New York Times Magazine
Who Is the Best Restaurateur in America?
Drew Nieporent put hamachi with jalapenos in a birch forest at Nobu and mixed phyllo-wrapped sardines with belly dancers at Layla. With six restaurants and counting, he has redefined the art of dinner as theater.
by Arthur Lubow
March 1996
Entering Tribakery, his first stop of the day, Drew Nieporent pauses to shift the wicker baskets of the biggest loaves of bread to the top shelf, where they're easier for the customers to grab. He asks the cashier to push a tray of lemon sqaures to the front of the display case (easier for the customers to see) and points out that the pastries are end to end in one part of the display case, sparse in another. A few words with the manager, and then, snatching a croissant on the way out, he walks next door to Tribeca Grill, his highest-volume restaurant, where he picks up a sheet of telephone messages. Although he is the head of a restaurant empire that does nearly $30 million a year in business, Nieporent has yet to hire a secretary. He checks calls (most are from friends or friends of friends, hoping for a table at one of his restaurants), then studies the reservations list. Celebrities, friends, regular customers, food professionals: all will require some acknowledgement - a little schmooze from the owner himself, a little something from the kitchen or both.
At night the small skylight room at the back of Tribeca Grill accomodates diners, but during the less-busy lunch period it serves as Nieporent's makeshift office. From here he can develop strategies for his expanding restaurant domain. Five of the six restaurants that he co-owns are within a five-minute walk of Tribeca grill. (The sixth, Rubicon, is in San Francisco.) There is Montrachet, his maiden venture, a French restaurant that is going strong in its 11th year; Nobu, an innovative Japanese restaurant that is, at this moment, the hardest reservation to score in New York: Layla, the Middle Eastern place that is Nieporents latest entry, and TriBakery, a lunch spot and bakery. Tribeca Grill serves as Nieporent's headquarters because as his largest restaurant, it allows him a little space to spread out. It's his symbolic base as well. When he opened Tribeca Grill in 1990 with Robert De Niro as his high-profile partner (and 22 other investors, many of them in the movie business), Nieporent arrived on the New York restaurant scene. Tribeca Grill introduced the Nieporent custom blend: professional service, dependable food, sharp-focused restaurant identity and high-octane glitz.
In the skylight room today, Nieporent has scheduled a noon meeting with David Rockwell, the interior designer whose credits (besides Planet Hollywood) include Nobu. When he opened Tribeca Grill, Nieporent was too rushed to care that it was ugly. Now he has decided that it could use a brush-up by Rockwell.
At the center of Tribaca Grill is an enormous mahogany bar, which Nieporent bought at auction for $7,500 and then spent $45,000 restoring. "It was in splinters," he says - the heritage is what he was after. The bar once dominated Maxwell's Plum, which was the trendiest restaurant in New York in the late 1960's. "There is a certain continuity of experience there," acknowledges Warner LeRoy, who founded Maxwell's and now owns Tavern on the Green. For Nieporent, the legacy was personal. After he graduated from Cornell University, his first full-time job was conveying food from the back of the house to the front (that is, from the kitchen to the dining room) at Maxwell's Plum.
Rockwell has no designs on the Maxwell's bar. In the main room, he is simply covering the banquettes, repainting the green wood trim maroon and hanging seven Mission-style chandeliers of oxidized bronze with glass inlays. "If it ain't broke," Nieporent says, "dont fix it." Rockwell has more ambitious plans for another site - Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. At Minton's, Nieporent hopes to restore the playhouse, which was a hallowed jazz club half a century ago, and to convert the vacant dry cleaner next door into a restaurant, but taht project is on hold until he can find some minority investors. (He doesn't want to be seen as an outsider.) In the more immediate future, Nieporent would like Rockwell to design a stylish noodle shop adjacent to Nobu, where an empty gallery now sits. He already has a name for the joint: Nobu's Noodles. "We're turning away 200 people a day at Nobu," he explains. The project is a little delicate because Nobuyuki Matsuhisa - the Los Angeles-based chef and Nieporent's partner - hasn't yet agreed to it. "We have to defer to Nobu in terms of the back of the house and the menu," Nieporent says, "but we're goosing him a little." He is also fielding offers to openn Nobus in London and Las Vegas.
