade school in New York, when I ran into the school’s dean, the
esteemed French chef Alain Saillhac. I described my vision for The Modern and asked chef Sailhac whom he thought I should hire. Immediately he suggested a dynamic young chef named Gabriel Kreuther.
Why hadn’t I thought of that? I had enjoyed Gabriel’s cooking at Atelier, a French restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan, where he had served as executive chef following several years at Jean Georges. Gabriel was from the province of Alsace, in the northeast corner of France; and what I knew of his cooking style (forward, personal, classic, spare, and soulful) seemed completely compatible with a modernist setting. Gabriel was still in his midthirties but had already cooked at some of the best restaurants in New York. That year Food and Wine had named him one of the top ten best new chefs in America. The fit felt very right. Over the course of several months Gabriel and I proceeded to discuss the project and visit the construction site. We got to know one another before I made an offer, which Gabriel accepted.
In hiring chefs, my goal is to do three things: develop a close, mutually trusting and respectful relationship; establish a shared vision of what the food should be; and encourage them to search their own heart and soul for inspiration, urging them to go further than they’ve ever gone before. I am especially proud of the enduring bonds of shared success and loyalty that I have enjoyed with our chefs over the years.
I’ve learned that an effective way to achieve all those goals with a new chef (and to get to know the essence of the person) is to return with him to his roots. It was a moving experience to travel with Gabriel in Alsace and to see his homeland through his eyes and his palate. Of course the region holds special meaning for me too; my parents
had lived in the neighboring Lorraine for the first two years of their marriage. Alsace-Lorraine has historically been a melting pot, with French, German, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish cultures living together through war and hardship, producing a resilient people and excellent, soul-satisfying food.
Gabriel devised our ambitious itinerary and chose the restaurants, which ranged from a Michelin three-star in Strasbourg (Buerehiesel) and another in the middle of the forest well to the north (L’Arnsbourg) to quaint, out-of-the way winstubs—the traditional “wine bistros” of Alsace. He took me to the village of Niederschaffolsheim (population 1,246), where he grew up, and told me how he began helping his mother and grandmother with kitchen chores by the time he was six. Before he was a teenager, he was cooking for real. Gabriel was fascinated by his family’s cooking, or, as he put it, “our everyday home cooking.” (Also, he confided that by making himself more and more useful in the kitchen he avoided more grueling farm chores outside!) He learned from his mother and grandmother everything he needed to know about selecting the best fresh ingredients. We visited his boyhood home, where his proud mother served us a hunk of perfectly ripened Muenster cheese (the local favorite) that she had procured at the nearby farmers’ market; this Muenster was superior to the one we’d had the night before at the three-star restaurant. And even though she knew we were heading off for a three-star lunch, she insisted that we first try her homemade quiche lorraine with salad and cheese. Gabriel showed me his grade school; but he saved his greatest enthusiasm for our trip to the musty wine cellar in his mother’s chilly basement where he had been collecting and storing bottles since the age of fourteen. He showed me where he lovingly made eau-de-vie—or schnapps, as he called it in German—and presented me with a Campari
bottle filled with homemade mirabelle to take home to New York. It was an engrossing three days.
A pattern I’ve noticed in chefs is that many spend tremendous energy when they’re young working to build a life away from where and how they grew up, in order to free themselves and define who they are on their own terms. It takes a lot of confidence and emotional security for people— and especially chefs, whose cooking can so clearly reveal their roots—to feel they have accomplished enough in the outside world to “come home” in a culinary or an actual sense. My “getting to know you” trips to Italy with Michael Romano and (before Gramercy Tavern opened) with Tom Colicchio were in part meant to encourage them to rediscover their culinary roots. It struck me that Michael had proved himself as an extraordinary French chef before he permitted himself to cook Italian from his heart and remember the joy that he got from his mother’s or his grandmother’s cucina. There had been little on Tom’s excellent menus at his former restaurant, Mondrian, that revealed much exploration of his family’s Italian heritage.
Similarly, Tabla’s executive chef, Floyd Cardoz, who was born in Bombay and grew up in Goa, a former Portuguese colony on India’s west coast, had begun his stellar career as sous-chef to Gray Kunz and his French-based cooking at Lespinasse. Just as it took Michael some time to willingly express his Italian roots at Union Square Cafe, it took Floyd a couple of years to fully embrace his Indian identity and create not just Tabla’s elegant fusion fare but the bolder, more ethnic Indian “soul food” we serve downstairs at Bread Bar.
