Chef Andrew Carmellini

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Andrew Carmellini. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.

Andrew Carmellini: Hi. How are you doing?

SSR: Good. How are you?

AC: Pretty good.

SSR: Good. We always start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

AC: I grew up in South Cleveland, a little area right on the border called Seven Hills. Seven Hills, Ohio.

SSR: Nice. Were there early inklings that you wanted to be a chef, that you loved cooking, or any early influences early on?

AC: Yeah. There’s a story my mom likes to tell, that she in her 1970s parenting, read that this [how to] track and focus a very hyperactive child, which apparently I was. A very inexpensive cure for that was to give them measuring cups and polenta or cornmeal, and let them play with measuring things and get the measuring correct, and dumping it out. This whole activity was an idea to focus a young kid’s mind. And apparently, I loved it. She claimed that’s where it all started. I always loved eating, and we had a garden out back. My mom was a working mom but she was also a great cook, so food was always an important part of growing up for us.

SSR: Nice. Was there a first meal that you remember cooking, maybe with her?

AC: I think both my grandmothers, they loved to cook and bake. And I think that was always, on both sides of my family were some early memories, whether it was around the holidays or not. We had some traditions around the holidays, whether it was on the Italian side with making homemade sausages, like rouget, which is a sausage from my Friulian background, above Venice, this fresh sausage. And they would make that around the holidays.

And it’s funny, because the next weekend, the second week of December, all the Polish people would get together and they would make homemade kielbasa. So there was both of these activities around sausage-making. It was a big deal on both sides of the family.

SSR: Nice. Did you have sauce on everything? I grew up in an Italian household, and I just remember sauce on the table at all times.

AC: The Italian-American experience is interesting, because in my neighborhood all my friends that were Italian, they were either Sicilian, Calabrian, or frok Campania. That was their background, so sauce and those traditional Italian-American things were what you saw.

My family, from Friuli, you can’t get more north than that, really, we never had any of that growing up. And my grandmother was the derogatory funny term for someone from Friuli is a Polatine, which means polenta eater, or a corn eater. So it would be more like polenta, and of rich stews. I bring up mojette, it’s interesting because the condiment for that, is something called brafka, which is a fermented turnip. And you don’t really think of those things as quote unquote Italian cuisine because that area, it was raided and transferred between countries for years. It was part of Austria, it was part of Solonia. Suddenly this cross cultural part of Italy. So our bi-Italian-American food was very different than most of my friends.

SSR: That’s funny how different it can be. So you ended up going to the Culinary Institute of America. What brought you there? Why did you gravitate towards that school, and what were some of the greatest takeaways from that experience?

AC: Well, it’s interesting, culinary school, then, and this is 1989, if you were serious about cooking, there wasn’t a lot of paths to go, and it wasn’t a very popular career. It was something that you would tell someone you were going to do, and people would understand what that is, really. Cooking, for most people in the ’80s, or working in a restaurant, it wasn’t looked upon as a great career choice. The kitchens were sub-places that were full of destitutes and fringes of society, even on a professional level.

Really, you go to cooking school at a couple of different places and you went to New York City if you were serious and wanted to be a chef on a high level. It was also not very expensive. It’s very expensive now. It was more of a trade school, to be honest with you, than it is now, where there’s a very expanded curriculum. It was good for me because I was there when I was 18 years old, and it introduced me to a wider, broader section of cooking then.

Now, that professional cooking has expanded so much in this country, which has been great, and it’s portrayed in the media a lot, or had its peak a couple of years ago, I would think. The school part is not so necessary, I think, I would say today. Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s a great thing, for sure, but you can get great training because there’s good restaurants just about everywhere now. And you don’t need to necessarily need to come to New York, Chicago or San Francisco to get great culinary training.

SSR: Got it. After school, or maybe even during school, what was one of your first jobs? First roles, I guess, coming out of school?

AC: My first job? Well, I had been cooking all through high school, and working in restaurants. The coolest job actually what I got during school, and it’s is a wild story when I think about it, I just answered an ad that was literally posted up on the job bulletin at school, and it said private chef needed, and there was a number. And this is pre-internet, so there was no looking it up. And I just called the number and I mailed in my resume, and they called me up for an interview. And I showed up at the address they gave me, and it was the governor of New York’s house. At the time, that was Mario Cuomo. And it turns out I was their private chef for two years, which was a great job. It was a state job. And it was great. I did that three or four days a week, and it was just a random thing I fell into.

SSR: Are there any good stories of great dinners that you made?

AC: They were great, a great family. Actually, Matilda Cuomo, the matriarch of that family, was instrumental in getting me to come to New York. And she actually introduced me to Tony May, was a big Italian restaurateur in the city, the best in the country at the time in the late ’80s. And gave me my first job in the city. It was an important little step for me way back then.

