NOW I WANTED TO turn my attention to Michael Romano. Michael had been somewhat dejected when I corrected all of Union Square Cafe’s design flaws by building a new facility at Gramercy Tavern. Though he had invested his own money in Gramercy Tavern, he was envious when he saw that the new restaurant’s shining kitchen had everything his didn’t have. Even though neither of us was really sure that Michael actually wanted to play a role in launching another restaurant, it was important at least to explore the option.
For my part, my own growth as a leader had allowed me to strengthen the foundations of both Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern. It had also helped me become more confident as I contemplated further expansion. I was ready to go for it. By 1995, there were no great or affordable spaces left along Union Square Park, and so I decided to take a look around Madison Square Park—a run-down plot of splotchy green which was a stone’s throw from Union Square and Gramercy Tavern, and which had all the potential upside in the world.
I thought we might be able to contribute something new to the traditional bistro or brasserie, so I asked Michael to
accompany me on a research trip to Paris, seeking new ideas and inspiration for creating a French version of Union Square Cafe. (Union Square Cafe itself being an Italian version of Union Square Cafe). This research proved to be a punishing form of pleasure. On day one, we dined at two different Michelin three-star restaurants (lunch at Robuchon, followed by dinner at Lucas Carton), and over the next forty- eight hours we ate at six other classic bistros and as many brasseries. Was there anything fresh to express in this niche?
The space I had my eye on in New York was at the base of the gorgeous old Gift Building at 225 Fifth Avenue on the northwest corner of Madison Square Park. Since it was a fairly small storefront, the only realistic plan for adequate seating at 225 Fifth was to extend the ground floor outward by building an enclosed sidewalk annex or cafe overlooking Madison Square Park and the Flatiron Building. I knew that the park had been center stage for New York’s social elite at the turn of the nineteenth century, and it was still one of Manhattan’s most significant confluences—Fifth and Madison avenues, Broadway, and Twenty-third Street. I met with three officials of New York City to seek approval for the sidewalk annex, assuring each one that if we could make a restaurant work there, it would let us lead an effort to revitalize the downtrodden park outside our front door.
The park itself was poorly landscaped, dirty, and unsafe
—not unlike Union Square Park circa 1985, but without even a spark of retail activity on its perimeter. Twenty-third Street had a hodgepodge of fast-food places, shoeshine shops, and delis; and the three-block stretch of Madison Avenue, as well as Twenty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, was practically barren. As I became more enthusiastic about the idea of opening a third restaurant, the possibility of playing a role in reviving Madison Square Park made it even more
compelling. This would be a chance to make a bet on an emerging neighborhood while the rents were still affordable
—about 50 percent lower at that time than for comparable spaces around Union Square or in the Flatiron district. Why wouldn’t we want to create a wonderful restaurant overlooking what could once again become a majestic park? I was indeed motivated to open a French-style restaurant with Michael, and a voice within me urged me to be a pioneer in another new community.
In 1995 we began negotiating a lease with the Japanese owner of 225 Fifth Avenue, but we made just a little headway on an agreement over the next several months.
Meanwhile, a real estate consultant contacted us to say that she had been hired to find a nationally known restaurateur for the ground-floor space at 11 Madison Avenue, the MetLife Building. MetLife was upgrading this historic art deco building into “class A” office space and had already signed leases with such high-end tenants as Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and some major advertising agencies.
When my assistant told me that she had informed the developer that we were already looking elsewhere, my first reaction was “That’s a mistake!” It was important to take a look at 11 Madison. Even if we were to close a deal and one day open a restaurant at 225 Fifth, a competitor would eventually take the space at 11 Madison, and I felt we should at least learn what kind of deal that potential competitor would get. (ABCD!) Meeting with the developer not only would gain us information about a prospective rival but also would be a hedge against losing the deal at 225 Fifth.
My hunch soon proved prescient, when we got some deal-breaking news: there was an enormous Consolidated Edison transformer directly beneath the sidewalk at 225 Fifth that would make the construction of an enclosed
outdoor café impossible. The huge grates over the transformer were plainly visible; but in my inexperience and ignorance, I had never noticed them or thought to ask about them. Instead, I had wasted six months of our time telling the city officials how much a new restaurant there would add to the neighborhood.
Still, the time had not been spent entirely in vain; on the contrary, whatever time and effort had been used examining Madison Square Park and selling ourselves on its future had been very well spent. I had become consumed with the neighborhood and had gotten to know and become known by leading public officials in the process. I was more determined than ever to open a restaurant directly across from the park, and to invest in its future.
We immediately started talking seriously with the agent for the project at 11 Madison. The primary notion of restoring the park was to bring beauty and life to the neighborhood and provide the community with a reason to use the park. That idea reflects one of my core business philosophies: invest in your community, and the rising tide will lift all boats.
Invest in your community. A business that understands how powerful it is to create wealth for the community stands a much higher chance of creating wealth for its own investors. I have yet to see a house lose any of its value when a garden is planted in its front yard. And each time one householder plants a garden, chances are the neighbors will follow suit.
In mid-1996, I attended my first meeting with executives at MetLife to negotiate a lease. There were all kinds of
financial and real estate terms to discuss, but first I made my own agenda—the big picture—clear to our prospective landlord. “Before we discuss any details of a lease,” I said at this meeting, “it’s important for me to know that you will first commit to partnering with me in rebuilding and restoring Madison Square Park—to where it was in its heyday.” He may not have fully realized what he was getting his company into, but the MetLife executive, Dom Prezzano, replied, “I don’t think you have any idea how many people have tried to do this and for how long; but if you have the energy to lead, we’ll lend our financial support.”