I wanted Gabriel to be able to hasten that journey to his culinary home. Given the high-profile scrutiny I expected at The Modern, he wouldn’t have the luxury of waiting years to learn and grow on the job. It’s not that I was interested in
seeing Gabriel faithfully replicate an Alsatian winstub. Some elements of that rustic cuisine would translate and others would not, if we imported them to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. What was crucial was for him to cook for New Yorkers from his Alsatian heart.
We spent our time driving through farmland, strolling around small towns and villages, and studying dozens of menus—their shape, size, categories, formats, and even font styles. We talked about what kind of uniforms we’d want our staff to wear. We checked out pottery and furniture shops and discussed décor. We visited dozens of pastry, cheese, and butcher shops. It was easy to see how Gabriel’s very personal style of cooking had been nurtured in and around the farmhouses of his extended family. He told me, for instance, all about the classic Alsatian baeckoffe, a pork, veal, or beef stew made by marinating the meat in local white wines (Riesling, Edelzwicker, and Sylvaner), and then baking it with layers of potatoes (sliced an eighth of an inch thin), carrots, leeks, onions, parsley, pepper, and tomatoes on top. Each family’s recipe was just a little different.
Baeckoffe means “baker’s oven,” and is so named because homemakers hauled their own huge pots to the village baker before church and would later pick them up, bring them home, and then serve the one-pot meal for Sunday dinner.
The idea of creating a new hybrid by blending classic Alsatian elements with dishes more familiar to Americans thrilled me. As we ate together I would look at a menu item
—baeckoffe, tarte à l’oignon, choucroute, foie gras, quiche lorraine—and ask Gabriel: “What does that dish mean to you? Can you remember the best version you ever ate?” He’d say, “Sure. My grandmother made the best one I’ve ever had.” “Well, then, tell me about that,” I’d ask. “Can you imagine any application for The Modern?”
Together we saw how many wonderful things butchers did with livers and sausage and discussed how meats are butchered differently in Alsace, and throughout Europe for that matter. (Many familiar American cuts for steaks and chops are virtually nonexistent there. Instead one finds an abundance of lengthwise cuts and roasts.) We saw how many types of sausage are made from so many different parts of so many different animals. At one butcher shop I pointed to something that looked just like liverwurst and said, “Gabriel, there it is. We should be able to make the best liverwurst sandwich New York has ever had.”
“Ah, that’s saucisse de foie!” he said. “I remember when I was growing up we would stud it with black truffles.”
“If you take something traditional, like saucisse de foie, that’s done exquisitely well in Alsace,” I said, “and then make it the best version of liverwurst that New Yorkers have ever had, then you’ve added something exciting to the dialogue.”
I urged Gabriel to view his work at Atelier—excellent as it was—as a launching pad for what he would do next at The Modern. I told him that I was absolutely convinced that he had yet to do his greatest work. And where better to frame that work than inside the Museum of Modern Art!
Our gastronomic adventure was my version of an off-site management meeting designed to help me get to know, motivate, and build bonds with a new colleague. I love to encourage a pastry chef or a cook or an executive chef to remember the first time he or she ever successfully cooked chocolate chip cookies or brownies (or, in Gabriel’s case, tarte flambée). If I can get people to relive the pride of such an accomplishment—the joy of having solved a problem, of tasting something delicious, and most important, the
pleasure of presenting a gift to their parents—I know we’ll be in good shape.
I also encountered more fortune when I met Ana Marie Mormando. In mid-2003, I’d heard that Ana Marie, the longtime director of operations for Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants, was considering a career change. I’d agreed to interview her even though we didn’t have any specific job opening for her.
We hadn’t yet gotten the go-ahead from MoMA, and it hadn’t dawned on me whom we’d put in charge of our museum operations if we were to take on the project. In our first meeting, I learned that Ana Marie had run an earlier incarnation of the Members’ Dining Room at MoMA, and that she had experience operating restaurants at Lincoln Center. The lights went on. We brought her aboard for a full year before opening at MoMA, during which time she was responsible for our construction and opening timeline. We also wanted her to get a flavor for and become an established part of our Union Square Hospitality Group culture.
