New York
Grill Power
Robert De Niro Builds His Dream Restaurant
By Meryl Gordon
April 9, 1990
In the dusty, nearly finished dining room of the TriBeCa Grill, a workman is loudly sawing away while manager Drew Nieporent valiantly tries to go over the restaurant's menu with chef Don Pintabona.
"When are the pasta cookers coming in?" asks Nieporent.
"I'm not sure. Soon, I hope," says Pintabona.
"Why did you take the stuffed zucchini off the menu?"
"Too time-consuming."
"Can we add a banana dessert?"
"Of course."
"And we can't call this 'the country salad,' " says Nieporent. "They use the exact same verbiage at Luxembourg. The last thing you want is for people to think you're taking poetic license."
Nieporent, who's just getting started, is interrupted by two assistants with bad news: A final piece of the handsome mahogany bar--the one from Maxwell's Plum that Nieporent bought last year at auction for $ 15,000--won't be ready for a few weeks, and another building inspector wants yet another construction alteration. "This is a nightmare," says Nieporent, the 36-year-old restaurateur who also runs Montrachet, only a few blocks away.
And then there's Robert De Niro, the lead partner and ringleader behind this whole operation. The actor comes back to New York tonight, after two weeks in Los Angeles. Nieporent knows that his very first question off the plane is going to be "Is this restaurant ever going to open?"
Last year, the hot ticket was 150 Wooster; this year, it's the TriBeCa Grill. The restaurant has held a series of private parties since December and hopes to open, pending final city approvals, next week. Located on the ground floor of the old Martinson Coffee Building at Greenwich and Franklin Streets, the restaurant was conceived and built as part of De Niro's new Tribeca Film Center.
Even before it was set to open, the TriBeCa Grill was being touted as a sort of Schwabs on the Hudson, Manhattan's own Hollywood commissary--but with good food. It does have built-in cachet--the upstairs neighbors included writers, producers, and directors like Brian De Palma. And to finance the restaurant, De Niro recruited the ultimate buddy cast of investors: Bill Murray, Christopher Walken, Sean Penn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ed Harris, and Lou Diamond Phillips. Months before the kitchen had pots or pans, The New York Times Magazine published a recipe for stuffed vegetables from the TriBeCa Grill, and Vanity Fair jumped the gun a month and a half ago by describing actress Lorraine Bracco as part of a "downtown drama set who all seem to . . . hang out at Robert De Niro's TriBeCa Grill."
Like an overbudget movie with production problems, the TriBeCa Grill is now months behind schedule. De Niro's production company and Nieporent have been getting hundreds of calls a week from people desperately seeking reservations. They simply assumed that the restaurant had opened--but with an unlisted phone number.
"That's what they do in L.A. Restaurants don't give out the phone number. It's ridiculous," says De Niro in his upstairs office. The phone, he explains, deliberately wasn't installed until just last week. Dressed casually in gray corduroys, a dark-blue shirt, and gray Windbreaker, De Niro insists that he "absolutely" does not want his place to have snob appeal. "The place should be warm; people should feel comfortable in it. It should have the feeling of a place that isn't fly-by-night. It'll last," he says, rambling in stream-of-consciousness fashion. "Only time will give it a tradition."
From the outset, De Niro's infatuation with owning his own restaurant has had the serendipitous, impulsive quality of a backyard musical more than that of a prudent, well-planned business venture. After bringing in one lone restaurant professional, Drew Nieporent, De Niro went on to sign up an architect who had minimal restaurant experience; to hire a fashion designer with little decorating experience to pick the fabrics, lighting fixtures, and chairs; and to put a Disney executive whom he'd hired to run his movie-production company in charge of watching over construction. "I kept telling myself, 'I used to be a movie executive. Why am I looking at bathroom equipment?'" says Jane Rosenthal, the vice-president of Tribeca Productions.
De Niro has jetted between movie sets and the building site, often staying in the character of the moment. "When you were talking to him," according to one participant, "you didn't know whether you were dealing with an illiterate [Stanley & Iris] or a man coming out of a coma [the just-wrapped Awakenings]."
In short, this was a gifted-amateur hour--and given the "who's on first" quality of the entire production, it's surprising that this unlikely crew has pulled it off.
Blame it on their years working as waitresses and waiters waiting to be discovered, but actors find restaurants irresistible--Mariel Hemingway and Sam's Cafe, Patrick Swayze and Mulholland Drive, and Matt Dillon backing The Falls. But for the reclusive De Niro to cast himself as the star attraction of the TriBeCa Grill seems a very odd choice. On a recent Friday night at Montrachet, he sat next to a fire exit in the very back of the room, as far away as possible from the gawkers. The next night, at the Grill's private party for Awakenings, he wore an overcoat and scarf all evening--as if ready to make a premidnight run for it.