The city’s social elite and a concentration of capital had long ago converged on the park to bring it early iconic skyscrapers like Madison Square Garden (1890), the Flatiron Building (1903), and the MetLife clock tower (1906). But ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Madison Square Park had been in decline. After months of being urged by Audrey to read Caleb Carr’s best-selling historic mystery The Alienist, I finally did so and became fascinated by his description of what the area around Madison Square Park had been like in its days of glory. I was also captivated by what Carr wrote about New York’s prominent turn-of-the century restaurateur, Charlie Delmonico, who had always opened the next Delmonico’s restaurant in whatever neighborhood he believed was going to become New York’s most prominent. In 1876, he had opened a Delmonico’s on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. That inspired me—a little over a century later—to try my hand at doing the same.
Since the 1970s, it seemed, local business leaders had been disappointed by broken promises from New York City to rebuild the park. Good intentions, it seemed, had always been followed by downturns in the city budget. By the time I started asking questions about reviving the park, most
people I spoke to in business or government expressed doubts at best, and cynicism at worst.
I knew that 11 Madison could be majestic, but it came with significant financial and architectural obstacles, and the talks with MetLife went on for nearly a year as we ironed out these issues. Because the building was a designated landmark, we would need to satisfy the requirements of the National Register of Historic Places, to preserve and restore existing elements of its historic design—an enormous and costly undertaking. We would need to restore ceiling moldings that were chipped or missing, and repair and restore a thirty-five-foot-long art deco fluorescent light fixture even though we’d never use it. We even had to design lighting fixtures that would surround but not replace the space’s original hanging fixtures and sconces, to meet historic preservation requirements. All this work would add at least 30 percent to the normal costs of building a restaurant, and this extra cost would delay any possible return on investment for our shareholders, of whom there would need to be a lot more than the usual few if we were to pull this off. And there was an even more difficult challenge: a massive wall bisected the first floor of the MetLife Building. Since the historic requirements of the building prohibited us from taking it down, we’d have to create two different restaurants, one on either side of the dividing wall.
People began telling me that it would be insane to create, design, staff, and open two restaurants simultaneously in the same space. It was becoming abundantly clear to me that I would need to take on more investors and more managing partners, and I did. I did not have the personal funds to build two large restaurants in the space; nor did I have the gumption to go it alone without partners at my side. I began to think intently about where
I’d seek financial assistance. I recruited two new colleagues to become my managing partners—David Swinghamer, from Chicago’s Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises; and Richard Coraine, from San Francisco, who had worked for years with Wolfgang Puck at Postrio, and had then opened his own restaurant, Hawthorne Lane.
BRASSERIE
When I looked at the two adjoining spaces, it struck me that the larger rectangular room—which had thirty-foot-high windows on the park—offered the perfect volume for the heady bustle of a brasserie. This would be the result of all those conversations with Michael Romano in Paris. There’s nothing particularly refined about brasserie standards— oysters, escargots, pigs’ feet, soupe à l’oignon, and steak frites—or about the breezy brasserie style of ser vice; it’s just meant to be fun. But then I asked myself: “Who ever wrote the rule that just because you’re having all that fun, you can’t simultaneously have exquisite food and an extensive list of fine French wines?” That was followed by the question: “Who ever wrote the rule that just because it’s a brasserie you have to serve soupe à l’oignon and steak au poivre?” How could we combine a brasserie’s winsome atmosphere and French culinary accent with an urbane New York point of view to create something unexpected? I wasn’t entirely sure of the answer; but whatever it was, that would be restaurant number one.
Now, however, nearly a year after our trip to France, Michael said that he did not want to open another restaurant—his true joy was to focus entirely on Union Square Cafe. So together we hired a chef for our forthcoming restaurant, Brian Goode, who had previously been a talented sous-chef for Michael at Union Square Cafe, and had recently opened as the executive chef at Firebird, a
new Russian restaurant in the theater district. We sent Brian to France for a month, with a long list of all kinds of restaurants we wanted him to visit and an ample sack of Francs for meals and lodging.
I described the new restaurant to my friend Robert Chadderdon. Although he himself is a Francophile, he told me: “Don’t use French in the name. Americans are tiring of French restaurants. Call it something in English.”
“How about Madison Square Cafe?” I said, recalling a conversation I’d had with my father more than a decade earlier.
“You can do better and be more original,” Robert countered.
“Madison Park Cafe?” I asked.
“No. Call it Eleven Madison Park. That’s what it is.”
Not long after Brian returned from France, and while he was working intently on the kitchen plans and the construction of the restaurant, it occurred to him that this place was becoming very costly. He was concerned about whether it could be a safe financial bet for his own future. He didn’t see how the restaurant would ever be able to pay off its debt or its investors, and that made him nervous.
When construction delays arose, he grew increasingly impatient and ill at ease. With just six weeks to go before opening Eleven Madison Park, we parted ways. I immediately consulted with my business partners, and Tom Colicchio pointed me toward Kerry Heffernan. Kerry had been Tom’s sous-chef years earlier at Mondrian, and had built a solid resumé as an executive chef since then. Tom told me that Kerry was the best cook he had worked with, and I also knew that the two were fly-fishing buddies. Kerry
had just moved to Tavern on the Green from the Westbury Hotel when its restaurant, The Polo, had closed. I liked what I knew of Kerry, and he was ready to join our team. I hired him after just two interviews, and without even asking him to prepare a tasting.
INDIAN
That left restaurant number two. I still needed to come up with an idea for the smaller space on the other side of the historic wall. One day I was hanging out in Michael’s office, and I asked him what he thought we should do there. He shrugged, rubbed his left sideburn, and returned to the cookbook he was intently perusing. “Whatever it is,” I said, “I want it to be a leader within its niche.” I began flipping through the Zagat Survey for 1997, looking in the section on categories. When I got to “Indian,” I saw that the top-rated Indian restaurant then was place called Dawat, with a food score of twenty-four out of a possible thirty. That got my attention. “Since you’ve come to Union Square Cafe,” I said, “the restaurant hasn’t received less than twenty-six for food, and for several years you’ve earned a twenty-seven.”