Ana Marie led a talented team of over 300 staff members to open our dining facilities at MoMA with little time, scant practice, and unrelenting pressure. And this was all without a general manager for The Modern, since the GM we hired at the outset had resigned about a week before the restaurant opened—acknowledging a mutual mistake. He was someone about whom we had heard wonderful things, but who unfortunately was just not the right fit to open this restaurant in this setting, and under this amount of pressure.
IN THE FINAL DAYS leading up to our opening, as it became clear that we were on a collision course with November 20, I remember saying something to the museum executives that was not especially appreciated: “Unlike a piece of art, restaurants are not inanimate objects. You can’t simply hang them on a wall by a set date and expect them to work or even look good. They need to be trained, fine-tuned, focused, recalibrated.” It was my emotional way of trying to bring reality to bear on the near impossibility of our mandate to hire and train so many people in a rushed, high- pressure situation. Reluctantly, the museum agreed to allow us to push back the opening of the Bar Room to the general public until January 2005. On February 7 we at last opened our doors to the public for dinner in the dining room of The Modern. And just one night later, on February 8, the New York Times’s restaurant critic Frank Bruni paid the restaurant a visit.
Unbeknownst to us, Mr. Bruni was also dining at Eleven Madison Park. His two-star review of the restaurant on February 23 caught the staff by surprise, and resulted in a demoralized team. We had never known what he looked like (the custom for food critics is to be anonymous whenever that is possible, even if it means dining in disguise), but the first time he came to The Modern, a champagne salesman who happened to be at the bar pointed to a dark-haired man at a table and said to one of our bartenders, “That’s Frank Bruni over there.” By our best count, the reviewer paid us eleven separate visits in total before he had at last gathered enough information to write his review. At the very least, his visits alone had generated significant revenue for the restaurants.
I have never opened a restaurant where the members of the staff were as keyed up and uptight about a review as everyone at The Modern was in anticipation of this one.
Managers, cooks, and servers were so concerned about how well or poorly we would fare that many of them stopped acting naturally. The morning after one of Bruni’s visits, at the end of March 2005, I was on a spring vacation with my family at the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort in Longboat Key, Florida, when I got a call just as I was leaving the tennis court. It was Ana Marie phoning to say that something terrible had happened the previous night. One of our wine captains had gone up to the critic as he was retrieving his coat at the end of the meal and told him how grateful she was that he had just given a glowing two-star review to her friend’s restaurant, Stone Park Cafe, a small place in Brooklyn.
Some members of the staff were beside themselves because our wine captain had broken a ludicrous cardinal rule: even if you know who a critic is, you must play the game of pretending that you don’t know. This wine captain, therefore, had acted unprofessionally, Ana Marie said. What should we do? I had to laugh.
It would be unnatural behavior not to extend especially warm hospitality to someone who has returned to the restaurant even three or four times, never mind eleven.
That wine captain had been expressing “hospitalitarian” soul! And soul was what seemed to me to be missing from The Modern. We were quickly becoming technically proficient. In fact, knowing that we were on such a big, brightly lit stage (with all those trustees, foodies, journalists, regulars from our other restaurants, and museum visitors watching us at close range), I’d reversed my usual strategy and focused on hiring more “49 percenters,” with their seasoned technical skills. But the staff was stiff and so psyched out by the perceived pressure to be perfect that our ser vice wasn’t nearly as warm and hospitable as our standards required, or as our guests expected it to be. The
fact that incidents like this one were being blown out of proportion made me realize just how uptight everyone was. Did anyone truly believe that a genuine expression of gratitude would have any downward influence on the number of stars we would receive from the New York Times? Would a restaurant critic lower his judgment of the restaurant or its food because someone had actually spoken to him?
