IN THOSE FIRST WEEKS and months it didn’t take me long to learn that very little makes guests madder than having to wait for their reserved table or their food. That was happening a lot, because the phone was ringing with increasing frequency and I was saying yes to almost every request for a reservation.
Though the restaurateur in me was obsessed with hospitality, the entrepreneur in me was becoming addicted to volume. I was always trying to see how many covers— customers, in restaurant parlance—we could serve on a given day. This was also important, since a higher volume meant more tips for the servers. I could not afford to lose the few good servers we had, but I would lose them if they weren’t able to make a living wage. The restaurant had 135 seats, and each night my goal was to set a new “personal best” for covers. We were consistently hovering around the one-turn mark—seating each table just once per night—and we had plateaued at around 140 for several weeks. Then, I almost brought the kitchen and restaurant down one night when we shattered our record and served 171 guests. Each high-water mark led to another. I charted out a manual
reservation system, assigning two hours for each deuce, an additional thirty minutes for each four-top, and three hours for a party of five or more. This was clearly maximizing covers, but I did not yet understand the art of pacing tables. The problem was that with a kitchen as undersized as ours, seating more than twenty or so guests every fifteen minutes would invariably clog it up; it was like shoving too much mass down the tube part of a funnel, stopping the flow of food altogether.
On the first night that we served actual paying guests, two parties left because their food never arrived. In the weeks going forward, excruciating waits and walkouts were the norm more than the exception. We realized that the broad number of items on the menu was far too ambitious for our small kitchen and our inexperienced cooks. I hated having to edit dishes I loved from the menu, even if only temporarily—but I did remove them. On most nights, there would come a point when I would leave the dining room and stand sweating in the kitchen, because I couldn’t face the fuming guests anymore. Watching Ali try to expedite his way out of a wall of “dupes”—each one representing a table of hungry guests—was safer than subjecting myself to the slings and arrows in the dining room.
In my obsession for big numbers, I’d created hideous logjams. But it was oddly exciting to manufacture challenges and then surmount them. (In fact, that was and continues to be a pattern in the way I work.) I drew up new reservation sheets, adjusted the seating chart, reassigned waiters’ “stations,” and sharpened my calculations of the turn time for each table—all with the goal of maximizing volume without compromising our ability to deliver excellence. As a puzzle, this was both an art and a science, and each dinner ser vice brought new opportunities to make adjustments in pace, flow, and progress.
I was developing what I would call an “athletic” approach to hospitality, sometimes playing offense, sometimes playing defense, but always wanting to find a way to win.
On offense, we’d figure out creative ways to enhance an already good experience (extra desserts with inscriptions written in chocolate for birthdays; dessert wine for regulars). Playing defense, we got better and better at overcoming our frequent mistakes or at defusing whatever situations the guests might be angry about. Increasingly, their anger was over not getting a reservation at a specific time. I was good at dealing with that, guided by my instinct to let the callers know I was on their side. “I’d love to put your name at the top of our wait list for eight o’clock,” I would say. Or, “There are literally no tables at eight. Is there any way I could do this for you at eight-forty-five?”—which I knew sounded a little earlier than “quarter of nine.” Or, “Can you give me a range that would work for you, so that I can root for a cancellation?” The point was to keep the dialogue open while sending the message: I am your agent, not the gatekeeper!
For those who had to wait too long, there was often a reward—a generous supply of dessert wines on the house. We had resuscitated an old refrigerator from Brownies in the back bar that we named the “Medicine Cabinet,” the medicine being our ample collection of dessert wines, which we dispensed liberally by the glass as an apology to guests. Except for the most hostile, the medicine generally worked. Back in 1985 one rarely saw dessert wines by the glass on a menu in New York—this was still much more of a European custom—but I began offering an extensive list of dessert wines by the glass. It was an important early lesson in applying defensive hospitality when things don’t go according to plan.
While we weren’t giving away Château d’Yquem, we did offer an assortment of world-class sweet wines like Château Raymond-Lafon, Château Guiraud, Moscato d’Asti, Malvasia delle Lipari, and Verduzzo di Cialla. Our most popular dessert wine was from Tuscany Vin Santo—an amber-colored Madeira-like wine into which we’d encourage guests to dunk almond biscotti. The Italian tradition of biscotto bagno (“biscuit bath”) was new to most of our guests in 1985, but it was an after-dinner delight I had enjoyed learning about while working as a tour guide in Rome back in 1978.