Michael was listening. He was fascinated by many things Indian; he had studied spices in India; was into yoga, meditation, and Indian spirituality; and had dated Indian women. For several years now he had been cooking with Indian spices at Union Square Cafe, combining them with French and Italian techniques and ingredients from the greenmarket. By 1996, nearly 25 percent of the items on the menu at Union Square Cafe were being cooked with some type of Indian spice. “Frankly,” I told Michael, “I’d just as soon see all those spices used in a new restaurant.
They’re delicious, but they don’t even go with most of the wines in our cellar. Let’s build on the success of these Indian dishes you’ve been cooking at Union Square Cafe and
create a whole new restaurant for them. What about doing a new version of an Indian restaurant?” He put down the cookbook, looked me in the eye, and smiled broadly.
Around that time I took my daughter Hallie, now four, to a children’s concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The classical clarinetist Richard Stoltzman began by teaching the kids how the clarinet works and sounds by playing some well-known riffs from Peter and the Wolf. “Now,” he said, “I want to show you how the clarinet sounds when it’s played alongside another instrument.” Minutes later, the curtain opened to reveal a young musician seated on the stage floor surrounded by a dozen sets of hand drums. He explained that these drums were tablas and that they are the primary percussion instrument in classical Indian music. He showed the audience how each drum had its own distinct tone and timbre. Stoltzman then came back out, and the pair teamed up to play a fusion of jazz clarinet with Indian drums. That’s when it hit me: what they were doing musically was exactly what I had been envisioning culinarily for the second restaurant. I wanted to give American elements an Indian accent. It was at this moment that the second new restaurant found its name: Tabla.
MICHAEL AND I HAD been dreaming and talking openly about the Indian venture, and one day Nick Oltarsh, the head tavern room cook at Gramercy Tavern, overheard us and made an appointment to come in and see me. “I know the perfect person to be the chef at the restaurant you’ve been talking about. His name is Floyd Cardoz, and we cooked together at Lespinasse,” Nick said. He knew that Michael never intended to abandon Union Square Cafe to become Tabla’s day-to-day chef. “All I ever heard Floyd talking about was how one day he would show the world
that Indians could be great cooks. What you and Michael are talking about happens to be his dream.”
We learned that Floyd was a native of Bombay and had grown up in Goa, learning all his grandmother’s recipes before studying classical French technique in Switzerland. That sounded too good to be true, and it got even better. Floyd Cardoz had been at Lespinasse—a four-star restaurant
—for over five years and was now executive sous-chef, having convinced his chef, Gray Kunz, to greatly expand the number of aromatic Indian spices in the resataurant’s pantry. We met Floyd, who confirmed that he was eager to break away and do something on his own. His dream was a perfect fit with our vision for Tabla; and after a brilliant tasting in which he cooked fifteen dishes for us that made my palate sing (and sometimes burn) with delight, we hired Floyd to be our executive chef. Later, we made him a partner at Tabla.
From the moment we had decided on the concept, I sharpened my vision for Tabla. I asked myself: “Who ever wrote the rule that if you love Indian spices and Indian breads, you should be able to enjoy them only in the context of a purely classical Indian restaurant?” I wanted Tabla to become a unique American dining experience, based on Floyd’s lifelong passion for the cooking of his homeland. With Floyd’s input, I asked our architects—Bentel and Bentel—to design a “spice room” in the kitchen, a laboratory of sorts where Floyd could bring a piece of fish or meat and experiment with new combinations of tastes.
Together, we came up with a harmonious blend of American hospitality, French culinary technique, and expertly applied Indian spices. Soon after Tabla opened, in December 1998, it earned three stars from Ruth Reichl of the New York Times.
She wrote, “This is American food, viewed through a
kaleidoscope of Indian spices. The flavors are so powerful, original, and unexpected that they evoke intense emotions.”
Next door, Eleven Madison Park had gotten off to a decent enough start. But the public knew that in just four more weeks we’d be launching a groundbreaking restaurant called Tabla, so many people saw the more classic Eleven Madison Park as the warm-up act for the main event. Eleven Madison Park would have to succeed by virtue of its architectural beauty, hospitality, and solid kitchen.
Conceptually, nothing about it was breaking new ground.
In these early days, our lunch business at Eleven Madison Park was lagging far behind our optimistic projections. But rather than explaining this sluggishness as a natural challenge of building a business from scratch, we convinced ourselves that people didn’t have time to leave their desks for lunch. We decided that the solution was to deliver beautifully designed box lunches to their offices. We targeted Credit Suisse First Boston in particular, since its world headquarters were upstairs at 11 Madison. We offered a choice of three exquisite sandwiches, homemade potato chips, a bottle of water, and a homemade cookie.
Unfortunately, very few people bought this concept, or the box lunches. We had made a fundamental mistake by trying to extend an original brand without having first established the core brand. It wasn’t so much that people were tied to their desks; it was that they had no clear idea what Eleven Madison Park represented as a dining experience. Was it a bistro or a grand restaurant? Was it inexpensive or for special occasions? Was it French? Was it a place for sandwiches, potato chips, and cookies? Until we had answered those questions for ourselves, we couldn’t avoid confusing our potential customers.
Know Thyself: Before you go to market, know what you are selling and to whom. It’s a very rare business that can (or should) be all things to all people. Be the best you can be within a reasonably tight product focus. That will help you to improve yourself and help your customers to know how and when to buy your product.
