Wine Spectator
Drew Nieporent, Empire Builder
The New York restaurateur opens an eatery in San Francisco and a new Japanese place in the Big Apple
by Mervyn Rothstein
November 15, 1994
Drew Nieporent marches swiftly past the bare red-brick walls and thick rust-and-green metal pipes that accentuate the decor of his Tribeca Grill in lower Manhattan. His white shirt is, as always, tieless and buttoned to the neck, and his shapeless gray trousers are, as ever, creased from overuse.
A black leather briefcase over his shoulder bulges with papers, the accoutrements of an active man. Nieporent himself also bulges. With his dark hair, thick black beard, round thin tortoise-shell eyeglasses and almost 300 pounds of body weight the renowned restaurateur looks like a somewhat smaller, more youthful version of Luciano Pavarotti. And the resemblance seems appropriate, for the ubiquity and success of Nieporent in the world of food call to mind the omnipresence of the mellifluous Italian tenor in the world of music.
Nieporent is 15 minutes late for an interview, and he smiles and apologizes. But the apology, however graceful and diplomatic, is pro forma. Drew Nieporent is a busy man, and busy men are expected to be late. He is also a celebrity, and celebrities have their own time clocks. In an era when restaurant luminaries are most often the chefs, he is a notable exception, a quintessential star restaurateur, rivaling the greats of past and present--Henri Soule of Le Pavilion, Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club, Vincent Sardi of Sardi's, Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque--in name recognition and contemporary glamour. Profiles of Nieporent, complete with photographs or caricatures of his forever smiling face, abound: in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Elle, Crains New York Business, The London Times and newspapers east and west. In 1992, he was even inducted into "Whoís Who in Cooking in America" by the James Beard Foundation.
Indeed, these days the 39-year-old Nieporent is everywhere, and wherever he is--New York City, Long Island, San Francisco--there is a successful restaurant. And behind every eating establishment there is the Nieporent philosophy: informality combined with good food, unastronomical prices and more than a dash of celebrity glitter.
"The idea is good food and great wine in a casual setting," Nieporent says after sitting down and ordering spring rolls, one of the Grill's most well-regarded appetizers, and a plate of grilled chicken and mushrooms prepared especially for him. "You don't have to wear a tie and jacket to feel like you're dining."
Nieporent is very much an egalitarian: a child of the '60s, instilled with a lack of concern for ceremony and pretense that is part of the legacy of that decade of protest and change. The philosophy is one of congeniality as well as informality, and it extends to the relaxed manner in which he treats his dining-room staffers (each of whom is attired in the trademark tieless shirt buttoned to the collar). It even reaches to the kitchen help, who are greeted with a round of high fives.
The newest Nieporent establishments, east and west, are in TriBeCa and 3,000 miles away, in San Francisco. In August, Nieporent and Robert De Niro, his film-star partner in the Tribeca Grill, opened Nobu, a block away, turning a former bank on Hudson Street into a sushi and sashimi palace. It features the creations of the renowned Japanese chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa--owner of the Matsuhisa restaurant in Beverly Hills--which in addition to the fabulous raw fish include cooked specialties with a hint of Peru, where Matsuhisa once worked. And Nobu is yet another hit. The critics have cheered, and so have members of the city's dining elite, who eagerly seek reservations.
In March, Nieporent and De Niro got together with Francis Ford Coppola and Robin Williams to start a restaurant called Rubicon in a former Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco's financial district. Named after one of Coppola's own Napa Valley wines, Rubicon boasts a wine cellar prepared by the well-known sommelier Larry Stone, and New American cuisine from the chef Traci des Jardins, a veteran of Elka in San Francisco and Patina in Los Angeles.
In late April, in Bayville, Long Island, an hour's drive from New York City, Nieporent became a consultant to a restaurant called the Pine Island Grill, part of the Crescent Beach Club. It is directly on the water, with 200 seats indoors, 200 outdoors and beautiful views of Long Island Sound. Nieporent is also planning to open a bakery just next door to the Tribeca Grill sometime in the spring. And last year he formed the Myriad Restaurant Group, which specializes in hospitality consulting and management. Clients include the Harley-Davidson Cafe, the Hotel Macklowe, the Queen Elizabeth II, Joseph Phelps Vineyards and the Jordan Vineyard and Winery.
