MarketWatch
Myriad Visions
Myriad Visions – An eclectic restaurant group finds that diversity is the key to success
by Liza B. Zimmerman
June 2002
“The name Myriad means endless, countless. It has a mysterious connotation,” says owner Drew Nieporent of the name he chose for his innovative restaurant group. “I like the journey; we are on an endless, countless mission,” he continues. This is the same man who had to be convinced not to wear a NASA spacesuit – which he believed represented the infinite dimensions of his dining mission – to the photo shoot on this page.
The Myriad Restaurant Group, which officially adopted its current name in 1992, has grown to encompass 15 restaurants, including Tribeca Grill, Montrachet, Nobu, Next Door Nobu, Layla, heartbeat, Icon, Pulse, and the TriBakery in New York; Rubicon in San Francisco; Nobu in London; The Coach House in Martha’s Vineyard; Earth & Ocean in Seattle; Lucca in Boca Raton; and The Steelhead Grill in Pittsburgh. The group also has a consulting branch which works with hotel restaurants across the country, including many bars and dining concepts in the Starwood Hotels and Resort chain.
Nieporent says he thinks and relates to his restaurants like they were his kids. While expounding on their virtues, he alternately drinks coffee, smokes a cigar, takes cell phone calls and interacts with the staff around him at Icon as they set up for dinner. He has been keeping busy lately: Beyond overseeing his growing culinary empire, he lost 125 pounds in eights months on a “low everything” diet and spent several high-profile weeks down at Ground Zero feeding rescue workers after the September 11 terrorist attacks shuttered most of his restaurants.
TriBeCa, the Downtown Manhattan neighborhood where Nieporent first opened Montrachet in 1985, has morphed from an obscure fringe area to a hot and trendy place in the late ‘90’s to one of the slices of New York that was most affected by September’s attacks. You could once see both the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building from the street in front of Montrachet, notes Drew’s brother Tracy Nieporent, Myriad’s director of marketing. Drew estimates that he lost more than $1 million in sales in the two weeks that the restaurants were closed in September, $300,000 of which was in employee salaries alone. The restaurant has since raised an additional $700,000 for the families of the employees of Windows on the World and other restaurant workers in the World Trade Center in a one-night event called Windows of Hope, held on November 7, 2001.
The picture is looking brighter, though, and New Yorkers and tourists alike are coming back Downtown, according to Drew. In a sign of trust and good faith in April, Myriad has reopened Layla, the Middle Eastern restaurant that had been shuttered since the disaster. The brothers had thought of creating a new restaurant, but so many customers expressed support that they decided to reopen it.
A New Twist To The Neighborhood
Drew says he knew he wanted to go into the restaurant business by the time he was eight years old. “I loved to eat. I loved the theater of it,” he says, explaining that his father – who did legal work for restaurants – got him interested in the business by taking the family out to all different kinds of restaurants. Raised in New York, Drew used to jog in TriBeCa in the ‘80s “when I realized that I could afford the rent at that moment.” He says he also knew that the off-the-beaten-track neighborhood was eventually going to be fantastic since it bordered on both the financial district and the galleries of SoHo. Montrachet’s unusual location also had added cachet since “in New York City, destination dining was part of the adventure and hard-to-find restaurants [were what it was all about].”
When he opened Montrachet, he also made a strong statement abut the direction that fine dining was taking on a national scale. “I like to believe that I took away a lot of the pretensions about dining out,” says Drew. Montrachet was one of the first restaurants to offer a top-notch dining experience and a serious wine list, free from many of the formalities that generally accompany a similar experience at more formal restaurants uptown, he explains. “We have always tried to appeal to a mass audience. That’s why we have no barriers, no doorman, no dress code.” The approach appears to be paying off as the Myriad Group had revenues of more than $50 million annually on all properties combined in 2001.
Celebrity partnerships with actors like Robert DeNiro have also added cachet to the group and entice diners with fantasies of being seated next to the famous New York native. But while DeNiro does eat in the restaurants, his appearances are more likely to be on a low-key note and perhaps in a more secluded part of the restaurant. Tracy clarifies that they have never asked their celebrity partners to make appearances to promote the restaurants, and even if they did, it is unlikely they would oblige.
However, their presence in the operation is, as Drew says, part of the hype, and he knows just how to spin it. He has even gone beyond the traditional celebrity angle to “change the mold of what the celebrity restaurant was defined as. It was the mood, not the food,” Drew notes of other celebrity-sponsored restaurants in the past. At a time when the scene was often considered the most important aspect of a restaurant, “we went in the other direction and emphasized the food. It’s always a question of style versus substance.”
Putting It Together
Although the group’s seven partners all brainstorm for ideas and work together on benefits and events, each partner functions with a great deal of autonomy. “There’s a lot of empowerment in terms of their freedom. There’s not a lot of looking over people’s shoulders,” says Drew. The company’s three wine directors – Daniel Johnnes at Montrachet, David Gordon at Tribeca Grill and Larry Stone at Rubicon – all create their lists separately, adding to the diversity that exists throughout the group. “Each restaurant has a different program and there’s no centralized buying,” explains Tribeca’s Gordon, who started with the company in 1990. “There’s not a corporate stamp on all the lists. They are each different and that is what makes the group so unique,” adds Rubicon’s Stone, who joined the company in 1994.