Also, we hadn’t done our homework: CSFB already had a first-rate, company-subsidized cafeteria for its employees, run by an outside food ser vice. And creating the box lunches had kept chef Kerry Heffernan and the management team from focusing on what we should have been doing all along: improving the restaurant itself and doing the hard work necessary to build our lunch business one guest at a time. We abandoned the box lunch program very quickly and ended up with a costly inventory of 3,000 unused boxes. The experience was a vitally important illustration of inappropriate brand extension, wrongheaded priorities, and inadequate focus on a core product. Fortunately, by working on the basics, our lunch business doubled within six months. We had found a wonderful maître d’ who was expert at recognizing guests. We worked on presenting a menu that offered enough light choices to encourage frequent dining.
And we worked on speed, understanding that at lunch, time is everything.
Hybrid restaurants are challenging to imagine, and when first realized they can be confusing—both for the staff and for the customers. I’ve learned to live with that. I trust our ability to build a community of people who want to discover us and take an active interest in our evolution—even if it takes several visits for us all to get there.
FOR THE NEXT TWO years after we had opened Tabla and Eleven Madison Park, I was not looking for any new restaurant ventures. My plate was full and overflowing. In fact, when my cousin James Polsky asked if I might be interested in collaborating with him at 27 Standard and Jazz Standard—his restaurant and his forward-looking underground jazz club—I had to decline. James was a jazz fanatic (with an encyclopedic knowledge of the idiom), and opening the club had been a life’s dream for him. The club was receiving accolades and had built a regular clientele, but his upstairs restaurant, despite a strong two-star review from the New York Times, was experiencing financial losses. James had considered and declined offers from high-profile restaurateurs to buy out the lease on his handsome two- level loft space on East Twenty-seventh Street; he was afraid that a new owner would immediately convert the jewel-like jazz club into a private party space.
Notwithstanding my own capacity for more work, I knew I was in no position to take on another restaurant. But ideas had not stopped bubbling up in me. For one thing, I had considered launching my own dot-com. It would be a barbecue lover’s website called cue.com (or possibly Q.com). You would log on, and an animated map of America would appear onscreen. Next you’d click on a destination, and a map would generate information about traditional barbecue styles in that region, including one or two worthy local practitioners from whom we could procure barbecue for overnight delivery to your door. The idea would be to “sole-source” great barbecue, promote it, and sell it like crazy. I am reasonably confident, looking back, that cue.com would have had as tough a time succeeding as most Internet schemes did back then; and I’m happy not to have sunk even one dollar into it.
At the same time, I accepted an invitation from Rocco Landesman, a leading Broadway executive, a former St. Louisan, and a friend. He may or may not have known about my lifelong love of barbecue, but he had found an easy mark. “We know this really neat guy from southern Illinois,” Rocco said, “and he is probably the greatest pitmaster I have ever met. His name is Mike Mills. What do you think about coming over for dinner one night to taste some of his ribs?”
“You’re not talking about doing a barbecue restaurant, are you?” I asked him. “Because I swear I’m not opening another restaurant.” My mind shouted at me, Be careful!
“Let’s try to pick a night when the Cardinals are on TV. We’ll grab some beers and get Mike to ship some of his barbecue in,” Rocco replied. “I also want you to meet some people who would really like to find a way to bring his barbecue to New York. My good friend Tom Viertel—the theater producer—is in love with Mike. Tom and his partner, Pat Daley, are judges on the national barbecue circuit. You need to meet these people even if you can’t do it. Maybe you can introduce them to another restaurateur who can!” That got my competitive juices flowing.
This invitation was tough to turn down, even though I now had four restaurants and knew that the last thing I needed to do was open a fifth. But these were friends; the idea involved the St. Louis Cardinals; I was a sucker for barbecue; and it struck me as an intriguing idea.
It’s not what you know, it’s whom you’ll listen to.
Sometimes—very, very occasionally—I’m presented with an idea or invitation, and I know there’s a 99.9 percent probability I’m not interested in it. Yet my intuition tells me that it’s worth investigating, just to see what’s on the other
side. I’ll allow myself to be open to new ideas, particularly when they’re presented by good people I know and trust. And when I hear those ideas from people I know and trust, I pay even stronger attention to my own instinct and intuition.
I wasn’t attending this rib tasting with any expectation that it might lead somewhere. I was just going to discover some excellent barbecue and, I hoped, watch the Cardinals win a ball game.
But the pink-edged, dry-rubbed ribs were remarkable.
And so was the moist, smoky pulled pork. The baked beans, made from four kinds of beans, stopped me in my tracks.
And this stuff had been frozen, shipped, thawed, and reheated. How good might it be fresh? I suddenly began to ask myself some basic questions, such as, Why isn’t there more good barbecue in a city like New York that has so much of everything, and in many cases has the very best? I convinced myself that there were environmental restrictions on producing real pit barbecue, which gives off a lot of smoke. But what if it were possible to overcome that obstacle? I knew that Virgil’s Real BBQ, which was then the most commercially successful barbecue restaurant in New York, had been using some kind of smoke-eating equipment for years, just off Times Square. But I also remembered that the authentic Pearson’s, in Queens, had been forced to relocate its pit to the back of a noisy, crowded sports bar after neighbors complained about smoke at the original site in Long Island City. Still, Manhattan was lacking in authentic barbecue, and Mike Mills was clearly a barbecue artist.
After the challenging twin openings of Eleven Madison Park and Tabla, perhaps it would be easier this time to do a “joint.” Slowly but surely, I began to talk myself into the project. I gained confidence by visiting Mike in Murphysboro,
Illinois; and subsequently in Las Vegas, where he had opened two more restaurants. Through long conversations and lots of animated dialogue about business values and barbecue, along with Richard and David, my partners, I took the measure of the man. His gift for the pit was obvious (so was his gift for fascinating gab), and a bond of trust was growing between us. One day it occurred to me that this was precisely the right fit for my cousin’s restaurant space at 27 Standard and that Jazz Standard would be a natural home for good ’cue. Beginning in urban Kansas City, barbecue and jazz had long been bedfellows. Why not here in New York?