Eleven visits were a lot of experiences to arrive at the conclusion that The Modern was a two-star restaurant, as Bruni did in May 2005. I’ve always wished that restaurant critics would be more like wine critics. They taste wines that are very young and predict the future: “This is where the wine is going. It will be a classic someday.” I don’t think Bruni would have betrayed his readers or damaged his reputation if he’d written, “This restaurant is on a fast trajectory to become a three-star restaurant.” We didn’t conceive or design The Modern to be “very good.” It was born to be excellent, and in its first year the restaurant was judged so by the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, Esquire (“Best New Restaurant in the United States”), Wallpaper (“Best New Restaurant in the World”), Time Out New York (“Best New Restaurant in New York”), The James Beard Foundation (Best New Restaurant in America), and even the 2006 Michelin Guide to New York City, which gave The Modern one star just months after its opening.
In some ways, Bruni’s review was a turning point for the restaurant. It at last liberated the senior management team from the stress of waiting and wondering, and encouraged them to roll up their sleeves and begin to have some fun. It took the hot lid off a highly pressurized boiler. I even think the food improved soon after the review because Gabriel had been playing it safe in anticipation of the piece. The
waiters loosened up and began smiling and looking people in the eye, and they too improved. Everyone had been playing not to lose, as opposed to playing to win. Now the staff was finding it enjoyable, for the first time, to exceed expectations. “You mean to tell me this is only a two-star restaurant? You guys are good!”
In fact, I too felt free. I was, for the first time in my career of opening restaurants, feeling relaxed. This project was so huge and so far beyond any fantasies I may have had about actually being in control that it forced me let go. It made me do what I’d always known I needed to do—surround myself with very talented people; give them clear direction, goals, and feedback; and not try to be everywhere at once. Well, except for the first three or four months, when I made two trips each day to the museum to go on my rounds, collect and connect the new dots, turn over all the rocks, and check in on everything.
BEFORE WE OPENED THE Modern, I’m not sure there had ever been a museum restaurant in America that was a destination in and of itself. The museum restaurants I knew of had been designed primarily as amenities for attendees. They were meant more to serve a captive audience than to be competitive, stand-alone eateries. We were determined to create a restaurant that you’d want to go to even if it did not overlook one of the world’s most spectacular sculpture gardens.
YOU CAN SPEND MANY years in the restaurant business trying to attract and earn the loyalty of a regular, core clientele. At The Modern we basically had a built-in club— the museum, its trustees, its curators, and its executives.
That is both a wonderful privilege and a high-class challenge as we worked to build a new community of friends.
Since The Modern is the first restaurant at MoMA that has also been open to the non-museumgoing public, we’d presented ourselves with another new challenge: how do we operate, on one hand, as an exclusive club and, on the other hand, as a public restaurant? Learning to do this was quite tricky at the outset. People who were used to hearing “yes” were instead getting incessant busy signals, only to finally get through and hear, “I’m sorry, we’re booked.” We were trying hard to balance the needs of several constituencies, each entitled to the utmost in hospitality: the MoMA community, the legion of loyalists from our existing restaurants, our investors, and of course the thousands of curious New Yorkers who line up to be among the first to visit a new restaurant.
One day I stood in The Modern and observed a trustee of the museum sitting next to a high-powered financier. A couple of tables away were some art-loving tourists from Minneapolis; dining not too far from their table was the alternative singer Björk, who was sitting next to a well- known book editor. It’s a richly diverse clientele, and one that is unpredictable—in the most positive way—each day.
Making my dining room rounds is every bit as exciting at The Modern as it was when I began doing it at Union Square Cafe in 1985. I cannot wait to go there. Like all of our restaurants, The Modern will take time to fulfill its greatest potential, but I am confident it will become a great and enduring New York restaurant. That will have happened when it develops its own soul through the same process of conducting a dialogue with its guests that each of the other restaurants has gone through for a sustained period of time.
MoMA provides the perfect frame for The Modern: it’s a peak career opportunity for my company and me. When the Museum of Modern Art buys a piece of art to hang on its walls, the artist’s career is instantly affirmed. When MoMA selects a chair or a watch for its design collection, the esteem in which that product is held grows instantly and dramatically. I have to hope that the same has happened for us. The Museum of Modern Art is an established arbiter of taste, design, and art, and creating a living product for such an institution is something I could hardly have dreamed of as a restaurateur.
Soon after we embarked on our deal with MoMA, Glenn Lowry, who is the museum’s director and a highly effective CEO, offered me some heartfelt advice. “Please don’t get caught up in the aura of the museum,” he said. “We selected you because of what we know of you. Too often, people try too hard with us and end up not doing their best work.” I heard his advice, but for me it was impossible not to try hard, when I was part of creating a restaurant whose thirty-five foot windows overlook the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller sculpture garden.
