Town & Country
True Drew
He Has a Big Heart, a Big Appetite and a Big-Time Roster of Hot Restaurants. What's Next on Drew Nieporent's Menu?
by John Mariani
August 2000
August 2000
Drew Nieporent's headquarters are wherever he happens to be at any given moment. That is, as long as the battery on his cell phone holds out. Despite his more than a dozen restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic, Nieporent has no conventional office. He conducts almost all of his business by mobile phone--usually in a taxi or a town car on his way to and from restaurants, meetings, airports and benefits. To spend any time with Nieporent is to watch a very big man (he can tip the scales at 300 pounds) throw off enormous energy--whether he's making plans for a new restaurant while stuck in traffic, just back from a two-day trip to London, or in a booth at Nobu in Manhattan, carrying on an interview with a reporter while taking calls from staff members.
The frantic pace Nieporent keeps, the number of restaurants he runs (seventeen and counting) and his generosity on the charity circuit--he's just been awarded the James Beard Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year award--have earned him the deep respect and affection of his peers. As restaurateur Danny Meyer, himself a former Beard humanitarian awardee, puts it: "Drew's taking care of people knows no bounds. It doesn't stop at the doorstep of his restaurants." And Maguy Le Coze, co-owner of New York's Le Bernardin, echoes a familiar sentiment among restaurateurs when she says: "Drew is one of the great professionals of our business. He is also an extremely nice man."
And a successful one. With an industry average of four out of five restaurants shutting down within two years of opening, Drew's Myriad Restaurant Group has had--with a few exceptions--a daunting string of big hits. That's because there's no playing it safe for Drew. Instead, he has pioneered the kind of restaurants that have set the direction for American dining. He has been able to puzzle out--almost dictate--what a sophisticated clientele wants to eat next and in what kind of setting. And even if some of his recent disappointing efforts--most notably New York's short-lived Berkeley Grill--suggest that Nieporent's imagination is in overdrive, no one can ever accuse him of playing copycat.
Certainly no one was clamoring for a French restaurant in the then-grim stretch of downtown New York City known as TriBeCa when Drew gambled on his first restaurant, Montrachet, in 1985. His idea was to create a new style of fine French dining, sans attitude, in a neighborhood he believed was on the verge of revival. "We wanted to break down the formal barriers of those old-fashioned, supercilious French restaurants you had in midtown back then," says Drew, who had honed his own service skills at such classics as New York's La Regence and Le Perigord. "My father told me I was crazy to open a restaurant down there, but my mother lent me $25,000 to do it."
Neither parental response was surprising. Drew Nieporent (though the name is often mispronounced, it's nee-POR-ent) describes his childhood in 1950s and '60s Manhattan as a happy one. His introduction to the restaurant scene came through his late father, Andrew, an attorney for the state liquor authority who helped restaurant owners obtain liquor licenses. In return the Nieporents were invited to dine at the great restaurants of the era--Le Pavilion, Cafe Chauveron, San Marino. "I fell in love with that world," says Drew. "To me it was all this incredible theater. The service was so choreographed. And I thought it was an absolute miracle that all this food could come out looking so beautiful--and hot, too." If Drew inherited a fascination with the rough-and-tumble of the restaurant business from his father, he got his sense of the dramatic--often a restaurateur's best asset--from his late mother.
Sybil Trent Nieporent, who died of lymphoma in June at the age of 73, was a child radio actress (she sang the Cream of Wheat song on a children's show). "When Drew was six he was already crazy about going out to eat--especially since I wasn't much of a cook myself," she said in an interview early this year. "By the time he was 10, he was making chicken pate to go with my Rice-A-Roni casserole dishes. He told me he someday wanted to own ten different restaurants, because he had ten different ideas for them."
Drew eventually entered Cornell University's hotel and restaurant school, spending summers as a waiter on cruise ships. After graduation in 1977, he began working at the 1,000-seat Tavern on the Green, whose colorful owner Warner LeRoy showed him how much of a spectacle running a restaurant could be."When I was appointed manager of Tavern," says Drew,"I had more than 200 employees under my supervision, serving up to 1,500 people a day. My father was so proud that I was making a go of my career. When I left Tavern in 1982, I think it was the saddest day of his life."