One by one, my partners gave me thumbs-up; and with their unanimous support, we made a deal for the space with my cousin James. He would stay on as an owner to help ensure the outstanding music for Jazz Standard, and we would create Blue Smoke and be responsible for the restaurant and club operations.
I WAS AMAZED TO get my first peek into the world of professional and amateur pitmasters and barbecue fanatics. These buffs, like followers of the Super Bowl or the Indy 500, will travel hundreds of miles for a main event. During twenty-four months of intense research, we became groupies ourselves; members of our Blue Smoke team collectively covered some 60,000 miles—through Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, upstate New York, Texas, southern Illinois, the South Side of Chicago,
Boston, and Oakland, California—to research and understand barbecue’s regional distinctions. Along with Mike Mills, Tom Viertel, now an investor in our forthcoming restaurant, arranged for me to attend the 2001 Memphis in May competition, the “Super Bowl of Swine,” as a judge in
the rib category. Mike’s charismatic passion proved infectious. When I asked him what it would take for us to serve ribs on a par with those that had won him his three grand championships at Memphis in May, he said, “You’ll have to figure out how to pull them from the pit at just the perfect moment. Just when the meat is relaxed enough— after six or seven hours of smoking—you baste that rack with the sauce. If you hit it perfectly—you’ll see a blue smoke rise up out of those ribs.” A blue smoke. That was that—our new restaurant had its name. We invited Mike to become our chief ’cue consultant (I called him our rib rabbi), paid him in equity, and asked him to teach us and our chef everything he had learned not only on the competitive circuit but also in his own restaurants.
We selected Kenny Callaghan, who had been a dedicated cook and sous-chef at Union Square Cafe for over eight years, to be the pitmaster and executive chef of Blue Smoke. Kenny’s culinary background had little to do with barbecue: before cooking at Union Square Cafe he had worked at the Russian Tea Room. But his disciplined approach to cooking made him the perfect choice for Blue Smoke. The most successful barbecue pitmasters have a passion for doing the same things over and over, each day finding nuanced ways to improve on what they did yesterday. Barbecue is not a matter of creativity so much as a matter of dogged perseverance and execution. Kenny’s no-nonsense personality, straightforward cooking style, and persistent pursuit of ways to do things better made him an
ideal choice. We also chose another veteran of Union Square Cafe, Mark Maynard-Parisi, to become Blue Smoke’s opening general manager. It had always been a priority of mine to develop leaders from within, both for the sake of team morale and as an assurance that we’d begin our new restaurants with as much of our preexisting DNA as possible. Letting our business grow on the shoulders of
those who’ve gotten us there provides safety and is its own rationale for growing in the first place.
Mike gave Kenny Callaghan and Michael Romano (who was emerging as our chief culinary sage) an intensive, hands-on course in real pit barbecue technique, teaching them in his restaurant pits, and giving them a competitive role in the famous “Apple City” barbecue contest in Murphysboro, Illinois.
There was a steep learning curve to get all the components right—selecting the best meat vendors; finding good sources for hickory and apple wood; and developing and perfecting recipes for classic barbecue “sides” like corn bread, coleslaw, pit beans, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese. There were also punishing lessons to be learned about preparing barbecue in a densely populated vertical city—where rising smoke might waft into someone’s bedroom or office. One too many complaints over a flawed ventilation system, and we could be shut down irrespective of how much we’d spent to build the restaurant. And it was unnerving to present barbecue to a city that lacked its own historic barbecue tradition but that was home to more opinionated expats from classic barbecue destinations than anywhere else in the world. Mike was used to cooking on his traditional “Ole Hickory” smoker with its standard short smokestack. This was the equipment he had taught us how to use, and it was exactly what we purchased for the restaurant. But to win approval to install our pits, our smokers would need to be connected to a fifteen-story smokestack that would have to run up along the rear brick wall of the office building. It took us nearly eight months of frustratingly dry and un-smoky results before we fully understood that the powerful updraft of the skyscraper-like smokestack was acting as a high-power blow-dryer on our meats, rather than allowing the barbecue to be gently
bathed by hours of smoke. First, we tried a low-tech solution to keep the meat moist, like placing a huge bowl of water in the smoker for the duration of the barbecue process. The meats turned out moister but were still not smoky enough.
At last, we performed surgery on the stack, inserting a damper at the level where most smokestacks end. We had effectively tricked it into becoming the real deal. Soon thereafter, for the first time, our ribs put a smile on my face.
Perhaps because it was “just a joint,” Blue Smoke was in some ways the most challenging restaurant to design. Many beloved barbecue joints around the country are on the wrong side of the tracks. And part of what people love about going to them is having to travel to a rural outpost or a down-and-out part of town to hunt down the ethereal smoked pork. The barbecue seems to taste better both because of what you have to do and because of where you have to go to get it. That’s also why hot dogs taste better at the ballpark and Vernaccia di San Gimignano tastes better in Tuscany. Context is everything.
Manhattan’s Park Avenue in the East Twenties is not many people’s idea of the wrong side of the tracks. Once again we turned to the architects Bentel and Bentel to help us arrive at an authentic solution. The questions about design were basic but crucial. For instance, how could we blend traditional barbecue elements with what is real for a Manhattan restaurant? It was a foregone conclusion that we wouldn’t resort to such clichés as bowling trophies, photographs of softball teams, or caricatures of smiling piggies. Yet such clichés are tempting because they help guests understand exactly what a restaurant is out to accomplish. People do want to feel transported when they go to a restaurant.