The division between the front and back of house is the fault line of the restaurant business. Nieporent straddles it like a colossus - which, when you consider that his weight is 280 pounds and rising, is more than a idle figure of speech. He has a politician's memory for names and faces and, although not trained as a chef, he is a gourmand with strong ideas about his menus. Other restaurant owners may serve more distinguished food: in New York, as in most cities, the critics favor the temples of cuisine (Bouley, Daniel, Lespinasse, Aureole) that are run by chef-proprietors. Other upscale restaurants do a higher volume: in New York, the steakhouse and seafood czar Alan Stillman (Smith & Wollensky, Cite) does more than twice Nieporent's business. But this is Nieporent's moment. At 40, the oversize, ebullient, bearded man, in his trademark button-up collarless shirts and scuffed black shoes, is the most dynamic restaurateur in the country. His bulky form is familiar to television viewers from his frequent appearances on the Television Food Network. His restaurants won four James Beard Awards (the foodies' Oscars) last year. And heft as his achievements are, they're dwarfed by his ambitions. "I don't think anyone has ever grown so many excellent restaurants in such a short period of time as Drew," says Danny Meyer, the owner of Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern in New York. "There are a lot of us who look at Drew and say, 'My God, how does he do it?'"
Beneath the artful drizzle of coulis on the plates and the oxidized metal on the walls, the upscale restaurant world is ruled by a stark arithmetic. A successful restaurant should earn at least 8 to 10 percent on the customer's dollar. At bottom, a restaurant is a chair-rental service. "The table and chair - that's our most perishable commodity," Nieporent says. He believes that the restaurateur makes his most critical decisions in the initial design, when he "sets out the template" for what follows. "You have to maximize the seating capacity," he says. "Chairs produce revenue. Trolleys with dessert don't produce revenue." The goal is to squeeze as many tables as possible into the room, yet still leave space for waiters to avoid bumping into diners. But that's just the beginning. "When you walk into a restaurant and see bodies on seats, that doesn't mean the place is working," Nieporent says. To be successful, a restaurant must do two seatings a night. When taking reservations, Nieporent allots two hours for tables for two - "deuces" - and two and a half hours for tables for four. (With larger parties, the busboy spends more time setting up the table, and the waiter spends more time taking the order; its also more likely that someone in the group will be late.) Unfortunately for restaurateurs, the typical New York diner wants to arrive between 7:30 and 8:30. Most callers must be steered to come an hour later or an hour earlier so that the table can be used twice a night.
Nieporent has calculated that by tacking a $10 surcharge onto every meal he could operate a restaurant that did only one seating a night. He jokes that he would call it Dinner at Eight. His arithmetic? A restaurant typically spends one-third of its gross revenue on food and wine. In the Nieporent group, Tribeca Grill, at 28 percent, has the lowest food cost, and Nobu - where a 600-pound tuna can cost $18,000 - has the highest, 35 percent. The second big bite out of the dollar - about another third - is payroll. Rent can subtract from 5 to 10 percent. Smaller costs, like laundry, flowers, music, shave away more. A proprietor who gets to keep 10 cents on every dollar is doing well. "Let's say a restaurant does $3 million, so you're netting $300,000," Nieporent says. "Three hundred and sixty-five days, minus Sunday - to make it simpler, let's say 300 days. Every day you make a thousand dollars. Say you're doing a hundred covers a day." (A "cover" is restaurant jargon for the person who fills the chair.) "That's a $10 a cover profit." So a $10 surcharge would eliminate the need for a second seating, except that the waiters, who depend on tips, would be shortchanged. And the public, Nieporent fears, would balk at an unfamiliar added expense. Don't expect Dinner at Eight anytime soon.
Nieporent says that despite its high food costs, Nobu generates his highest profit margin: 20 percent on a $6 million dollar gross. The tables are always full. The Japanese decor eliminates the cost of laundering tablecloths and washing silverware. Best of all is the low rent. "The rent number is 1 percent at Nobu," he gloats. My rent is $60,000 a year. Another restaurateur who is going to open the same restaurant in midtown will be paying $300,000 rent."