Drew then worked at a number of smaller New York restaurants. At one of them he met his wife-to-be, Ann LiPuma, then a magazine writer and editor. "She came in as a guest when I was managing the restaurant 24 Fifth Avenue," Drew recalls. "I asked her out, took her to see The World According to Garp and found we both shared a passion for travel and food." (The star of Garp, Robin Williams, would later become a backer of Drew's San Francisco restaurant, Rubicon.)
While courting Ann--whom he wed in 1986--Drew was working what he calls the "Le and La circuit" of midtbwn French restaurants. He learned to charm a very demanding clientele with suave deference and even a litde hauteur. With unflappable grace, he humored heads of state and society stalwarts, all the while knowing that on the other side of the swinging door, it was controlled chaos--the heat and noise of a kitchen where everyone was either screaming orders or screaming at each other to move, move, move; a shrilly lighted room where captains' soothing voices rose into a scurrilous kitchen argot; a cramped space in which impeccably plated, half-eaten dishes were unceremoniously dumped into garbage cans. So when he opened his own pressure cooker, it was with more than a little blind faith.
And little else. Given the scant money Nieporent had to build and lease the restaurant space--including the $25,000 Sybil had lent her son--Montrachet could not hope to compete with the pricey, elegant uptown French restaurants. Or could it? "A year before, I'd been to Jamin in Paris, where I ate a great meal for $18.50--that was when the dollar got you ten francs," says Drew. "At Montrachet I wanted to replicate that experience. We were able to do it [initially] for $16.50 in TriBeCa, and we got three stars from The New York Times within a few months."
When Montrachet hit its stride, Drews dad could not have been more proud. "He was an adorable, lovable person," Drew says of his father, who died in 1986. "Often he would just come down and sit in the window at Montrachet. I'd say, 'Dad, can I get you something?' And he'd say, No, he was just content to sit there and watch it all develop." (Another family member, Drew's older brother Tracy, took a more active role in the business, becoming Myriad's marketing director.)
The Times review and unanimous praise from other venues made Montrachet, and Drew, instant stars. "We were besieged with people trying to book a table," he recalls. "I had to turn down Henry Kissinger one night." Drew adored being the grand host--a role he played with such American aplomb and New York swagger that celebrities felt at ease, even at home, at Montrachet. Several of them (including Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Mikhail Baryshnikov) bankrolled Drew's follow-up, a huge warehouse he turned into the Tribeca Grill (marking its tenth anniversary this year).
In 1994, Drew brought haute Japanese cuisine to New York with Nobu, under chef Nobu Matsuhisa, and its more casual outlet, Next Door Nobu, both stunningly designed by David Rockwell. His next concept: hip, kitschy and Middle Eastern, complete with belly dancers. Enter Layla, which, like Tribeca Grill, was but a baguette's throw from Montrachet.
As much as Drew has been able to divine the hottest new restaurant concept, he has been equally adept at choosing talent in the kitchen. Not only did he pluck Nobu Matushisa (at De Niros behest) from a tiny sushi bar in Beverly Hills and make him an international star (with restaurants of his own now), but Drew's first chef at Montrachet, David Bouley, went on to open his own highly acclaimed restaurants, including the four-star Bouley, Danube and Bouley Bakery. David Bouley's successor at Montrachet, Debra Ponzek, was named Rising Star Chef in 1992 by the Beard Foundation, which awarded another of Drew's chefs--Traci des Jardins of Rubicon in San Francisco--that same prize in 1995.
Each of his restaurants was a statement of Drew's omnivorous joy in doing something no one else had attempted. And the spirit they brought to the neighborhood turned TriBeCa into a hot zone. As restaurateur George Lang, of New York's Cafe des Artistes, contends, "Word of mouth was made for Drew." Soon the buzz about that part of town helped attract other restaurants to TriBeCa--including Obeca Li and the Screening Room.
By the time Nobu opened, Drew himself had become the draw at his restaurants. People expected to see his larger-than-life figure racing in, sending a little foie gras to this table, schmoozing with a Hollywood star at that. His touch with customers, along with his inventiveness, prompted even the hard-to-impress Sirio Maccioni, owner of Le Cirque 2000, to say, "Drew is very courageous. New York needs him."