First, we knew we’d need booths, a common feature of barbecue restaurants. A booth can take the form of a picnic table, as is common in the Texas hill country; or it can have a Formica tabletop with hard, uncomfortable benches on either side, as in the barbecue joints of North Carolina. But we needed to have barbecue booths that made sense in New York. We chose comfortable leather cushions as upholstery, and we came up with a tabletop made of a finer laminate than cold, hard Formica.
We also made sure to have the classic black menu board with red-and-white plastic lettering hanging above our bar. But we didn’t attempt authenticity by deliberately using an old Coca-Cola sponsorship sign or misspelling pork sandwiches and rib tips on the menu. There could not be even a hint of a theme park. We included a genuine New York element: an exciting, comprehensive listing of microbrew beers, bourbons, classic cocktails, and world- class wines by the glass—not your typical accompaniment to barbecue. Thoughtful design and loving cooking would go a long way toward giving the restaurant soul and authenticity. It would need to exist in harmony with its own building, its neighborhood, and the city. Once you step inside a theme park, you could be anywhere. We were determined that Blue Smoke would be an actual place.
THE GREAT MARY FRANCES KENNEDY FISHER wrote in her
memoir The Gastronomical Me, “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger
for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.”
This passage has always moved me, in part because it captures exactly what another Mary taught me. Although the gastronomical influences of my family were many, no one in my young life expressed the feeling that food is love more purely than our longtime housekeeper, Mary Francis Smith. My attachment to Mary was the steadiest, safest, and most dependable relationship I had while I was growing up. Also, she made the world’s best fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and frosted layer cakes from scratch. Mary fried her chicken in the afternoon, and she’d always sneak me a drumstick and thigh a couple of hours ahead of dinnertime. I’d eat them in my bedroom and flush the bones down the toilet so that my mom wouldn’t find out that even before dinner, I had already consumed enough for dinner.
Mary had been born into a Mississippi sharecropping family, and though she was barely literate, in matters of life and love she was one of the wisest human beings I’ve ever met. Her husband, Charlie, was an easygoing man who drove car pool throughout the 1960s for house cleaners around St. Louis County. Mary and Charlie had not been blessed with any children of their own. We were her kids.
And I was her boy. The moment I came home from the hospital after being born, my mother handed me over to Mary, saying, “Here’s your boy.” And Mary Smith took that to heart, all the more so since she came to view me as the underdog in the family.
Nine years later, when Charlie was killed in a hideous car accident, Mary left us for a time, devastated. It was almost as if I had lost all contact with my own mother. After I got my driver’s license at the age of sixteen, I made frequent pilgrimages on Saturday afternoons to her walk-up
apartment at 4726 Lee Avenue, on the western fringe of downtown St. Louis in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. She would invite me (or rather, I would invite myself ) for a feast of fried chicken, deviled eggs, biscuits, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and sweet potato pie
—all things we serve on the menu at Blue Smoke.
When I opened Union Square Cafe, Mary, by then in her seventies, bought her own ticket to fly to New York to be there for me. She told me she wouldn’t have missed it for the world—that “her boy” had made her proud. She managed to fly to New York one more time, for my wedding. (Mary was peerless in her human judgments, and when she had given her approval, I knew Audrey was the right choice to become my wife.) Mary died in early 2000, so she never got to know about Blue Smoke, which was the closest I could come to paying homage to her—and to the love I felt for her and my native home, St. Louis.
MY YOUTH IN ST. Louis inspired another of my restaurants: Shake Shack, the burger, hot dog, and frozen custard stand we created in 2004 for Madison Square Park. Anyone who grew up in the automobile culture in the 1950s or 1960s probably had the experience of hanging out at a local stand or shack serving this type of food. Growing up, I spent a lot of time hanging out with my family and friends at places like Schneidhorst’s, the Parkmoor, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, Fitz’s Root Beer Stand, and Steak ’n’ Shake. I especially loved them for their curbside ser vice. In fact, I can’t remember many weekend nights during my teenage years that didn’t culminate at one of those places. And when I had lived in Chicago for two summers during and after graduating from college, I couldn’t resist a more than occasional “Chicago dog” topped with its nine traditional
accessories and served on a poppy seed bun. I had come to miss the drive-ins, carhops, and burger-and-shake stands of my youth, and today’s version of fast food—both the sanitized experience and the production-line food—was an unacceptable substitute. As always with our new ventures, the idea was to draw on the best elements of the classic, make it authentic for its present context, and then try to execute it with excellence. There is nothing particularly innovative about any single component of Shake Shack. The key, as always, would be how we might blend all the components to make it feel original.
The inception of Shake Shack actually began with a humble hot dog cart. In the summer of 2001 our fledgling organization, the Campaign for a New Madison Square Park, persuaded Target Stores to sponsor a series of group art shows for the park, curated by the Public Art Fund and in collaboration with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. A Thai sculptor, Navin Rawanchaikul, created a colorful work for the show called I ♥ Taxi, which featured cartoonlike sculptures of taxicabs on stilts. The artist also designed a working hot dog cart to go with the project, since he believed that the world’s two most democratic institutions were taxicabs and hot dogs. In his view, every human being on earth has either driven or ridden in a taxi and has either served or eaten a hot dog.
I ♥ Taxi was installed at the southern end of the park, not far from Eleven Madison Park, and when asked, we volunteered to give life to the project by actually operating the sculpture’s hot dog cart. We began by asking ourselves whether there was anything fresh we might bring to the world of hot dog carts.