All of which is in addition to the restaurants with which he made his name. First and oldest is Montrachet, which he and Tony Zazula, a fellow graduate of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, founded in TriBeCa almost 10 years ago. Its superb French food, luxurious yet informal atmosphere and master list of fine white and red Burgundies have made it one of the handful of restaurants to receive four stars from Wine Spectator and to be named a Grand Award winner for its list. Montrachet also has a wine club; the $150 membership fee provides prime access to tastings and dinners that include some of the best Burgundies in the house and cost from $150 to $500.
Then came the Tribeca Grill, which he and De Niro opened in 1990 on the ground floor of De Niro's TriBeCa Film Center. The Grill's other partners include Bill Murray and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and it quickly became a watering place for the New York celebrity world, a place to see and be seen. But unlike that at many such places, the food was good--good enough to make Conde Nast Travelerís list of 50 best American restaurants. These days it serves 500 to 600 meals a day in its 200 seats, taking in $7 million a year and making it one of the largest grossing restaurants in New York City.
Which is just how Nieporent dreamed it would be when he was growing up in a place called Peter Cooper Village, a quintessential middle-class enclave of medium-rise apartment buildings put up after World War II on Manhattan's East Side. For Drew Nieporent is the prototype of the New York kid who makes good, complete with the determination, the drive, the ambition, the rough yet charming style. He is someone who set his goals at an early age and figured out how to achieve them.
"I always knew what I wanted to do," Nieporent says, in a voice and an accent that could have only been born on the island of Manhattan. "I always knew I'd be involved in restaurants." And he always understood that his involvement would be in the front of the room, not in the kitchen.
"My father was an attorney for the State Liquor Authority," he says, "and when I was 6 years old we started eating out at all the great restaurants of Manhattan. I got to meet Henri Soule, the group that started the Shun Lee chain, the finest restaurateurs in the city. I would look at the restaurants' decor and think how it could be improved. I would judge the service. I would see the owners work their rooms. I would notice how much they enjoyed doing that, and I knew almost right away that this was something I would like to do. I loved the social aspects of the scene, the energy that was created, the cross section of the best of New York that you would see on any given night: the society couples, the lawyers, the politicians, the sports figures, the journalists. It was so exciting."
Nieporent's mother was a radio actress who portrayed the voice of Sybil Trent on the Saturday morning CBS program ìLetís Pretend," and his first brush with fame came early, albeit preconsciously. When he was only a few months old, he appeared as the Ivory Snow baby on a television commercial. He still has a photo of baby Drew on screen in diapers sitting on Mama Nieporent's lap.
But the fame of infancy proved fleeting. Young Drew nursed his restaurant ambitions through neighborhood public schools and four years at Stuyvesant High School, an elite New York City public school that specializes in math and science and to which admittance is gained only through a highly competitive entrance exam. Nieporent admits, though, that his grades were not the highest, that his prime scientific focus was the effect of heat on nutritional compounds. He worked after school, at McDonald's, grilling cheeseburgers, and at a restaurant called the Duck Joint on the Upper East Side.
His academic record was good enough for the Cornell hotel school, and he expanded his experience by working summers on the huge cruise ships Sagafjord and Vistafjord. After graduation, he got a job with Warner LeRoy at Maxwell's Plum, the huge Upper East Side eatery of 1970s fame whose large scale, intense hustle, aura of excitement and moderate prices not coincidentally resemble the 1990s scene at the Tribeca Grill. "Warner LeRoy's philosophy was to appeal to the mass audience, create a menu that is priced fairly and has all kinds of items on it," Nieporent acknowledges. "I said to myself, This is a good philosophy.'" (Nieporent has taken with him more than LeRoy's philosophy. The massive mahogany bar at the Tribeca Grill is in fact the very one that long graced the Plum; Nieporent bought it at suction for $7500 after his first post-college workplace closed.)
Nieporent started with LeRoy as a back waiter, one who brings the food from the kitchen but is not allowed to serve it. Within a year, however, he was put in charge of the Plum's dining room. Stints followed at La Reserve, Le Perigord, Le Regence, the Plaza Athenee and La Grenouilie, one of the finest French restaurants in New York, where he was the first American to attain the position of captain.