WHY DO I KEEP climbing mountains? Because with a few exceptions there’s always a higher, steeper mountain to scale, and I’m willing to confront all sorts of treacherous conditions, especially when I’m convinced that they’ll lead to exhilarating views from the top. It’s the same with opening new restaurants, and with any new business initiative. The MoMA project was a massive challenge for our organization. I wish I could think of an even bigger word to describe it. As with each new business I’ve ever opened, I am profoundly confident that this story will have a happy ending. Lacking a crystal ball, I have no idea how many or
what kind of episodes and temporary setbacks there will be along the way, or what shape they’ll take. However, we’ll have no choice but to improve and persevere with each step we take up the mountain.
I am now growing excited about seeing our organization take on another new challenge: to expand one of our existing businesses. Replicating something that we’re already doing will demand a new set of skills and will represent a wonderful opportunity for me to stretch as a professional and for the organization to stretch as well.
Whenever we do it, our challenge will be to do so in a way that conveys excellence, hospitality, and soul. And of course, wherever we do it, the timing and context must be a neat fit.
That is precisely how we’re addressing the challenge of off-premises catering. We launched Hudson Yards Catering in late 2005, and named it (as we like to do) for the emerging neighborhood in which the commissary is located. Through a persistant search, our team found a spot that was affordable and in Manhattan—overlooking the Hudson River, in the West Twenties. Just as we have done with our other businesses, connecting our catering company with its community reflects our broader, long-range interest in becoming an active stakeholder in the revitalization of an emerging part of the city.
We will also take the same approach to the catering business that has worked so well for every other business we’ve tackled: we’ll apply the strategy of enlightened hospitality while challenging ourselves to find a way to add something fresh to the experience of off-premises catering. And we’ll always look for unique ways and places for Hudson Yards Catering to serve its food.
On a Monday afternoon in May 2005, I came home unusually early, around four-thirty, to don my tuxedo and get ready for the evening’s event: the James Beard Foundation awards. Getting home that early was so unusual that my five-year-old son, Peyton, tore himself away from his play date and ran down the hall to bear witness: “Daddy’s home before dinner!” We hung out while I struggled—as I always do—with my tuxedo.
“You look like Mr. Davison,” he said, pointing to my bow tie. That’s the headmaster at his school. “Are you going to school tonight?”
“No,” I said, “I’m actually going to an awards event.” “What’s an award?”
“That’s a kind of prize you can get if people think you did something really well.”
“Well, Daddy, are you going to get one of those tonight?” “I don’t know. They’re giving out prizes for people who do
a good job at being in the restaurant business.”
“Well,” he said, “I think you should get that prize. I think Shake Shack is the best restaurant in the world. I love their frozen custard.”
That joyous moment with my son was the most meaningful thing that happened to me all night. The second most meaningful was winning the first-ever James Beard award for Outstanding Restaurateur, in a national field of impressive colleagues. I proudly accepted it on behalf of our entire organization.
It was clear to me that we weren’t really winning for being the best at any one specific cuisine or concept. The reason had more to do with our stretching the contours and the applicability of our hospitality-driven business model, from Union Square to Gramercy Park to Madison Square Park to Twenty-seventh Street, and up Fifth Avenue to the Museum of Modern Art. We won it because, whether you order a Shack Burger and a frozen custard at Shake Shack, or a lamb tenderloin carpaccio with black truffles at The Modern, whether you’re eating on paper plates or dining on Limoges china, there’s plenty on the table we’ve set to nourish and nurture you. Our job—and our joy—is to create restaurants you’d want to return to, and to build businesses that ultimately contribute at least as much to their communities as they reap from them.
For over two decades we’ve worked hard to create a broad community of people who have a real stake in our restaurants’ success. And because we have first committed our loyalty to them, they have paid us back abundantly.
When people choose to become regulars at Union Square Cafe or Gramercy Tavern or Eleven Madison Park or Tabla or Blue Smoke or Jazz Standard or The Modern, or our museum cafés, or at Shake Shack, or Hudson Yards Catering, they’re telling us, “This is the place that most makes me feel I’ve come home.”