Apparently so do lots of other places. These days his Myriad group gets almost weekly offers to develop projects around the U.S. and abroad--with good reason: the company has opened highly successful restaurants in San Francisco (Rubicon, whose backers, besides Robin Williams, include De Niro and Francis Ford Coppola), Pittsburgh (The Steelhead Grill), Martha s Vineyard (The Coach House) and elsewhere. After the success of Nobu in New York, offers to clone it came in seemingly from everywhere. The first foray was into London, where Nobu won a coveted Michelin star in its first year; then came Las Vegas. In 1999, Myriad's restaurants had combined sales of $45 million, with about 10 percent of that in net profit.
Built into each restaurants budget is a sizable commitment to charities, to which Drew finds it difficult to say no. "I feel honored to be asked," he says, "and I believe a restaurateur should support charitable causes in the community." He's been involved in everything from the American Heart Association to public television, and he's on the board of the national food bank Share Our Strength and chairs the Momentum AIDS Project. Says restaurant critic Gael Greene: "Drew is always there for every charity that asks."
But his most active support has been for a Tourette Syndrome organization: his son Andrew, now 12, is a victim of Tourette (and also has symptoms of attention deficit disorder), which affects some 100,000 Americans. "People think of Tourette as the disease of kids who can't help cursing constantly," explains Drew, "but that's really only a minority of cases. In most cases the children just can't control all these twitches and head jerks, and they can sometimes just have an emotional meltdown."
The Nieporents,who live in a genteel New Jersey suburb, also have another child, Gabrielle, eight. Balancing that home life with his professional life has not been easy. "You have to understand that Drew has achieved more than he'd ever imagined," explains Ann. "He wasn't born a jet-set kid, so he found it difficult to turn down all these celebrity invitations." Indeed, with his impeccably trimmed jet-black beard and deeply expressive eyes--recalling images of the young Orson Welles--Drew has grown used to attending pretty much any Hollywood gala he cares to and calling actors like Robert De Niro "Bobby." (His friendship with De Niro, however, has at times been strained by business-related disagreements.)
But Ann points out that Drew's peripatetic schedule also once kept him from dealing directly with his son's illness. "It took him a long time to accept Andrew's problems, and that gnawed at him," she says. "He's gotten much better now at turning down this and that invitation, and he has a wonderful one-on-one relationship with Andrew."
If building that relationship has been a challenge faced, there are others still in need of attention. Having successfully battled sleep apnea--a potentially dangerous illness during which the body is deprived of oxygen and sleep at night--Drew has yet to overcome his weight problem. "The eating was a form of gratification for him," says Ann, "but I think he's ready to come to grips with that."
And a lot more. After a string of huge successes, some of Drew's recent projects have fallen short--his City Wine & Cigar restaurant in TriBeCa and a short-lived Italian trattoria both closed. And not all of his current restaurants have achieved the solid audience appeal of, say, Tribeca Grill. But perhaps the biggest smudge on Drew's stellar record came last year, when <i>The New York Times</i> gave a highly critical one-star review to Berkeley Grill, his unconvincing homage to Berkeley's Chez Panisse. It was later shuttered, and Drew was devastated. "Do I create one-star restaurants?" he asks plaintively. "Do I hire chefs who cook one-star food?"
A somewhat chastened Drew now says he probably should cut back a bit. He no longer hops on a plane whenever he's asked to be part of a culinary event or charity dinner. "But tonight," he says rather sheepishly, "I've got to go to London, then to Paris, then to Burgundy and Meursault..."
Clearly, Drew isn't about to withdraw from a field that has so powerfully shaped his life. In fact, later this year, he'll open yet another establishment, a Tuscan restaurant in Boca Raton. "The business gets tougher all the time," he says. "Everything is more expensive...and there are too many amateurs getting into it who think you can just reproduce a concept like some of those I've done. They have no respect for restaurant history, for good taste. They just see the money, and it's not always there."
And then, slowing down for a little introspection, he volunteers: "You know, I've come to realize that it doesn't really matter how much time you spend in one restaurant or at home--it's never enough. I see my restaurants as my extended family, and, just as with my own children, I love them equally. The minute you favor one over another, jealousy sets in." He pauses, smiles broadly and, like a man who's been given both a great gift and a great responsibility, continues, "But, hey, in the end, the show must go on."