Tag Archives: restaurants

How to Build a Restaurant Empire

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So you’ve created a wildly successful restaurant, and you’re just beginning to have some semblance of stability and free time again. Is it time to expand and build another location? At last night’s Culintro panel on restaurant expansion, three prominent chefs tackled that question and more. Danny Bowien (Mission Chinese), Andy Ricker (Pok Pok) and Michael White (Marea, Ai Fiori, Osteria Morini, Nicoletta) collectively shared their insights and mused on why anyone would decide to “go do the hardest thing in the world—open a restaurant in New York.”

After all, opening and running a restaurant is asking for unexpected kinks and surprises every day. “You wake up in the morning wondering if today is the day you get your ass handed to you,” Ricker noted wryly. “The job is basically problem solving. It’s being able to grasp a whole lot of things happening at once.” That global vision is what makes a chef and restauranteur. “It’s not just cooking—you’ve got to know about electricity, basic engineering, and when something breaks, you can’t call someone because he’ll come three hours later and you need it fixed now.” Bowien agreed and offered some optimism: “All the challenges—if you can just power through them, it’ll work out. When we were getting reviewed by the New York Times, I was flying back from Copenhagen, and just after I landed, someone texted to say the New York Times is here…and so is the health department. I was having a heart attack! But you just have to power through it all.”

So when do you know it’s time to expand? Most people don’t set out to build restaurant empires, but it becomes clear when the timing is right to grow. “When your restaurant is very successful, you have a sort of political capital, and you either spend it or you don’t—you sh*t or get off the pot,” said Ricker. “You reach a point where you have ideas that don’t fit in the current template. If there’s interest and political capital, the door just opens up.” Over the course of the evening, Ricker, Bowien and White batted ideas and shared the following lessons for aspiring chefs and restauranteurs (or any entrepreneur):
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On Fast Food, Money and Child Labor: I Grew Up as a Restaurant Brat

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The roach skittered towards a cardboard box, and Cheryl raised her hand to smash it before the customers could see. The kitchen was in the weeds—we were short-staffed because the fry cook had been jailed last night for a DUI. Dad would stop by later to bail him out and give him another futile lecture. Meanwhile, the insistent beep of the drive-through sensor rang out. I scurried back to my post atop an overturned milk crate and pressed the speaker button. “Welcome to Lucky Phoenix, can I help you?” Just another June afternoon working at the family restaurant.

From the million-watt smile of Racheal Ray to the rock star trappings of Anthony Bourdain, there’s no question that it is a very good time to be famous in the kitchen. Americans may not be cooking any more, but they’re certainly soaking up every TV show, cookbook and blog they can find, as food takes on an unprecedented, fetishistic spotlight in pop culture.

But let’s talk about something a little less glamorous: Chinese fast-food restaurants. You know the sort, the dingy corner take-out joint named some combination of {Golden, Lucky, Jade, Happy} {Moon, Buddha, Wok, Phoenix, Panda}. The kind that serves ambiguously Chinese dishes from a 100-item menu, located in a building converted from an old Taco Bell. The kind that relies on labor from family and friends, the unwitting members of a Chinese restaurant fraternity open automatically to FOB immigrants with no English skills and an eye for cash. You walk past this restaurant every day, in Chicago, in Tuscaloosa, in small-town Italy.

This was my playground.
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French Cuisine Triptych: Terrible, Traditional and Avant-Garde

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The other day, my aunt asked me, “So you keep raving about how delicious everything is, but are there any bad meals?” Yes, of course there are. Though I generally travel with boatloads of research and a good sense of intuition, I do get stuck with bland, uninspired meals like everyone else. While in France, the quality of the food was (unsurprisingly) very good, but no country is fail-proof. Here is a glimpse into how our class of well-traveled and knowledgeable students critiques meals:

Meal #1: Paul Bocuse – Brasserie Le Nord, Lyon



“Paul Bocuse? The Paul Bocuse‽” When we heard that we would be dining at one of Paul Bocuse’s brasseries while on stage, the excitement exploded. After all, Paul Bocuse is one of the godfathers of French nouvelle cuisine, and is the namesake for the prestigious Bocuse d’Or prize, a cooking competition commonly referred to as the Olympics of the culinary world. Expectations were running quite high, as we wanted to see what the man hailed for changing the direction of French gastronomy could do in his restaurants.

Alas, Brasserie Le Nord left us feeling more than underwhelmed. Whether it was an off night, or Bocuse simply doesn’t spend enough time managing his less-prestigious properties, it was clear that little thought had gone into the composition and presentation of the dinner. We began with a classic French onion soup, thickly laden with cheese, sweet onions and bread. The rich soup was then followed by quenelle de brochet, a whipped fish, bread and egg mixture, poached in an oval shape and served with cream sauce. Other than a few spongy mushrooms, there was nary a sign of vegetables and nothing to balance the heavy cream. For dessert, there was (you guessed it) more cream, a slice of whipped cream and egg whites (?), studded with nuts and candied fruit. “It was all brown!” exclaimed one student. “This meal was made without love,” another person declared. Throughout the evening, our servers were mostly absent, did not interact with us and provided no explanations about what we were having that evening. We were left to guess and rely on our French-raised comrades to provide information. All in all, this meal exemplified the worst of French cuisine stereotypes; it was rich, heavy and the servers didn’t give us the time of day.
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