De Niro seems uncomfortable about articulating his motives for owning a restaurant. During an interview, he stares at a tape recorder: "I always thought of having a place, you know, sort of one building, a restaurant. . . . Sort of a bistro-type thing."
Two years ago, when he decided to take control of his erratic career by starting his own production company, De Niro came across the Martinson Coffee Building, a block from his TriBeCa apartment. "Bobby flipped for the building," says Bob MacDonald, who met De Niro when he helped install cabinets in the actor's apartment years ago and has become an aide-de-camp. De Niro bought a 50 percent share of the building from the owners, developer Paul Wallace and theatrical producer Stewart (La Cage aux Folles) Lane. It was his idea to turn the whole place into a film complex with a downstairs restaurant where he and his movie pals could hang out.
Since De Niro and girlfriend Toukie Smith were regulars at Montrachct, he asked owner Drew Nieporent to help plan the restaurant. "Drew really cares," says De Niro. "He makes running a restaurant almost like an art itself. I was impressed by that."
So on a hot August evening in 1988, the actor asked Nieporent if he would consider doing another restaurant downtown. "It really took me by surprise," says Nieporent, who in past stints at Maxwell's Plum and Tavern on the Green mastered the "art" of making both the famous and the not-so-famous comfortable.
After dinner, De Niro, Smith, and Nieporent walked over to Greenwich Street, three blocks away, to look at the Martinson building. Nieporent, who was beginning to feel restless after three years of running Montrachet, immediately wanted a front-and-center table at De Niro's new restaurant. "But I didn't want to come on too strong," Nieporent recalls. "I asked him, 'What's your idea?' but at that point he didn't have a clear vision."
Over the next six months, De Niro auditioned some twenty architects for the job of redoing the entire building and designing the restaurant. He finally picked Lo-Yi Chan, a soft-spoken Chinese emigre best known for the Roosevelt Island tramway and for his sedate renovations of buildings at Harvard and Columbia. Chan admits he was surprised to get the assignment. In Chan's three separate interviews for the job, De Niro's primary concern seemed to be "chemistry, finding someone he could get along with." As the architect politely puts it, "He doesn't easily give direction as to what he wants to do."
With the main cast in place, the tortuous process of designing the restaurant began. In January 1989, Nieporent took De Niro, along with Rosenthal, MacDonald, and Chan, on a whirlwind tour of ten restaurants all over Manhattan. In a two-car caravan, the group went from Aureole to B. Smith's to Rakel, to get ideas for what the restaurant should look like.
In February, De Niro flew some of the group to Toronto. He wanted them to check out a Thai-inspired Italian restaurant called Stelle (Italian for "stars") and to meet the chef. When the dinners finally arrived, there was stunned silence: The chefs conceit was to arrange the food in star-shaped patterns. Nieporent was put in the awkward position of telling De Niro gently, "That's not right for us."
Next, De Niro said he wanted a sushi bar in one corner of the restaurant. He invited the owner of Matsuhisa, his favorite Beverly Hills sushi restaurant, to come to New York and inspect the new space. The California sushi master speaks little English, and no one involved in the project spoke Japanese. "I smiled a lot," says Bob MacDonald. The sushi idea was quietly dropped after that.
Last March, renovation finally began on the Martinson building, even though the restaurant plans were still vague. When the demolition crews arrived, the local residents were outraged. They started passing out leaflets denouncing De Niro. They didn't want more limousines and crowds coming into the area. A lot of them made angry phone calls about the construction noise.
"People were very concerned about the traffic and celebrities the operation might bring in," says Howard Harrington, a local community-board official. Jane Rosenthal found herself cast as the neighborhood mediator, arranging a tour for the board and assuring people that the TriBeCa Grill would be a reputable restaurant and not a private club. De Niro even sent a letter to the Landmarks Preservation Commission supporting a proposal to make his building a landmark. As Rosenthal puts it, "Anything bad that's happened in the neighborhood in the past year has been blamed on Bob."
Meanwhile, he continued looking for investors. "Literally, I'd run into somebody in the street," he says, "and I said, 'Maybe I'll ask them; maybe they will do it or maybe they won't.' It was very random. You're having dinner with someone and tell them about it on the spur of the moment."
Barbra Streisand was one of the friends De Niro courted over dinner at Montrachet. By the time dessert arrived, she had agreed to become involved. But in order to get a liquor license, all participants in a restaurant or bar have to be fingerprinted; Streisand, a militant civil libertarian, balked. De Niro also asked Danny DeVito, Penny Marshall, and Jeremy Irons, but they, too, turned him down.