Though it was nearly impossible for me to concede, some parties were beyond winning over. I distinctly remember one table that wouldn’t abondon its anger, despite five attempts at trying to overcome our mistakes. “I really want you to know how important it is to me that we earn back your trust,” I pleaded. “I know we made you wait too long for your food. Your time is valuable and I feel horrible. Is there anything I can do to earn back your patronage?”
“There’s nothing you can do,” one of the men at the table said. “We’re never coming back.” I still remember the lump in my throat. “OK, but when you go,” I said, making one last attempt, “just know that I would have done anything to earn back your faith in us.”
That outcome, happily, was rare. Instead, guests began coming back and asking for dessert wine. And they paid for it. Those early days were filled with unexpected lessons in management. One day, soon after opening, I went to the kitchen in search of chef Ali. Unable to find him there, I descended our narrow stairway to the basement prep area. No Ali. I resorted to the last option and opened the door to the walk-in refrigerator. There was Ali—with his sous-chef, Marcie Smith, locked in an embrace next to the oyster bushel shelf. None of us said a word as I backed out of the
walk-in. Up until that moment, I’d had no idea that Ali and Marcie were romantically involved, and it was a delicate situation I knew I’d have to handle quite carefully. I called my father for advice (this being a safe topic). He said, “Whenever you get attractive people together in the intense environment of a restaurant, they’re either going to fight or fall in love. This is probably the better option.” I still didn’t know what to do.
One evening, some weeks after we opened, I was proudly showing off Union Square Cafe to Tom Carouso, a good friend from Trinity College who had just returned to New York after living in Africa, who couldn’t believe I had actually followed through on my dream of opening a restaurant. The two of us were surveying the restaurant from the balcony overlooking the back dining room with its twenty-five-foot ceiling and its huge mural along the back wall. As I began to describe how the artist Judy Rifka had painted it, I suddenly heard a piercing crack, and a boom, as one end of a thirty- foot track lighting rod ripped out of the ceiling and swung down like a pendulum. The heavy steel rod and its fixtures smashed into the wall with a grotesque thud, gouging a three-inch gash in the plaster wall, perilously close to the head of a woman who was dining. If it had been two inches to the right it could well have killed her, and would surely have put me out of business for good.
The woman was in shock. My heart skipped several beats. I ran downstairs and offered to move her into the other dining room and to buy her dinner. We were both shaking. She was far too upset to stay, and as soon as she could catch her breath, she and her date went home. I don’t think I even had the presence of mind to ask for her name, address, or phone numbers so that I could follow up. Our contractor had some very serious explaining to do.
I also recall the Friday after Thanksgiving, just five weeks after opening. Business had been decent, but we hadn’t yet been reviewed, and I had anticipated a slow holiday weekend. I gave both chef Ali and his sous-chef and girlfriend, Marcie, the weekend off so that they could go to Pepper Pike, Ohio, where Ali would be presented to Marcie’s parents—his future in-laws. (My inexperienced way of dealing with their relationship was not to deal with it at all but just to pray for the best.)
My prediction of a slow weekend was absolutely wrong, and on Friday night, overcome with a slew of last-minute reservations, we were so busy that I needed to throw on kitchen whites, over my suit and tie, and cook. The kitchen was swamped, and guests were waiting thirty minutes for their appetizers and at least that long for their main courses. I was overheated and perspiring and my red Brooks Brothers tie began bleeding all over my wrinkled white button-down shirt. I became lightheaded, not having bothered to eat all day. At one point I walked out of the kitchen into the dining room and saw a drunken patron stumbling around loudly ranting about not being able to order a baked potato at this “crappy restaurant.”
My judgment was cloudy from fatigue and hunger, and I chose to confront the man on his own terms. When I told him we wouldn’t serve him another drop of anything, he blurted, “You can’t cut me off.”
“Yes, I can,” I replied. “Your check is on the way.” “You can’t make me pay my check,” he countered. “Maybe not,” I said, “but I can tell you to leave my
restaurant.”
We continued our conversation—“’Fraid not,” “’Fraid so”—while dancing chest to chest through the dining room and then up the stairs toward the bar. As we neared the front door, he threw a nasty punch that hit me squarely in the jaw. I punched him back as hard as I could. I then managed to push him toward the door and out into the vestibule. But from there he was able to grab the door handle and next my head, which he slammed between the door and the doorjamb. That was painful—and when he began to come at me again, I instinctively wound up and kicked him as hard as I possibly could in the nuts.
He managed to crouch his way outside to the sidewalk on East Sixteenth Street, where his two dining companions, who had been lurking around uselessly during the altercation, finally picked him up off the sidewalk and stuffed him into a taxi.