Then he decided to go out on his own. He contacted a chef with whom he had worked at the Plasa AtheneeóDavid Bouley--and Montrachet was born. "It was a different kind of French restaurant," Nieporent says. "I thought that in the French restaurants I had seen there was a lot of facade. And I think that part of the facade back then was trying to give the customers the illusion that they were stepping into a classy joint. So there was a lot of intimidation, a lot of stuffiness and formality. I always felt a little uncomfortable in some of those restaurants. So my feeling was why not take the best elements of those restaurants--the good food, some of the great wines--but not impose any barriers. To try to do it at a lower price and not to have any dress codes."
Seven weeks later, The New York Times gave the restaurant three stars, and the names of Nieporent and Bouley became known citywide. Now, after a decade, Montrachet remains successful with critics and customers, even though Bouley is long gone. He left in a dispute with Nieporent over the direction the restaurant should take, opening his own four-star establishment, Bouley, nearby. (After Bouley left, the, new executive chef, Debra Ponzek, maintained the Times rating. Earlier this year, Ponzek departed to take a break from the kitchen and write a book, and the restaurant's sous-chef, Chris Gesualdi, who has been at Montrachet since 1990, donned the top chef's hat and continued the tradition.)
"It turned out great," Nieporent says of Bouley's departure. "He got what he wanted and I got what I wanted. He got a temple of haute cuisine and I've got a bunch of congenial restaurants where you don't have to wear a jacket or tie in 90∞ weather to get in."
One day in the late 1980s, De Niro, who lives in the neighborhood, showed up for dinner ar Montrachet. He liked the food and the wine and kept coming back. De Niro was planning to set up a film center a few blocks away, at 375 Greenwich St., and envisioned a restaurant on the street floor. "He wanted it to be like a canteen where the directors and the producers and the artistic people would all gather and discuss their projects," Nieporent says. "And to a large extent that vision has come true." With, of course, the public invited to participate, to converse and dine amid the rich and famous and beneath paintings created by De Niro's father, Robert De Niro Sr.
The Tribeca Grill opened to much publicity. In addition to Murray and Baryshnikov, Sean Penn, Ed Harris and Christopher Walken invested. Their presence attracted other stars, and now, four years later, the guest list often includes the likes of Spike Lee, Gerard Depardieu, director James Brooks and models Cindy Crawford and Veronica Webb. (The Grill also has periodic wine dinners called "A Date With Grapes"; the wines are current and the price is about $85.)
"What we have tried to do and what I think we have done is make it a real New York place," says Nieporent, who is the managing partner. "When people are in the public eye they come here. It's kind of a magnet. When Bruce Cutler, the John Gotti lawyer, was in the papers he came here. I think if O.J. Simpson were not in jail he'd come to lunch here today."
Success engenders success, and Nieporent has become a permanent member of the food industry's most-wanted list. Which is what led to Rubicon. "It was in some ways a real stretch for me to do a West Coast restaurant," Nieporent says. "I know the New York market very well, but I'm not as familiar with the Coast. But then the opportunity presented itself to buy the building. And the building was such a natural, with its high ceilings and brick walls.î
He, De Niro, Coppola and their partners put the restaurant together for about $1 million. "De Niro talked to Coppola about getting involved," Nieporent says. "And then he was able to convince Robin Williams to invest. But not before ìMrs. Doubtfire.î It was after ìMrs. Doubtfire.î Before, Robin and his wife, Marsha, were saying no. But after the movie edged up to S175 million in gross revenue they reconsidered."
The wine list, not unexpectedly, focuses on California vintages, including selections from Sonoma-Cutrer, Silverado, Joseph Phelps, Jordan and Stag's Leap. ìThe whole idea of the restaurant was to be very wine savvy," he says. "The California wine growers all want to be represented, and we want to try to include everybody, but we can't all at once. We love the Stag's Leap [Petite] Sirah, for instance, so that is on the list. But just because their Cabernet Sauvignon isn't on the list doesn't mean we don't like it."
Sommelier Stone also has a special affinity for Veuve Clicquot Champagne, Nieporent says, so the list includes many Veuve Clicquot choices: "vintage, non-vintage, tete de cuvee, you name it.î
Nobu, the new Japanese place in TriBeCa, also has a decent-sized wine list, with the wine stored in the former bank building's vault. "But we've also starrted to teach ourselves a little bit about sake," Nieporent says.
His Myriad Restaurant Group, he says, came out of a conscious decision to change his way of doing things. "Until two years ago, you could look at my business and say that in terms of management it was a one-man show," he says. "And then I took a look at all the opportunities that were coming my way and I thought, ëThis is wild.' So we could have looked at all these things and said no to everything and kept the life pretty simple. Or I could do something that my father never had the ability to do."