Small as the project was (or seemed), I took this cart quite seriously. I was eager to use the project as a test of
enlightened hospitality. I was asking myself, “Who ever wrote that rule that you can’t push the envelopes of excellence and hospitality for something as ordinary as a hot dog cart? Could a hot dog cart ever be anything more than just a hot dog cart?”
My team and I decided to feature Chicago-style hot dogs (from a Chicago vendor, Vienna Beef; and boiled in water spiked with garlic, coriander, and bay leaves). We would serve the hot dogs on poppy seed buns (shipped especially from Chicago) with the requisite toppings: celery salt, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, mustard, pickles, spicy “sport peppers,” cucumbers, and “neon” relish. Our menu was limited, but we would also serve bags of homemade beet-stained potato chips, fresh verbena lemonade, salty chocolate truffle cookies, and iced tea. We staffed the cart with members of Eleven Madison Park’s winter coatcheck crew, providing them with summer employment; and Kerry Heffernan was our supervising chef. I assigned the project of running the cart to one of Eleven Madison Park’s managers as a low-risk way to learn how to run a small business. To go with her addictive chocolate cookies, the pastry chef Nicole Kaplan also contributed refined Rice Krispy treats.
It turned out that there was some risk—by the time I ♥ Taxi and its hot dog stand closed in early September 2001, we had actually lost nearly $5,000 operating the cart. While demand had been high and lines were always long, we’d addressed my requirement for excellence and hospitality by hiring too many people, working in a very inefficient system.
But there was a clamor from the neighborhood for us to return with the cart in 2002 (even though that summer brought new sculpture to the park that had nothing to do with ♥ing taxis or hot dogs), and so we did. During the second summer we got a little smarter about our operations
and production systems and nearly broke even, but it was 2003 that proved to be the tipping point for the profitability of the hot dog cart. Each day, beginning at eleven-thirty in the morning as many as seventy people were lining up for a Chicago dog. We could barely keep up. We needed three tables behind the cart so that the staff could assemble the hot dogs and all the assorted toppings. Throughout the day reinforcements were wheeled through the park from our kitchen at Eleven Madison Park, and some days we ran out of hot dogs well before closing hour. Before long Newsweek, Newsday, Crain’s New York Business, CNN, and each of the big three national nightly news shows—NBC, CBS, and ABC
—had done stories on our little cart. Writing for the New York
Times, Alex Witchel helped create longer lines than ever when she called our cart the hot dog connoisseur’s “equivalent of fine dining.” The restaurant critics William Grimes and Eric Asimov of the New York Times both wrote reviews—and each had favorable things to say about the product.
We wanted our hospitality to be at the highest possible level. Without reservation lists, our staff never knew any of the guests’ names, so the emphasis was on recognizing repeat customers by face and remembering their usual orders. And with nine toppings, everyone seemed to have a personal preference. We believed that a customer’s desire to be recognized could just as easily be satisfied by a summer intern at our hot dog cart as by the host in the dining room of a three-star restaurant. We encouraged our young, energetic staff to create “plus ones” or “legends of hospitality”—offering those in line free samples and cookies; and spotting, say, a regular man on a park bench, making him his usual order, and bringing it to him just as he started to head for the line. Though they were spending $2.50 for a hot dog, the satisfaction and loyalty of these guests was no
less important to us than that of our regulars at Gramercy Tavern or Tabla.
Our application of enlightened hospitality had proved a phenomenal success. Our staff loved the work; our patrons were captivated; the park was bustling; Vienna Beef was thrilled with the unexpected business in New York; and by the season’s end we presented a check for $7,500 to the newly formed Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Around that time, the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation had solicited proposals to create and operate a permanent kiosk in Madison Square Park. We were game, and we decided to expand on the hot dog cart and make our dream of a drive-in come alive for good—and for the good of the park. We submitted our proposal as operators in collaboration with the Madison Square Park Conservancy with the understanding that the kiosk itself would be built with funds raised through a philanthropic campaign (allowing us to own the business, and the conservancy and city to be our landlords) and that we would pay rent as a percentage of our sales to both the Madison Square Park Conservancy and the New York Department of Parks and Recreation.
As we imagined our new kiosk, we thought about a lot more than food. We understood that people don’t go out just to eat; they also select restaurants in order to be part of a community experience. Starbucks took the notion of drinking good coffee (and standing in line to buy it) and figured out how to make the experience of drinking coffee with a community of other like-minded people become the real star of the show. The company also learned to superimpose its blueprint onto thousands of locations north, south, east, and west, while also conveying the sense that each Starbucks belonged to its particular community. It was
brilliant entrepreneurship to grasp that selling excellent coffee is secondary to creating a sense of community.
Coffee sells (and is habit-forming), but performing a daily ritual with a self-selected group of like-minded human beings also sells. A business that doesn’t understand its raison d’être as fostering community will inevitably underperform.
My thinking about what we might add to the mission of the Madison Square Park Conservancy had been shaped largely by my experience as an active member of the board of the Union Square Partnership, responsible for the safety, development, programming, and overall welfare of Union Square. I understood that it’s not enough to just restore a park: you must sustain its beauty and safety by providing good citizens with lots of reason to visit it. Otherwise, you’ve merely given the park a temporary face-lift. Union Square Park always relied on the greenmarket as its most powerful magnet in attracting people. Other attractions were the park’s playgrounds; its dog run; and Luna Park, its summertime restaurant.
We won the city’s competitive bidding process because of the strength of our overall proposal for Shake Shack, including our culinary idea; because the city had confidence in us as operators; and certainly because of the design and financing plan for the kiosk itself. It was challenging to create a model whereby the city would share the precentage rent revenue stream with the conservancy; but we made a strong case for that, and eventually the idea was embraced.