The next week I opened the Daily News and learned for the first time that its restaurant critic, Arthur Schwartz, had been in the restaurant that raucous evening and had witnessed the entire fracas. (Remarkably, he omitted any mention of the fisticuffs in his review, but he later told me he had seen the whole thing. He hoped I was feeling better.)
Schwartz became the first critic in New York to suggest that Union Square Cafe had tremendous promise and that we were doing something groundbreaking and fresh. His review was the first to put us on the map. Meanwhile, I was looking over my shoulder for Bryan Miller. Bryan was now the most powerful restaurant critic in America; and since we had a tacit agreement not to be in contact, I had no idea when, or even if, he’d ever show up in our dining room.
IT WAS CRUCIAL FOR me that Union Square Cafe express a sense of boldness and innovation. I wanted to blend the best of European fine dining with the ease and comfort of American style. I imagined Union Square Cafe as a combination of three very different kinds of restaurants one encountered in the late 1970s: first, the earthy, seasonal, local, food-loving places in Berkeley and San Francisco; second, the refined gastronomic temples of Paris; and third, the mama-and-papa trattorias of Rome. In California, there were passionate men and women working together; sometimes living together; breaking rules, boundaries, and traditions; and loving it. In Paris refined excellence was the only relevant criterion and everyone knew exactly what was expected of him or her—accountability to precision, and to hospitality. In Rome, one family ran the restaurant for the pleasure of its extended family of regulars. I was determined to find a way to “emulsify” those three ingredients to create an ambience of relaxed excellence. I was convinced that I could blend the best of California, Paris, and Rome and have it all ways: refined technical ser vice paired with caring, gracious hospitality, and soulful seasonal cooking.
Going against the grain of the high-flying 1980s, we always looked for low-key, straightforward ways to celebrate with the guests in our dining room. One easy way to set ourselves apart in that era, when lofty menu tabs convolutedly conferred superior status, was to offer exceptional value. I was willing to accept legitimate criticism for any aspect of the restaurant, but if anyone ever accused us of overcharging for our product, I was mortified. My views on this had been shaped by my own early experiences at restaurants with my family, when I had been urged to read the menu “from right to left”—that is, prices first. My dining forays in Italy and France in my early twenties had also shaped my ideas. The dollar had been very strong then, and I was used to downing appetizer bowls of the world’s best
pasta for, say, $3 or $4. I was appalled that in America some restaurants charged $18 for entree portions of only passable pasta. And I saw offering value as a great opportunity to distinguish us from the rest of the pack. But it was in the late 1980s, several years after Union Square Cafe had opened, that I had my epiphany as a restaurateur.
Audrey and I were in Paris, making our first visit to the three-star Taillevent. The seamless ser vice and exquisite hospitality were superior to anything I had ever experienced, and the polished staff members also possessed a confident sense of humor about themselves while providing pleasure for the guest. This was the first time I had ever dined at a Michelin three-star restaurant that, in addition to serving ethereally good food, was actually fun!
It is no coincidence that Taillevent has maintained its three-star rating for more than three decades. If there’s a better restaurateur in the world than Taillevent’s Jean- Claude Vrinat (whose father created the restaurant), I have yet to meet him or her. Self-deprecating to a fault, Monsieur Vrinat brushed off my gratitude for an evening of perfect ser vice. “We have fun taking ser vice seriously,” he said. “And as for perfection, we just hide our mistakes better than anyone else!” That was a refreshing insight for me as I continued to hone my own version of hospitality.
After leaving Checkpoint in 1983, I had treated myself to a memorable fortnight in London. I used the Gault Millau Guide to exhaustively research the local restaurant scene (which was still sleepy at that point, but fascinated me nonetheless), and dined out alone every night. The trip added a new wrinkle to my understanding of hospitality. Half the restaurants I selected simply refused to accept my reservation once they learned I was a party of “just one.” After a series of rejections, I decided I was no longer going
to take no for an answer. I would call back the same restaurant and simply make a reservation for two. Then I’d arrive, be seated, and after a while look disbelievingly at my watch and say, “It seems my guest isn’t showing up.” This approach worked at a series of highly rated restaurants, all of which had initially refused to take “just me.” These experiences led to a determination that in my restaurant solo diners would be treated with extra courtesy and respect.