His father, Nieporent says, "was a civil-service coward. He was a Depression-era person. Money was extraordinarily fleeting. He was happy he had a job. He was not ambitious. Money wasn't that important to him. Money and material things are not necessarily that important to me, either. But my ambition is still very energized. So if I get a phone call from someone to plan another restaurant, or somebody calls to talk about providing the food service for a gigantic new sports club, or somebody calls and wants to talk about creating a jazz emporium-soul food restaurant in Harlem, these are all things that excite me. They make my life very interesting. So I could either have said to myself, 'I'm one person, I've got the Tribeca Grill, I've got Montrachet, I've got to stop.' Or I could have thought, 'Wait a minute, what did they teach me at Cornell hotel school? Delegate authority!' There are a lot of intelligent people in our business who haven't had the opportunities I've had. If I give them the responsibility, they can manage it as well as I can, and it enables me to create more things and do more things."
So he took the plunge, not unmindful of the risks. And the result has been more than gratifying. "We're living this American dream," he says. "In a difficult economic time we're opening businesses, we're employing people, we're taking over warehouses and factory spaces that were not producing anything and we're employing 100 people and generating $1 million in tax dollars for the City of New York."
But he also acknowledges that the growth is "a little scary. As you climb this ladder, or this totem pole--I don't want to use the word successóyour behind is sticking out very far, and it's a long way down."
There has been no fall, but there have been problems. Two years ago, Nieporent got together with the advertising executive Jerry Della Femina and a couple of other investors and opened two restaurants in trendy East Hampton, Long Island. Della Femina and East Hampton Point. The partnership broke up earlier this year in a dispute over money that Nieporent has described as "unfortunate." The breakup--Nieporent's relationship with the two restaurants was severed--led him to work on the Pine Island Grill in Bayville, but he says he still misses the ambience of the Hamptons.
"I look on the restaurant busmess as a great way to make money," he says, "but it's also creative. To me itís intellectual at some point. That's why the East Hampton breakup hurt a little bit. Because it's such an interesting community, full of artists and writers and thinkers. Our restaurants are a way station, a place where people can socialize and talk. Getting to know a movie director like Nora Ephron or a writer like Nicholas Pileggi can be a lot of fun."
He reflects for a moment. "Of course," he says, "one reason they want to know you is because they want to get a good table. So that's why they're nice to you. But at some point, if you have a semblance of a brain maybe they let you in a little bit."
It is clear that Nieporent has been let in more than a little bit. In addition to the stars who cluster in his restaurants, there are the celebrity movie previews in the special screening room a floor above the Grill in De Niroís film center. Nieporent is also an inveterate New York sports fan--his two prime passions are the New York Rangers and Knicksóand he spent much of the spring hobnobbing with his fellow celebs and the Madison Square Garden moguls in the Paramount executive suite above the Garden floor, celebrating the first Ranger Stanley Cup hockey triumph in 54 years and agonizing as the Knicks lost the National Basketball Association championship in the final game to the Houston Rockets.
But, he acknowledges, the busy life takes its toll. Nieporent lives in Ridgewood, N.J., with his wife, Ann, and their two young children, Andrew and Gabrielle, and even though he tries to arrange his days and his business trips so he can spend time with the kids, the week a month in San Francisco to fine-tune Rubicon and the flights to Japan to prepare for Nobu have not allowed him the family leisure he would like.
"My wife, not unlike any restaurant widow, sometimes gets upset at the hours," he says. "And this year has been especially difficult because of the new restaurants and because I'm such an avid sports fan. There were two game sevens in the final playoffs. And I even went to Vancouver for the sixth game of the Stanley Cup playofft. That's how much of a nut I am! I was talking with some of the people at the Garden about the hours we have invested in these games. But I guess there's something we get out of them."
Perhaps because of the busy-ness of his business, Nieporent says that his personal taste in wine these days runs to the simple. "I don't like to overintellectualize wine," he says. "I enjoy wine as a sacrament to the meal. Lately I love the Sangiovese [an Italian red from Tuscany or Umbria]. It's not so complex that while you're drinking it you have to think of 100 things. I've gotten away from going to tastings because I donít have the time to discern all the different nuances of a wine."