Drinks account for an average of 30 to 35 percent of total food and beverage revenue at Myriad, with wine accounting for a whopping 75 percent of total alcoholic-beverage sales. At Tribeca, a specialty of the house is Zinfandels and the list boasts more thank 80 of them ($29 to $150), such as 1999 Ridge Litton Springs ($55) and the 2000 Segesio ($32). Wines are also listed by the dominant grape varietal as a way of educating the customer. Chianti, for example, is found under the grape from which it is made: Sangiovese. The list also features a page called Dave’s Picks, featuring 40 wines ($29 to $175), such as 1999 Chateauneuf-du-Pape Cuvee du Vatican ($55) – hand-selected by Gordon – which currently accounts for 10 to 20 percent of total wine sales. The restaurant also offers 15 wines by the glass, priced from $7 to $11.
At Montrachet, “we started with 70 wines on the list [back in 1985] and now we have close to 1,800,” priced from $25 to $12,000, says Montrachet’s wine director Johnnes, who joined the company in 1985. He says what has always been unique about the list at Montrachet is that “it was the first list that provided some kind of text along with the wines,” he says. A special section of his list called “Burgundy off the Beaten Path” focuses on value wines priced from $25 to $65, and 5 percent of all wines are ordered off those pages. Montrachet also has a slightly higher beverage-to-food ratio of 45 to 55 percent and wine accounts for 85 percent of total alcoholic-beverage sales.
One of the few Myriad restaurants with a focus on cocktails is Icon in the W, The court hotel. Michael Trenk, restaurant director at Icon, says that his drink list is sleeker and younger than those at many other Myriad properties. Trenk is trying to imbue the rest of the group with his passion for cocktails. “Drew and Michael realize that the cocktail trend has taken on tremendous life,” he notes. The Legend ($10) is the top drink at Icon, made with raspberry puree and Perrier Jouet Champagne. Another house favorite is the Smoretini ($10), made with Kahlua, Frangelico and Vermeer Dutch Chocolate Cream.
Rubicon in San Francisco offers 1,800 selections on its wine list, priced $25 to $3,500, 40 percent of which are from California. The restaurant’s focus is on old California verticals and California Cabernet Sauvignon and Meritage wines, which are made from different blends of the five red Bordeaux varietals. The list has even featured a separate Meritage section from the beginning at Rubicon with 62 selections priced $65 to $600.
Educating The Community
Since 1998, Myriad has offered an annual restaurant seminar, during which up to 100 aspiring restaurateurs go through a weekend boot camp of dos and don’ts for the business presented by various members of the Myriad staff and guest speakers. The seminar was created to offer a much-needed opportunity for continuing education in an industry that doesn’t seem to have many, according to partner and veteran restaurateur Michael Bonadies. Drew doesn’t seem worried about any theft of intellectual property that might ensue as a result of the group sharing so much information. The few “son-of-Drew” restaurants that have sprouted up from the seminar, he says, “can steal certain things, but they can’t steal our soul.”
The other way in which Myriad shares its wisdom is through the consulting arm of its business, headed up by Bonadies, who joined the group in 1992. Most of the properties are hotel restaurants that range from the Charles Hotel in Boston to restaurants and bars in many of the Starwood properties. Bonadies says the group has been fortunate enough to have been approached by hoteliers, many of whom are typically not happy with what’s going on in their restaurants. Once hired as a consultant, Bonadies will then go to the operation and troubleshoot for everything from menu spelling errors to chair backs that are too high. Bonadies notes that drinks are an important part of the picture when he is consulting with hotels. “Bars are back,” he notes. “Bars are the flame that draws the moth. So we always look first to the bar.”
Interstate Hotels, which operates 137 branded properties including Marriott and Westin, as well as small independent properties like The Charles Hotel in Boston and the Washington Terrace in the nation’s capital, has been working with Myriad at the Charles and the Washington Terrace. “They look at things we wouldn’t typically look at,” says Don Stanczak, vice president of food and beverage at Interstate. “They worry abut site lines.”
At the W hotel in Seattle, where Myriad has a management contract, Karl Bruno, food and beverage director, says that as part of the consulting relationship, Bonadies will look over the drink menus for the earth & ocean restaurant as well as the W’s bar for everything from how well it reads to how well items are priced. Rubicon’s Larry Stone helps write the wine list. “They bring a competitive advantage to hotels by understanding the overall mentality of the freestanding restaurant,” says Bruno.
What’s On The Agenda For The Future?
The group has been growing at the rate of one to two restaurants a year. Drew adds that he will continue to open new places, and is currently working on a couple of projects in New York with some well-known chefs, whom he declines to name. He says that he has also had numerous discussions with a London group who is interested in setting up shop in the States. “There are lots of wonderful places in London that would have lots of application in New York.”
Drew stresses that one of Myriad’s most important focuses is to continue to stay cutting edge and up to date with the restaurant industry as it evolves. “We have to start attracting a new market every 10 to 12 years.” When asked how he envisions the group in five to 10 years, he shoots back: “Bigger, better, bolder, and just as fun.”