The design of Shake Shack unquestionably contributed mightily to its success. We made a fortunate choice in selecting the renowned architect James Wines of SITE Architecture (renowned for his environmentally sensitive
“green” architecture) to design the twenty-by-twenty kiosk to blend in with the park’s paths and foliage. It is itself, in my view, a work of art; ivy-covered, the kiosk appears to have sprouted up from the ground. Many of its design elements came from nearby landmarks; for instance, its sloping triangular roof is a nod to the nearby Flatiron Building. We certainly can’t claim any credit for the design of the traditional roadside shack. But by using familiar elements of that genre and designing our kiosk for a specific environment, we allowed the Shack to become part of its neighborhood, rather than something imposed on it. (Bryan Miller had observed that my first restaurant, Union Square Cafe, had avoided feeling imposed. That comment of his once again helped me to act intentionally in an area that had previously been instinctive.)
As soon as we’d won the bid, Richard Coraine (my most enthusiastic researcher of road food) and I set off to study burger-and-shake stands all across the country. We started out, of course, at Ted Drewes and Steak ’n’ Shake in St.
Louis; continued on to Kansas City (Sheridan’s); and individually made stops in Michigan (Culver’s), Los Angeles (In-n-Out Burger), Napa (Taylor’s Automatic Refresher), Chicago (Gold Coast Dogs, plus eight other establishments), and Connecticut (Super Duper Weenie, Clamps, Sycamore Drive-In)—always in search of the best of breed. Steak ’n’ Shake’s cooking method was my favorite for burgers. I’d always loved watching the cooks take a raw beef patty that looked like a red-and-white-flecked hockey puck, place it on the hot griddle, and then smash it down rhythmically with two heavy spatulas until it got crispy on one side. Then they’d flip it over. I trusted their motto, “In sight, it must be right.”
Using the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park’s private dining room as our laboratory for Shake Shack, we worked hard to
come up with just the right mixture of freshly ground beef, tasting many variations until we landed upon what we thought was the perfect ratio of ground sirloin steak to brisket. The fat-to-meat blend yielded a juicy, intensely beefy result. We debated what the precise size of the burgers should be, to the half ounce. We argued over the choice of buns (soft, potato), tomatoes (plum), lettuce (Bibb), and sauce (our secret). We chose every one of our ingredients with extreme care and with an eye toward authenticity. For the Chicago dogs we decided on Plochman’s mustard over French’s. We opted not to serve Dijon mustard, taking the position that no “gourmet” condiments belonged at Shake Shack. We chose crinkle-cut fries ( just like the ones I had grown up loving at Fitz’s Root Beer Stand in St. Louis) because they deliver more crunch per bite than shoestring fries, and because they make good cheese fries. In a blind tasting, we selected Abita, a richly flavored root beer from Louisiana.
Frozen custard, as I wrote on our opening menu, is “what happens when premium ice cream shacks up with soft-serve ice cream,” but with a stickier texture and an eggier taste.
We worked with Nicole Kaplan, our talented pastry chef at Eleven Madison Park, to zero in on our own recipe, tasting several top custards from around the country (shipped overnight by FedEx) as the benchmarks.
Shake Shack was an instant success when it opened in July 2004. But as is often the case, the unanticipated degree of success brought new challenges. From the outset, the line was long (up to ninety people at a time). Because everyone was a first-time customer, just explaining our menu and learning to make change for each cash transaction took too much time. Because our previous experience had been serving only hot dogs, we had allocated too much space for preparing the dogs and had badly underestimated what
would be needed for the overwhelmingly popular burgers and custard. We had to redo the layout of the tiny kitchen, ripping out and reconfiguring several of its stainless steel counters. That first summer saw our team struggling to assemble and serve more than 500 different items per hour at the pickup window in a nine-hour day. That’s a lot of dogs, fries, floats, cups, cones, lemonade, sundaes, concretes, burgers, iced tea, soda, beer, and wine. Yes, beer and wine—building on our Blue Smoke experience, there was no way we were going to pass up the opportunity to add something to the possibilities of what one might drink with a double burger, hot dog, or bratwurst. We had passed up Dijon mustard, but that was no reason to forgo Sancerre by the glass.
We had some good fortune a few weeks after we opened, when the opening-night celebration of the sculptor Mark Di Suvero’s new installations for the park was held at Shake Shack. On hand were Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe; Debbie Landau, executive director of the Madison Square Park Conservancy; and Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the NYPD, among others.
Photographs of the mayor sipping our vanilla shake were posted on the Internet and ran in the newspapers the next day. Before long New York magazine was calling Shake Shack “Burger heaven” and wrote that our Shack burger was the city’s best burger (“a thing of simple beauty swaddled in a wax paper jacket”).
Shake Shack became not just a huge success but also a wonderful business model. Because a percentage of every sale becomes rent, paid both to the conservancy and to the city, every hot dog, burger, frozen custard, or beverage purchased and enjoyed by a guest contributes something to the park’s ongoing vitality. Shake Shack is a useful example of a for-profit entity whose success contributes monetarily
and programmatically to the community. It shows that you can do well by doing good. Perhaps most important, it serves as a human-magnet, attracting all kinds of people of all ages and from all walks of life to the park. That makes them stakeholders in the park, and it increases the odds that the park will remain beautiful, safe, and enjoyed.
I never assumed that the Shack’s success was going to be defined by someone saying, “This is the best hamburger I’ve ever had.” One thing we had learned from Blue Smoke is that it’s just about impossible to create the “best” version of anything when the context is comfort food. It’s pretty tough to compete with the warmth of deeply emotional food memories.
But I would love it if we were fortunate enough to stay in this business long enough, and continued to execute consistently well, so that today’s young people might one day be in a burger joint somewhere with their kids and say, “The best hamburger I ever had when I was growing up was at Shake Shack.”