Although at some places the maître d’ and servers looked down their noses at me, other waitstaffs served me warmly. I was viewed either as an economic nuisance, occupying a table that could otherwise have generated more revenue, or as someone paying the restaurant a compliment by choosing to eat there. On one occasion I was treated so dismissively—ignored for at least twenty minutes after receiving my menu and wine list—that I decided to try an experiment. I summoned the haughty sommelier and proceeded to order a very expensive bottle of wine, bringing my tab to far more than what a typical deuce would have spent. Not surprisingly, I was soon deemed worthy of his attention. He may not have learned a lesson, but I had. I swore always to treat the guest who orders Soave exactly as I would the one who orders Chassagne-Montrachet.
That trip sensitized me to the idea that solo diners could be an important part of our business and should be welcomed accordingly. When I thought about how much time and care I put into choosing where to take myself to dinner, and how often I recommended those places that treated me well (and conversely, how strongly I warned everyone off the inhospitable ones), I knew that treating solo diners as royalty was both the right thing to do and smart business. Union Square Cafe began serving the full menu at the bar, mostly to single diners and couples, long
before others in the city did this. I have always felt that solo guests pay us the ultimate compliment by joining us for a meal. Their visit has no ulterior motive (it involves no business, romance, or socializing). These guests simply want to do something nice for themselves, chez nous. Why wouldn’t we reward that?
But the most significant and lasting way for us to set ourselves apart was the way we defined and delivered hospitality. Union Square Cafe opened in 1985 during the first blast of the “masters of the universe” culture. There was a combination of abundant money floating around and a lingering effect of the velvet rope at Studio 54: the more expensive or exclusive something was, the more coveted it became.
I don’t remember ever having particularly enjoyed a place just because I’d been afraid that it wouldn’t have me, so I was appalled to think that by charging people too much money and putting up barriers to entry, some restaurants had actually created an inflated demand to be part of their scene. However, these candles had short wicks. The discos of the 1970s had given way to the coked-up nightclubs of the early 1980s, which in turn gave way to stadium-size restaurants where the food was really nothing more than a prop in an ersatz nightclub scene. This was happening a lot, particularly as people started to gravitate downtown and take over lofty warehouse-like spaces. At the other extreme of the dining culture were celebratory, serious French restaurants such as La Grenouille, Le Cirque, La Côte Basque, and Lutèce. What you didn’t see much of was excellent dining in a setting of down-to-earth comfort. I sensed that there was in New York a community of food lovers who would be happy to be welcomed warmly and charged fair prices. In fact, conceiving Union Square Cafe as an excellent version of a neighborhood restaurant was, in
retrospect, not very challenging. It turned out that there was a tremendous gap in the dining culture that allowed us to open in a comparatively uncrowded field. We were doing something new and unexpected, and it was attracting an intelligent, self-confident clientele.
The 1980s were also the decade of the “ser vice economy.” Virtually all of corporate America was being challenged to respond to a cry for more ser vice—from rental car companies to banks to the U.S. Postal Ser vice. That trend appeared in our industry as well—sometimes, paradoxically, at the expense of hospitality. In the prevailing view of service, guests were to be treated to more coddling, more choices—and more interruptions. Did restaurants really need to offer a choice of four breads, two butters, and any number of special knives at dinner? Did the one-bite premeal morsel known as the amuse-bouche, or in some restaurants the amuse (a gift from the chef ) really require a one-minute description of every ingredient and cooking method? Every choice meant another needless intrusion by the waitstaff on guests’ time and attention. What mattered most to me was trying to provide maximum value in exchange not just for the guests’ money but also for their time. Anything that unnecessarily disrupts a guest’s time with his or her companions or disrupts the enjoyment of the meal undermines hospitality.
The beautiful choreography of ser vice is, at its best, an art form, a ballet. I appreciate the grace with which a table can be properly cleared. I admire the elegance with which a bottle of wine can be appropriately opened, decanted, and poured. There’s aesthetic value in doing things the right way. But I respond best when the person doing those things realizes that the purpose of all this beauty at the table is to create pleasure for me. To go through the motions in a perfunctory or self-absorbed manner, no matter how
expertly rendered, diminishes the beauty. It’s about soul— and ser vice without soul, no matter how elegant, is quickly forgotten by the guest.
Understanding the distinction between ser vice and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product.
Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Ser vice is a monologue—we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for ser vice. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great ser vice and great hospitality to rise to the top.
When you are seated at the precise time of your reservation at the exact table and with the waiter you requested, that is a reflection of good ser vice. When the right food is delivered to the right person at the right table at the right temperature at the right time—that’s ser vice. When you see a member of the waitstaff decanting a bottle of wine with care and grace, that’s ser vice. When your empty plate is cleared from the table in a graceful manner, that too is ser vice. When, in answer to your question, the waiter can explain the nuances of the wines on our list, that’s ser vice. But hospitality, which most distinguishes our restaurants—and ultimately any business—is the sum of all the thoughtful, caring, gracious things our staff does to make you feel we are on your side when you are dining with us.