But, he admits, he has not lost his respect for or delight in the special and the complex. "Of course I love a wine like Chateau d'Yquem," he says. "Every time you open a prestigious bottle like that and share it with friends it's an extraordinary experience. And, needless to say, given Montrachet:, I love white Burgundy. I could live the rest of my life drinking nothing but white Burgundy."
When it comes to the wine lists for Montrachet and the Triheca Grill--and for the new NobuóNieporent delegates all the authority to his master sommelier, Daniel Johnnes. "Back when we first opened Montrachet, literally in the first month, I was doing everything, ordering the wine, putting it on the shelves," "Nieporent says. "Daniel and I had worked together at the Plaza AthÈnÈe, and he came to me and said, 'I can take the wine list over for you. I can make your life easier.' And those were prophetic words. Daniel's brilliance over the last 10 years has been amazing. The wine lists are constantly evolving, and he is essentially 100 percent autonomous.î
Johnnes, whose excellence has been widely recognized, says that perhaps the two most critical inigredients in his wine philosophy are balance and recognition. "You see so many wine lists top-heavy with Chardonnay or Cabernet," he says. ìYou need to have wines in different price ranges and different styles and from different regions so there is something for everyone.î
The need for accessibility led Johnnes to supply brief yet colorful written descriptions of his wines. ìI suppose I have a reputation for finding offbeat country wines that are a bit esoteric," he says. "But itís equally important to have recognizable wines on the list so the customer feels comfortable. You don't want them to look at the list and say, 'I don't see anything I know so I'll have a gin and tonic.'"
Each list, he says, should also have a focus related to the type of restaurant. "At Monrrachet, we have a great concentracion of Burgundies, white and red, as the name would lead you to expect. At Tribeca Grill, where the cuisine is more American and international, the list is smaller but more diversified, with California, Italian and Spanish wines. And at Nobu we have Rieslings and aromatic types, Gew¸rtzraminer, Sauvignon Blanc: wines a bit lower in alcohol and more versatile with the food."
Nieporent has in recent years developed a taste for a good cigar too. His favorite brand is Onyx, from the Dominican Republic. "My father was a big cigar smoker," he says, "and when I was 14, he gave me and my brother cigars and we got sick as dogs. So I stayed away for a long time. But I was simply too young. It wasn't until started to read Cigar Aficionado magazine that I said to myself, 'Let me check this out again.' And they're incredible. All the time these days when we finish some important project at Myriad we break out the cigars to celebrate."
The Nieporent recognition quotient has reached such high levels that he recently was asked by the Slim Fast company to lose weight for one of its commercials (a la Tommy Lasorda and Willard Scott). He was offered $50,000, but so far has posed only for the "beforeî photograph. "They put a white chefs coat on me and put in pins," he says. "They were pinching it to see how much fat they could reveal."
He has not decided, however, whether he wants to pursue the weight loss publicly--though he says he has no doubt he can drop the poundage. After all,he says, he has done so before (only, as so many people have done, to put it on again).
Nieporent reaches into his pocket. "I have to show you this," he says. "I show it to everyone. I once ran the New York City Marathon. It was 1983. I was 100 pounds lighter." He opens his wallet, takes out a photo and points to a younger, thinner man crossing the finish line in Central Park. "That's me," he says. "I have a plan that I'm going to do it again. So I have to lose the 100 pounds."
And there is little doubt that he will--if he sets his mind to it. But there are so many other things he wants to do, some of them unrelated to food. "I'm a crazy media guy," he says, "a real '60s kid. I listened to copious amounts of music and watched copious amounts of television. Now, in the age of videotape, it's even worse. I'm the kind of guy who stays up until 2 in the morning watching a 'Night-line' from three weeks ago. I guess I'm a little bit addicted to television, especially lately. I'm not getting out. I'm not getting enough exercise."
He wants to become involved in the media, to produce for television or films. And, of course, he wants to remain in the restaurant business. ìI want to let people know that restaurants are an important part of the social fabric of this country," he says. "I want to be able to nurture this profession. I want to make a difference."
He pauses, and laughs. What he says next, though meant as a joke, as an example of the boyish charm that still exudes from this 39-year-old entrepreneur, nonetheless reveals, perhaps a bit unconsciously, just what makes Drew Nieporent tick: the cheerful, beguiling confidence of this ambitious kid from way east on 23rd Street, all the way over near the East River.
"And," he says, "I want to do it all before I'm 40."