When Drew Nieporent opened Montrachet in 1985, he changed not only the way people ate, but also where they ate---Tribeca was far from a destination at the time. He continued his commitment to the area by opening Tribeca Grill, Nobu, and recently Centrico, among others. Twenty years later, he owns restaurants around the world through his management company, Myriad Restaurant Group, and just opened his first wine store, Crush Wine Company, in New York. He has been inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Cooking in America, among a multitude of other honors, both in the US and abroad. He recently shared some thoughts with the Main Course.

How do your restaurant concepts come to life?
I have to be inspired. Certainly the earliest restaurants like Montrachet and Tribeca [Grill] came out of my experience, my exposure, and my upbringing. Montrachet specifically, of course, being the first restaurant 20 years ago, was sort of an amalgam of all of my experiences dining out, working in restaurants. But, most importantly, it was my interpretation of what I wanted to do, like a redefinition. To me the key thing is a professional knowledge of anything that you're talking about so that you have enough confidence to be able to pull it off because, if you're not confident that you can do something correctly, intelligently, it's probably going to fail.

And you had that confidence 20 years ago already?
I had a lot, yeah, all right. I think I was maybe suffering from overconfidence.

Is that necessary if you want to be a restaurant entrepreneur?
I've said this before, I think it takes a lot of guts to own any business, because you have responsibilities and your actions are always under scrutiny, both externally to the customer and internally to your own staff. So I think you have to have lot of character and guts to be able to pull it off. That translates into confidence. When people see somebody's confident, then they think they know what they're talking about. But behind the confidence has to be a base of knowledge.

How do you acquire that knowledge?
That's over a long period of time, through education. I've been very fortunate. I grew up in New York, went to Stuyvesant High School, and was accepted at Cornell Hotel School back in 1974. I like to say I went to both the school of hard knocks, because I have great on-the-job experiences, and the school of hotel administration. I’ve worked in all these various restaurants, some of the great French restaurants like Le Périgord, La Grenouille, the Plaza Athenée; that experience’s irreplaceable. I was always very clear about what I wanted my path to be, and I always felt I had the energy and the enthusiasm and the knowledge to achieve it.

Did you always want to open more than one restaurant?
Yes. My mentors were George Lang, Joe Baum, Richard Melman, of course. They set the table. One of my mentors was Roger Martin, who was the director of marketing for both Windows of the World and Restaurant Associates. He always provided me with a history. I loved the diversity of all these operations that showed the intelligent collaboration with architects and designers and obviously, the collaboration with chefs. For me, food is so important that I always wanted my own experiences to be multicultural. But I didn't want them all to be mixed up under one roof. So the only way to live out this idea of being part of all this different food culture is to really explore it. And then, if you think you know enough about it, to open a place which is your interpretation. We very strongly redefined the idea of a modern French restaurant when we opened Montrachet in 1985.

With Montrachet, you launched casual fine dining. Now there's almost no more formal fine dining. Is that a good thing?
Anytime you tear down a barrier, it's a good thing, but I think there's always a place for fine dining. But again, it's how one enacts the ritual. In other words, if you place barriers between you and the customer, such as dress codes, ridiculously high prix-fixe menus, you're sort of an unfriendly presence. And unfortunately, fine dining has translated into formality. For me, the casualization of that process is good. You can get to the meat of the matter, and you cut through all the BS, the barriers and the facades. I think it's a good thing. At the same time, I'm a bit of a traditionalist. So I would love to go into a place and really enjoy the room, enjoy the education and the knowledge of the experience. But unfortunately, the price of these experiences is kind of high these days.

But these barriers, these high prices, are common in casual restaurants too today.
Here's what's happened, though. The price level, because rents used to be reasonable, was up to the operator to charge. A couple of years ago, I looked over my shoulder. I said, I don't understand how I can be in business for 15 years, and somebody opens tomorrow with my price structure because it took me 15 years to build my prices, to feel that I can charge that for the quality that I've giving. But unfortunately now price is more symptomatic of the rent, which is not necessarily in our control. In other words, all the rents are very high. So you have this irony of the characterization of dining, which should mean that prices come down. But they don't, based on this enormous rent that we're all forced to pay because somebody thought that they could make of a go of it. So they sign a lease, and everybody had to follow behind them.