There are benefits besides the low Tribeca rents in concentrating several businesses in one neighborhood. "The best multi-unit restaurateur is someone who has five or six restaurants within walking distance, so he can visit all of them in the course of the day," says Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant. (Indeed Rubicon, in San Francisco, lacks the honed edge of the Tribeca establishments.) Making his daily rounds, Nieporent can adjust the lighting at Montrachet and survey the customers at Tribakery. He can sample new menu items and give pep talks to the staff. Furthermore, Nieporent has grown, so has Tribeca, and many of the people who hunted for West Broadway in their circling taxis back in 1985 have loyal customers at all of his establishments.
Nieporent views his restaurants as collaborations. He is the producer - or, to use one of his favored sports analogies, the manager. Rockwell and the other designers he hires are part of his team, and so are the waiters and the front-of-the-house managers and the bookkeepers and the real estate agent who scouts out new properties. His older brother, Tracy - a one-time advertising and marketing executive who is a scaled-down Drew lookalike - is on the team, specializing in promotion and marketing, and so is their mother, Sybil, who takes reservations at Montrachet. (Their father, who was a lawyer for the State Liquor Authority and introduced young Drew to the world of dining out, died in 1986). In the restaurant business, however, the glamorous position - the quarterback - is the chef. It wasn't always so. In the heyday of Maxwell's Plum or Joseph Baum's Restaurant Associates establishments, no one knew or cared who the chef was. Over the last 15 or 20 years American chefs have become celebrities, and the back of the house is challenging the front of the house. That conflict almost undid Nieporent at the very start.
Nieporent built Montrachet with $175,000, including $50,000 of his own (all he had) and $25,000 from his mother. Two years earlier he visited California for the first time and, at the recommendation of a friend, sampled the cooking of David Bouley, a French-trained American who was working as sous-chef at Sutter 500 in San Francisco. The seven-course lunch was the most expensive meal he had ever eaten - and he loved it. He recruited Bouley to be his chef. Nieporent likes to say that the concept of Montrachet was a first-rate French restaurant with "no barriers." He offered a $16 prix fixe so people without stuffed wallets could eat there. The menu was in English. There was no dress code. Seven weeks after it opened Montrachet received three stars from the Times restaurant critic and the phone has never stopped ringing.
A year later Nieporent fired Bouley, giving him $37,000 in severance. The acrimony from the divorce persists. "Drew's relationship with David was never meant to be," says Brian Whitmer, who was brought into replace Bouley and now runs his own highly regarded restaurant, Montrio, in Monterey, Calif. Nieporent wasn't about to limit is domain to the front of the house. "It was the whole guest experience that was being provided by Drew at the time," Whitmer says. "Drew would be at the door, Drew would be at your table and Drew would be in the kitchen. He's a control person. It was a small enough place that Drew could be all over it. He would be there first thing in the morning to answer the phone and he'd be there at night to close up."
Bouley ignored any culinary suggestions, but Nieporent might have been able to accept that. (Matsuhisa, the star chef he hired a decade later, is similarly unreceptive.) What he couldn't tolerate were the increasingly long waits for food to emerge from the kitchen as Bouley fussed with each plate. Diners were backing up in the little restaurant like planes on a foggy runway. Without two seatings a night, Montrachet couldn't prosper. Equally upsetting were the enormous food bills. "Our herb bill was several hundred dollars a day," he says. "We were only doing a hundred covers a day. It was two or three dollars per cover for herbs." What tipped him over the edge was the time Bouley left the kitchen to discuss business opportunities with some diners who represented the new Equitable Center in midtown. "He was cuckolding me right in front of my nose," Nieporent says. "And all the customers were hearing this. I had to say, 'I don't care if I lose my three stars.' We put all of his stuff in the van."
Bouley, who would not respond to repeated requests for comment, went on to open his own eponymous restaurant, which earned four stars from The Times. Although he has never crossed Bouley's threshold, Nieporent doesn't begrudge him the rating. Nieporent's satisfaction comes from the fact that when Montrachet was reviewed again with a new chef, it kept its three stars. "There was a simple reason we had to part," he says of Bouley, who has just been hired by Warner LeRot - Nieporent's old boss - to revamp the Russian Tea Room. "I had a dream and he had a dream. He was destroying my dream."