But Mikhail Baryshnikov and Christopher Walken were two who signed on enthusiastically. "Doing business with your friends is the nicest way," says Walken. "On the menu, we can have Veal Chris, Steak Misha, and Chicken Bob." A few minutes later, Walken called back to amend the line. "Actually, we'd better make that Beef Bob." In truth, the menu will have no cute sobriquets.
When the partnership papers for Home Boy Restaurant (Padell's choice of a corporate name) were signed, 23 people had put up $2.8 million for a share in De Niro's dream. Half the money was to go for buying the 13,500-square-foot space; the rest would be used for renovations. And making money didn't seem to be a critical factor. David Trenk, a shy 66-year-old man who runs a poultry-wholesaling business in Newark, and his wife, Penny, were just thrilled at being part of a hot downtown restaurant. "After selling chickens for 45 years," says Trenk, "this is going to be very exciting; it's like starting a new life." Elektra Records chairman Robert Krasnow says he wrote a check to back the TriBeCa Grill for the sheer fun of it. "I'm part of a club," he says. "The people involved aren't doing this for the money."
But last October, weeks after the construction had started, the money began to dry up. Renovations eventually came in around $350,000 over budget. Some blame Chan's inexperience as an architect and say his plans were never within budget. Others point to the unions, saying the workmen displayed a featherbedding "get the celebrity" attitude. "You could almost hear the unions saying, 'Look at who the investors in this place are--they can afford it,'" says one participant. Nieporent's insistence on building two kitchens--one for the restaurant and a smaller version for an upstairs party room--also added to the overruns. And De Niro was always more concerned with the look and feel of the place than with the bottom line.
Since the partnership papers had closed, it was too late to recruit any new investors. Padell finally redesigned the financial package so that the building's owners--De Niro, Paul Wallace, and Stewart Lane--assumed a larger mortgage on the restaurant space, which raised the yearly interest cost by about $40,000. The TriBeCa Grill now has to gross $1.2 million a year to break even, according to Nieporent. In a declining restaurant market, that's a lot of grilled swordfish and poached pears in a place where a typical tab is expected to run $40 a person.
Walking into the nearly finished TriBeCa Grill a few weeks before it opens, one is struck by its airiness, the huge, high redbrick ceilings, the ornate mahogany bar smack in the center. (One jarring note is the garish red-black-and-green banquettes.) The feel of an old factory building--pipes painted forest green and odd knobs poking out here and there--is very much a part of the restaurant's character. Nieporent convinced De Niro that the bar should be the centerpiece of the restaurant. It would break up the space and give the bar crowd an unobstructed view of the celebrity scene. "I was opposed to it," says De Niro aide Bob MacDonald, "but Bob agreed. He thought. If people are going to come and gawk, let's make it easy for them."
Another major argument developed over the noise factor. Nieporent and architect Chan wanted acoustical tiles on the ceiling and carpeting on the floor. De Niro wanted to keep the authentic factory look. They ended up compromising with two small islands of green carpeting on the tile floors. "We were afraid if you put in wall-to-wall carpet, it would look like Leonard's of Great Neck," explains Rosenthal. Frank Spina, design director of a women's-wear company called Gillian, got his job designing the restaurant because he knew one of De Niro's production assistants. Spina says De Niro told him to think of the restaurant as "an extended living room . . . a place where his friends would feel comfortable."
With opening day only a few weeks away, the pressure is on Nieporent to make the customers happy. "I just want to enjoy the place," De Niro says. "I don't want the headaches Drew will have."
While the actor tinkered with every other decision, he gave Nieporent free reign in hiring 30-year-old Don Pintabona, formerly a chef at the River Cafe and Aureole. Unlike Montrachet's carefully sauced French fare, the Grill menu includes a lot of simple, easily prepared grilled-fish and pasta dishes. "The service has to be fast," Pintabona explains, "so the presentation has to be less dramatic." Nieporent is betting that the marinated citron chicken will be the TriBeCa Grill's best-seller; Pintabona isn't so sure. He doesn't yet know what the crowd expects or how it will respond.
Over dinner late one evening at a nearly deserted Canal Bar, Nieporent admits he's worried. There's an ephemeral, flash-in-the-pan quality to many Manhattan restaurants. Tonight, for example, the truly hip are at 150 Wooster; but soon Bianca and Blaine and, yes, even Lorraine Bracco will head to the TriBeCa Grill. "I'm not anxious for it to be the trendiest in-spot," says Nieporent, who's worried that the initial crowds could overwhelm the kitchen. "I feel like a heavyweight champ," he says, only half in jest. "My whole reputation is on the line. I keep thinking about Mike Tyson." But Tyson merely had Donald Trump in the audience. Nieporent has the Raging Bull in his corner.