Will we see a downward trend in that, do you think?
There's no end in sight, I don't think. I've never ever had a rent rollback!

How do you pick your locations?
It's always been my modus operandi to find comfortable spaces. I've always said that space is like a person. When you see one initially, you have an immediate reaction to it. So it doesn't really matter where it is because we've always been a destination restaurant. We've proven that we can bring people to Tribeca, when obviously you have to travel here. I'm more sensitive to rent; I'd rather find something reasonable so that there's a cushion. Hotels talk about occupancy, restaurants never do. But at what level is your break even and what level is your loss? Luckily in New York the restaurant business is 365 days, but that's not the case in other parts of the country. And my experience is that, if your rent is high, you don't have much of a cushion or a buffer in times that are slow. So I would always look to pioneer space in the lower rent areas. Although, I don't know what that is anymore in New York. That's the irony of it.

How would you describe the Drew Nieporent philosophy of what makes good restaurants?
My thinking is that they have to be serious chef-driven restaurants, that the philosophy is always that there's a person with a strong personality in the kitchen defining what it is that we're doing from a food standpoint. And then in the front of the house, the wine-oriented restaurants, it speaks for itself: Larry Stone, Daniel Johnnes, David Gordon, three [Wine Spectator] Grand Awards. That didn't happen by itself. Those are three spectacular individuals who built a wine program that gained recognition. That's because of our insistence on really doing the best job. Not only do we want to be known for great wine, but we want be known for efficient service. This is the philosophy, treating the customer the way you would treat yourself. It's as simple as that. What that means is that your servers have to understand what it means to be a customer. And too many of the servers in this day and age have never been customers, and they don't understand themselves how to be treated. So how can you treat somebody the way you want to be treated if they've never been in that role?

How do you work on that with your staff?
I invite them to all my restaurants.

Is that part of their training?
I insist, yes. I insist that they eat in the restaurant that they're going to work in. It's elementary. It's a basic thing.

Do they go through a training period before they're in the dining room?
We have a fairly rigorous program both on the job but also classroom, so that they get a thorough knowledge about what it is that we're asking them to do. But at the end of the day, the success or failure of a hiree is usually inherent in their own personality. We can train someone blue in the face, but you need somebody who has a sensitivity and a caring, that wants to do this in a genuine way. The most important thing for us is the casting, finding the right people to begin with.

Does it help to have knowledge of the kitchen if you're on the management side?
Restaurants tend to be run either from the back-of-the-house philosophy or from the front-of-the-house philosophy. Nobody would define their restaurant that way, but if I walked into anybody's restaurant, I would be able to tell you, the emphasis in this place is not so much on who the chef is and the quality of the food, but on who the designer is and how many girls are working behind the bar. You sense that these days. My feeling is that a restaurant has to have a clear focus and a philosophy and a definition. And it begins with who works there. For us, when we say our restaurants are chef driven, we mean it. There are restaurants we own where the public is not aware of what the name of the chef is. But we are aware, because that chef's been here for many years and has a definite point of view and an expertise and a successful operating style that works for us.

Many alumni of Myriad operations are at the helm of top restaurants of their own today. Do you get satisfaction from that?
We put out so many integral, strategically important people in all areas of the industry, cooking, front of the house, and that's very satisfying. That cannot be by accident. You can't say, well, that was just luck and timing. We can't take credit for all their subsequent successes, but I think there's a pattern, which is that we identify great talent at its earliest moments, whether it's David Rockwell, Michael Mina, David Bouley, Traci Des Jardins, or Nobu Matsuhisa. There's something to be said for that collaboration.