This winter, Nieporent opened LAyla, which features Middle Eastern food. Designed by Christopher Chestnutt, Layla - much like Nobu was decorated by Rockwell - transports a diner on a World's Fair carousel ride. Intricate tilework on the walls is interrupted by shards of Morrocan pottery. Harem lamps hang suggestively over the tables. Light glows behind a Moorish cutout on a red cloth screen. Topping it all off is a belly dancer who undulates nightly from table to table. With each new restaurant, Nieporent feels the pressure to prove more stuff. "I can't hit a double or a triple," he says. "It has to be a home run."
Although Nieporent doesn't own theme restaurants like the Hard Rock Cafe, his restaurants are strongly themed. Good food and service aren't enough. You have to be noticed. That's why the man who opened Montrachet with bare walls now hires the splashiest designers. "What is Starbucks?" he asks. "It's a coffee shop with great graphics. But people go there instead of Chock Full o' Nuts because it's an event.
Nieporent's restaurants succeed because they provide not only good food and service but also an event. Going to Nobu, you feel that you are at a brilliant, innovative restaurant - you feel like a foodie. At Tribeca Grill, you gaze voyeuristically about, and even if you don't spot anyone famous, you feel that you are at a celebrity brasserie - you feel cool. "Tribeca Grill is perceived as somewhat hip, but not by people who are hip," says another, trendier New York restaurateur. Nieporent's restaurants are predictable - and to some, boring. The effect is a bit like being on a luxury safari to Kenya, where a Jeep driver with a walkie-talkie drives you up to the lions and announces that this is wild Africa. It's a reliable, prepackaged experience. It's a picture that comes with a frame. In 1996, it's what the customer wants.
Passing by TriBakery in the early evening, Nieporent says: You can shoot a cannon through this place. We don't get any play." He has decided to fill the tables and chairs by transforming the afternoon lunch spot into an Italian restaurant each night. He plans to call it Zeppole, after the fried-dough snack food he loved as a boy growing up in Manhattan. "'Zeppole' has a little bit of a downscale feeling," he says. "Naming a restaurant is very important. It's like naming a movie. If you blow it, that's bad." He already has an Italian chef in mind, and several others he could turn to. "He knows who all the young and good chefs are, and he makes a mental note to someday tap them," says Jerry Della Femina, the advertising executive who was Nieporent's partner in two East Hampton restaurants before a financial dispute ended the relationship.
The joke among Nieporent and his colleagues at Myriad Restaurants, his corporation, is, "What's the deal of the day?" Each day, Nieporent takes calls from people who want him to start a restaurant. A New York Giants marketing executive phones to discuss a Giants theme restaurant. A prominent chef is interested in starting his own seafood restaurant, and Nieporent has his eye on a space in the World Financial Center. An old friend wants to collaborate on a restaurant in Sonoma, Calif. The question is whether Nieporent, as he expands, will spread himself too thin. "I think the key to his success is not how many ideas he can think of or how many celebrity partners he can get," says Richard Melman whose Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You restaurant chain is one of Nieporent's inspirations. "The key is how he develops his organization. What's the methodology of doing multiple places? After four or five, one person can't do it, or maintain it, without partners."
Walking through the streets of Tribeca toward the close of his 11-11 workday, before catching a ride home (he doesn't drive) to his wife and two young children in New Jersey, Nieporent scans the eateries and galleries like a Monopoly player. That Greek coffee shop would make a fine chili house. Somewhere he would love to open a Jewish delicatessen. "To have all your eggs in one basket is nuts," he says. The public is fickle. In the back of his mind, he is always worrying that he is "going to wind up like all the other slobs out there - all of a sudden you're working for a living." Not that placing two bottoms on every seat each night isn't work. Bringing in customers and holding down costs in hope of earning 10 percent on your gross - that's the reality behind the glamour of the restaurant business. "You make a dime on a dollar is you're lucky," Nieporent says with a shrug. "A dime on a dollar. That's why you have to grind it out."