Our restaurants are not selective in doling out hospitality
—we strive to treat first-time visitors as well as many
restaurants treat their regulars, and we do not give priority treatment exclusively to the privileged. This fact has been often cited to me as criticism. But far from being a problem, our democratic approach to how we treat guests has become a core value of our business philosophy. I still remember a review in a column called “The Restaurant Rotator” that appeared in a hip weekly of the mid-1980s called 7 Days, about two years after we opened. The writer, who called herself The Rotator, compared her dining experience at Union Square Cafe to being served by the Stepford wives. I had to look up the reference; at the time, I didn’t know what she meant.
She apparently found it objectionable and disingenuous that we were hiring naturally friendly people and allowing their personalities to shine through in the dining room. This cynical review stung me, but it didn’t hurt the restaurant or in any way change the way I chose to do business. If a guest refused to sit at a particular table, I’d say, “Sure. Which table would you prefer?” Many didn’t know how to respond to this, because they’d been conditioned to expect, “Sorry.
That’s the only table we have available.”
I had already learned that the trick to delivering superior hospitality was to hire geniune, happy, optimistic people.
The Ritz-Carlton hotels are deservedly famous for their focus on ser vice; they don’t call it hospitality. But as a guest there, I have occasionally sensed a rote quality in the process, when every employee responds with exactly the same phrase, “My pleasure,” to anything guests ask or say.
Hearing “My pleasure” over and over again can get rather creepy after a while. It’s like hearing a flight attendant chirp “Bye now!” and “Bye-bye!” 200 times as passengers disembark from an airplane. Hospitality cannot flow from a monologue. I instruct my staff members to figure out whatever it takes to make the guests feel and understand
that we are in their corner. I don’t tell the staff precisely what to do or say in every scenario, though I do have some pet peeves that I don’t ever want to hear in our dining rooms. I cringe when a waiter asks, “How is everything?” That’s an empty question that will get an empty response. Also, I can’t stand the use of we to mean you, as in, “How are we doing so far?” I abhor the question, “Are you still working on the lamb?” If the guest has been working on the lamb, it probably wasn’t very tender or very good in the first place. And if a guest says “Thank you” for something, the waiter should not answer, “No problem.” Since when is it necessary to deny that delivering excellent ser vice is a “problem”? A genuine “You’re welcome” is always the appropriate response.
IN THE FIRST THREE months we were open, I left Union Square Cafe just one night—to celebrate Audrey’s birthday with a dinner uptown at the four-star Lutèce. It was our first grown-up restaurant date in months. As I watched Lutèce’s peerless chef André Soltner make his rounds welcoming guests in the dining room, I was hoping wistfully that he would greet us the way he did his best regulars. He didn’t know me, but our mutual friend Marc Sarrazin had arranged for our reservation—which otherwise would have been impossible to get—and had told chef Soltner that I was a budding downtown restaurateur. Table by table, Soltner said hello to every one of his guests. And then he arrived at our side. Turning to Audrey with a broad smile, he said, “Happy birthday to you.” To me, with a mock stern look, and in a pronounced Alsatian accent, he said, “What the hell are you doing in my restaurant tonight when you should be working in your restaurant?” Sheepishly, I smiled, looking down at my bowl of écrevisses in tomato cream. It was clear that I had a very long way to go.
I didn’t go out for a long time after that. I was fairly certain that Bryan Miller was going to come in to review us one night, and I absolutely wanted to be there when that happened. We were beginning to build a nice business, already serving more guests than I had ever imagined, learning to do it a little better every day. But I was so stressed over the impending review by the New York Times that I developed a case of Bell’s palsy. I was just two months into the restaurant business, and the left half of my face had become paralyzed and the left half of my tongue had lost its ability to taste. I couldn’t flare my left nostril or close my left eyelid. The best I could muster was a half smile. And even that was only half sincere: Bell’s palsy is scary, and it hurts. My doctor told me that 80 percent of all cases go away within two weeks, but 20 percent don’t. So for half a month I had no idea in which group I’d end up. That made me really worry, and worrying added more stress and made everything worse. During the first New Year’s eve at Union Square Cafe, in 1985, I could barely smile when the noisemakers rang out and confetti whirled at midnight. I couldn’t even manage to cry. When my face began to regain its full movement after the first two weeks of 1986 I did cry, with relief.