When you're just starting, how do you find these people?
The best people always search out the best people. In the earlier days, everyone came to our door because we got a lot of publicity and people read about us. And therefore they wanted to work with us. Now what I find is that the young kids really gravitate to the chefs, not to the restaurateurs. It's rare I get a phone call from somebody who says, I really want to work for you. I want to learn from you. I've read about you. That used to happen all the time. So it's harder for us now to recruit. We still want to develop from within.

What is the key to lasting in this business?
You have to police yourself personally, meaning that whoever owns the restaurant can’t drink heavily, do drugs, womanize. You're supposed to be representing your business. I think you have to try not to be too greedy and just think about yourself all the time and how much money you're going to make, but try as much as possible to spread the wealth.

Because good karma will come back to you?
Well, I've always believed that. I don't know how true it is. [laughs]

Are you involved hands-on with your restaurants here in New York, and around the world?
Yes. I think the fish stinks from the head. So you lay a groundwork of what it is that you expect. You put your men into the place, and I think the proof is that, in most of the cases, our chefs and our managers stay and exist for many, many years, so my approach tends to be laissez-faire.

Have you ever had to cut corners?
I think everybody does unfortunately. When you say cut corners, if you mean in spending money in terms of design and things, I'm constantly trying to evaluate why we create all these facades when my whole career has been about knocking down the facades. In other words, Montrachet was the perfect example of spending what you had, and it was minimal. But they got it. You know, they really got it. They got who was cooking. They got the concept of it. They got the price structure of it. They got the wine savvyness of it. And yet we had to cut corners because we had no money. Now, subsequently, you see all these restaurants, and they're spending more and more and more money on design, design, design. Is this to fool the customer? Because at the end of the day, you're going there to eat. And so if it's cutting corners when it comes to spending money on that, I don't have a problem. If it's cutting corners as far as the best quality of the tuna, the best quality of the cheese, no, we'd never cut corners there. That's why I'm so upset with the level of the rise in the rent is because it doesn't give us the opportunity to spend more on food and our employees. In other words, the numbers have changed. I've heard other restaurateurs who are paying these crazy rents say, ‘our payroll is under 30 percent.’ I don't understand how that's a good thing because if your payroll's under 30 percent, it means you're paying your staff less. If your food cost is under 30 percent, it means you're giving the customer either less quality or smaller portions. If you ask me that, I'll tell you that you're controlling costs, but why not control the occupancy by not signing an inflated lease. So if you pay an extra 2 or 3 percent more to your staff and to your purveyors, what's wrong with that? I think that's better than paying it to a landlord.

You just opened a wine store, are working on a spa [The Virgin Spa at Natirar with Richard Branson]. Are these also ways to keep yourself challenged?
Oh, absolutely. After the whole episode downtown here at the World Trade Center, you had to reevaluate what was going to happen. There was so much uncertainty, it was an important time to reassess all of your priorities, your life's work. Keep in mind there was just so much loss, after that event. But I didn't want to see further victimization in the form of financial victimization. What I mean by that is the restaurants had to keep running. They had to stay open so that the staff wasn't victimized. Nobody really understood that, and honestly, it's still an ongoing process. The uncertainty has changed a little bit, things have slowly gotten back to some sense of normalcy, but my obligation is not just to me and my family, it's to my extended family, which are all the employees of all these restaurants. And I take my responsibilities seriously. I'm responsible for these businesses, and the future of these businesses and the people who work in these businesses.

Do you think about retirement?
Not really. I enjoy what I'm doing, but the world is so full of information, at such an increased pace that, even though your achievements can be many, varied, and great, they're going to be very soon forgotten. So our ego tells us, if we ride off into the sunset, who's going to remember anything we did? So as long as our ego is at work, we’re still working, still doing new stuff. I don't believe in opening restaurants just to make money.

That's not necessarily pointless, but to me I've never ever sat down and said, well, I make this much money over here, so I should do five of those. It's never been my philosophy to just do these things purely on the basis of commerce. It's always what would be fun and interesting or what could we do well and what can we execute and then you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is.

.

 > More Articles