Over the next month, Bryan, at last, came in five times (for two lunches and three dinners). I was there every time. One night I knew I should expect him because although he had made the reservation under a new alias, he had used the same callback number as on a previous visit. I remembered from the wine class we took together that he hated overchilled white wines. I tried to guess what he’d select in advance, because our bar refrigerator was malfunctioning, nearly freezing the bottles of wine. Knowing his tastes, I predicted that he’d choose to begin with an Italian white. I even remembered which Italian white wines were his favorites.
Five minutes before Bryan’s expected arrival, I pulled five bottles from the refrigerator so that they would be less cold by the time he ordered. He did come, and just as I’d expected, he turned to the section of Italian whites on the wine list. But when the waiter sent in his order I was terrified to see that Bryan hadn’t picked any one of the five wines I had preselected. He had ordered one that was still in the freezing refrigerator, a Tocai Friulano from Ronco del Gnemiz, and the bottle was frosty.
Cursing under my breath, I went over to the bar, well out of sight of his table, and stuck the icy bottle of Tocai between my thighs to warm it up. Five minutes later Bryan’s waiter approached me nervously. “Where’s the Tocai? He’s asking where it is!”
Feeling the bottle, I said, “I think it’s ready right now,” and handed it over. My pants were wet and very cold. A minute later the waiter returned to the bar with a defeated look, grasping the bottle: “Mr. Miller wants another bottle of Tocai. This one is too warm.”
FOR BRYAN’S FIFTH AND final visit, he and his wife, Anne, brought as their co-tasters the actress Mariel Hemingway and her new husband, Steven Crisman, a restaurateur. They had just opened a hopping spot called Sam’s Café. This was after her appearance as the buxom centerfold in Star 80, and it was impossible for me not to notice that she had had her breasts augmented. Bryan was going all-out and began his meal by ordering oysters and champagne. After I poured Mariel a glass of Billecart-Salmon, I slowly slid the glass closer to where it should be—while irresistably gazing down at her cleavage. Had I not been ogling her, I might have noticed that the tablecloth was poorly pressed and was
stiffly creased where it had been folded. As I slid the glass, the foot of the top-heavy champagne flute caught on the crease and tipped over, pouring cold champagne all over Mariel’s dress and lap. I now had two strikes, both involving wine.
On the night of January 23, 1986, Ali Barker and I camped out at the New York Times building on West Forty- third Street. At precisely 11:04, stacks of the next day’s early edition papers were tossed from a truck and then unbundled in the lobby. We noticed a few other people waiting for the paper—some who wanted the first crack at the classified want ads, and others whose plays were being reviewed. Plunking down 35 cents, we tore through the paper to the back of the Friday weekend section to find the review of Union Square Cafe. Bryan had given us two stars: “very good.” We were beyond ecstatic. Two stars really did mean “very good” in those days, and it read like a money review. He praised the food and the décor, calling them “genuine and eclectic”; and he said that the seafood risotto was “rousing,” the spaghetti alla puttanesca “generous” and “boldly seasoned,” and so on.
Two of Bryan’s observations really hit home. The first was that we were “fast becoming a lunch haunt for the downtown publishing crowd.” To this day, I always want any new restaurant I open to become a “lunch haunt” for some core group of loyal customers. To the degree that a restaurant can serve as an unofficial club for any constituency, it takes on an additional mystique that leads to more and more business. Second, Bryan wrote that the sensitive design made Union Square Cafe feel like “part of the neighborhood, not something imposed on it.” Reading his words helped me understand that what I was doing intuitively was actually working. I have made that an
intentional strategy for every single restaurant I’ve opened since.
That first review in the New York Times had more revenue impact on Union Square Cafe than any subsequent review has ever had on any of our restaurants. Business spiked 60 percent overnight. In later years Bryan confided that because of our friendship, he had actually been tougher on us than he might otherwise have been, to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. He had also had conversations with his boss at the New York Times about how to proceed with the review. He could avoid reviewing us altogether, but that wouldn’t be fair to his readers or to the restaurant. In the end, he and his boss agreed that if he hated the restaurant he’d probably omit the review. If he liked it, he’d err on the side of understating his enthusiasm. He wanted to give the restaurant a chance to exceed expectations. That was a gift.
IN THOSE EARLY DAYS, I benefited hugely from an unexpected mentor who helped me clarify and execute my vision. The larger-than-life co-owner of Sparks Steakhouse, Pat Cetta (the same man who helped celebrate my deal with Sam Brown), would often simply appear at the doorstep of Union Square Cafe, out of the blue. He never showed up at a convenient time, but, strangely, it was always the right time. I was struggling with my inexperience as a boss and a manager, and with learning how to operate a busy restaurant. Pat had a sixth sense for knowing precisely when I needed to be dressed down, or to be helped. He was equal parts genius and ruffian; charming and vulgar; teddy bear huggable and frighteningly cantankerous. I don’t think I ever saw Pat without a red wine stain on his tie or a button missing from his shirt. His unusually wide-set eyes had
permanent crow’s-feet, the kind that come from a combination of loving and laughing at life while chewing people out at the same time.
One day Pat arrived for one of his impromptu visits, and I promptly showed off a new dish I thought was a clever idea: fried oyster Caesar salad. We sat down together at table 61, and I confidently had the kitchen send one out to sample.
No one else was serving fried oyster Caesar salad, and this was long before every casual restaurant in America started offering even chicken Caesar salad.
“This dish,” Pat said, scowling, “is nothing more than mental masturbation. You’re clearly doing it just to get noticed by Florence Fabricant”—in the New York Times. “And the bad news,” he went on, “is that she won’t even like it. I guarantee you that shit is coming off your menu within two months—and if I were you, I’d take it off in two minutes. You know better than that bullshit, luvah!” He was right and I quickly retired the dish.
Though we were cut from completely different cloth, Pat’s vision of hospitality, ser vice, and excellence was quite similar to mine. It was amazing to watch him work his own dining room, which was always full. He did this (and is probably still doing it, wherever he went after he died) every weekday night. Pat wanted people to have a great time in his restaurant, and he focused all his energy and passion on making certain that his staff missed no detail. We did differ profoundly, though, in our philosophies on honoring dinner reservations. To Pat, a reservation merely meant, We are expecting you. But when you were seated was quite another matter. Guests at Sparks might typically wait anywhere between fifteen and ninety minutes for their reserved table. If Union Square Cafe is as much as thirty minutes late on a reservation, people are ready to write me a letter of
complaint and send a copy to every restaurant critic in town. But Pat, who died in 2000, always got away with it because people loved eating at Sparks and because he somehow made the wait part of the expected experience. (In later years, that gave me the confidence not to fret too much over the long lines at Shake Shack. They’re part of the experience.)
Another priceless mentor I gained in those early days is the brilliant wine importer Robert Chadderdon. Bob was among the extraordinary people I first met while I worked at Pesca in 1984. Even then, he already had a nearly mythic reputation for being difficult and iconoclastic, because he was supposedly selective about which wholesalers, restaurants, and wine stores he would and would not choose to do business with. In his clients, he required a high standard of excellence and integrity along with humility and faith in him—criteria that ruled out all but a very few.
Beyond the fact that he had worked for the legendary Frank Schoonmaker, I didn’t know much about him before we met. But I had always loved (and had never been let down by) any bottle of wine bearing his label: Robert Chadderdon Selections. Before I knew much about wine, I looked for his label at wine stores and at the few restaurants that displayed their bottles; it was a virtual guarantee of quality. One day when general manager Douglas Scarborough announced Robert’s arrival at Pesca, it was as if visiting royalty had stopped in for lunch. Douglas would not allow me to taste Robert’s wines with them, but I did get to look Robert in the eye for a brief moment at the bar. (Douglas did save me a taste of some of the wines, and I’ll never forget my first sips of Mercurey Blanc and St. Joseph Blanc, two obscure, high-value, delicious wines.) This first encounter with Robert Chadderdon impressed me so much that a year later, when I was putting together the opening wine list for Union Square Cafe, I gathered the courage to pick up the
phone and call him. After giving me the third degree over the phone, to determine if I seemed worthy of selling his wines (“You’re opening what? Where? Who’s the chef?
What’s your background?”), he agreed to meet me for dinner. We met in Greenwich Village at the bistro La Gauloise on Sixth Avenue. As he looked me squarely in the eye, his opening question was, “How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-seven,” I said, taken aback. “Why? How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven,” he replied, without missing a beat, “and I’ve forgotten more about wine—and life—in the last ten years than you may learn in the next twenty.” Then and there, I decided that this was a man from whom I could learn, from whom I wanted to learn, and with whom I could enjoy the learning process. He immediately became an important adviser and ally, something between a father and a brother; and we eventually worked closely together, even making several trips to France and Italy, where I was privileged to get intensive training and an advanced degree in wine and food. Robert is now twenty years wiser, and he hasn’t stopped teaching, pushing, and loving me since that first night.
Robert Chadderdon is, to be sure, a man who steadfastly walks down one path in life: his own. He’s not interested in submitting his wines to be reviewed, even by publications as influential as the Wine Spectator or Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, because he doesn’t need or want publicity. He has an extraordinary stable of winemakers and vineyards and has developed lifelong relationships with leading producers, who have been growing their grapes in prized vineyards for generations. He gets into their blood, taking an interest in their families and their lives. He advises them on every step as they make their wines. Nothing is more
important to him than quality, integrity, and trust. A Robert Chadderdon wine is not a commodity one sees listed at discount in a newspaper advertisement. Each bottle is a living extension of a living human relationship. Thanks in part to Bob, I first discovered the pleasures of some of the world’s most phenomenal wines—Château Rayas, Vouvray’s Domaine Huet, Burgundy’s Marc Colin and Robert Arnoux, Château Simone in Provence, Tuscany’s Querciabella and Grattamacco, Piedmont’s Bricco Manzoni, and the Veneto’s incomparable Giuseppe Quintarelli. And then there are Billecart-Salmon in Champagne, Château Clos Floridene in Graves, and Sancerre from George Roblin and Roger Neveu. Those wines and many others have helped our restaurants earn high praise for their wine lists.
But to view Robert Chadderdon as just an expert on wines would be missing the real story. The man is indeed blessed with a pitch-perfect palate, an uncanny taste memory, and an exquisite sense of inherent quality; but he also possesses a rich store of life knowledge, wisdom, and judgment to draw from. There is no one in all these years from whom I have learned more about excellence, food, wine, or life than Robert Chadderdon.
OUR THIRD FULL YEAR, 1988, brought important transitions. For the first time, we broke into the Zagat Survey’s list of New York’s top-forty favorite restaurants—we were number twenty-one—and Union Square Cafe was described as a “triumph of imaginative American cookery.” In August 1988, after having been together for four years, Audrey and I got married. And by early fall, I made a long-considered change in the kitchen.
Ali Barker, having promised me two years at his first job as chef, had now given me three. He had achieved everything he could for himself (including finding a wonderful woman to be his wife) and had contributed every ounce of raw culinary ability and effort he could muster, despite having no previous experience as a chef. We had an honest and open conversation about the future. I told him, “You have too much potential not to go and learn some more. And Union Square Cafe has too much potential not to benefit from having an even more experienced leader in the kitchen.” I urged him to spend some time cooking in France. The discussion was painful and tearful for both of us. We had become good friends and together had injected heart and soul into the place. Though Ali understood exactly what I was saying, it wasn’t easy for him to welcome my conclusion. But I knew this was the right decision; today, many years later, we remain friendly, and he has built a successful restaurant career and meaningful life with his family in the town of St. Joseph, Michigan, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.
In early October, I hired my old colleague Michael Romano, who had been turning heads at La Caravelle with his solid yet light approach to the French classics. It had taken me a long time to persuade Michael that he should consider making a move downtown, and even longer to get him to say yes. Ultimately, what sold him was the allure of cooking in a restaurant that would let him return to his Italian roots, even if it meant moving away from the refinement he had so diligently achieved as he built his career. During his first month at the restaurant, I prohibited Michael from changing our menu. “Get to know the staff, the guests, the facility, and the restaurant’s rhythms. Work on making our existing menu items look better than ever. Use the daily specials as an opportunity to try out new dishes.
We’ll know which ones work, and we can add them one by one to the menu later on.”
And that’s precisely what we did. In May 1989, Bryan Miller returned to review the restaurant once again, this time awarding it three stars and calling Union Square Cafe “a paragon of a new breed of restaurants that might be called international bistros.” Mentioning Michael’s passion for northern Italian cooking, Bryan described our menu as “the best roster of dishes I’ve encountered here,” and “reasonably priced” as well. Our wine list, he wrote, was one of the city’s best (“many uncommon treasures”); our tables were “spaced well to allow easy conversation”; and the dining room, down a few steps off the bar area felt “inviting and countrified.” In October, Zagat promoted us from number twenty-one to number thirteen on the list of New York’s favorite restaurants. Crushingly, 1989 was also the year that our beloved general manager, Gordon Dudash, succumbed to complications from AIDS. He had hung on long enough to see the fruits of his labor: a restaurant that was increasingly adored as much for its welcome as for its cooking.
I was just four years into the restaurant business, and the fire inside me was only beginning to burn. My vision for Union Square Cafe was being realized, from its cozy décor and ambience to the outstanding value we offered. To this day, Union Square Cafe remains the purest expression of me and most clearly represents the mission of all my restaurants: to express excellence in the most inclusive, accessible, genuine, and hospitable way possible.