SSR: You said you cooked also through high school. Were you just at different local restaurants?

AC: Yeah, I didn’t necessarily know I wanted to have a career in restaurants. I just wanted to make money because it was a very easy formula for me. Need to make some money to get a car to be able to go on dates with girls, so it was very easy lineage. It was more to make money and get out of the house. I liked the work and I always liked food and liked cooking with my family, and then started working in kitchens.

I worked at a catering house. I worked at an Italian restaurant, and then I worked for my first quote unquote real chef. And his name was John D’Amico, and he’s got a French restaurant in Vermilion, Ohio, which is on Lake Erie. Still there. He and his partner Matt Morris have this restaurant called Chez Francois. And they are old school restaurateurs still and they run a great ship. Actually took my parents and had a big party there for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary just pre-COVID. They’re still doing a great job.

He was always the chef that was flying lobsters in from Maine and he was using some great local farms and making all his own sauces. And at this time, in the late ’80s, it was a big deal that this was happening because there weren’t a lot of restaurants were doing those sorts of things, which is hard to picture now. But American gastronomy or high end restaurants, there wasn’t a lot of them, and this idea of great dining at different levels didn’t really exist.

The American food movement was just starting out. There wasn’t a lot of media covering food on a high level. It was basically Gourmet Magazine and Cooks Magazine. And there were a couple of shows on TV, mostly on public TV. No reality TV cooking shows, no food networks, nothing like that. It was special that he was doing that, and he was a big influence on me.

SSR: That’s awesome. Going back to Cuomo, got this great job, what’s next? Where do you go from there?

AC: Well, I came to New York right when I graduated. At this point I knew I wanted to be … Because I wasn’t really sure. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to own a restaurant or be a manager. There was this whole wine thing which I didn’t really understand what that was or what a sommelier was. It was time to go to New York and cook because that’s what I, at that point, decided I really want to do that and New York was the place to go.

I worked at all the top restaurants for a couple of days each, just to see what was going on. Back then, all the top restaurants, there was 10, really, and most of them were French, except for one, which was Italian. And they had three stars from The New York Times. They had an Italian chef that had a two-star Michelin restaurant in Italy, who was working here also. And it was called San Domenico, and it was on the corner of Central Park South between Broadway and 7th. It was the Italian restaurant in the country at that time, but it wasn’t the red sauce classics or elevated Italian-American cuisine. It was what the Italians would call it Alta Cucina, high kitchen, so very Emilia-Romagna, very Milanese, lots of French technique but Italian flavors.

A great eye-opener. I was the only American on the team. Actually, we were two Americans on the team, otherwise it was all Italian. Yeah, it was great, a great intro to a professional kitchen in New York doing food on a high level. I did that for a couple of years, and then went to Italy.

SSR: What did you do in Italy?

AC: Italy, I did the same. I had the connection at San Domenico. There’s a San Domenico, the original location was in Emilia-Romagna and I went and trained there. And I worked at Waltira Marchesi in Milan, and I worked at a couple of small trattorias, and just traveled really.

I did the same thing in France much later. Restaurants are one aspect of food and I was always interested in what the great chefs were doing and the great restaurants. But also, what the roots of everything were, and what the grandmothers are cooking and what people were eating at home, and where things came from.

I learned this in Italy and some trips previously I’d taken with my family that, it’s the ingredient part of Italian cuisine is so, so important. Which sounds cliché when you say that, but it really, really is. The understanding the history and the topography of different areas and why wine is grown in this area and how it’s grown and what makes Nebio different from Sangiovese, and how the different houses and Parmigiano Reggiano versus Grana. And just experiencing all of that and understanding what it all means, I think is really important.

I’ve always been a fan of understanding where things come from and understanding the roots of stuff. That was a year of cooking in restaurants and traveling to these areas and learning as much as I could about the history of things. What is balsamic vinegar? How it’s made, where it’s made, who are the people that do it, and understand how it’s used. Because after that, I feel then you have a respect for it and you can either do something very traditional or you can take it and do something else with it that’s your own. But at least you understand where it comes from.

SSR: No, that’s so important. Were there any great eye openers while you were there?

AC: In total, I spent about two and-a-half years in Europe, between France and Italy. The biggest eye opener is, when you grow up in the states, we’re only 200 and whatever years old, and so we don’t have those layers of history and assumption of history, which can be a burden. But when it comes to food, the traditions there just are…I love it and still love it, whether it’s going to simple things. You grew up with bleu cheese and it’s, oh, bleu cheese, whatever, Roquefort, whatever. But going to Roquefort and visiting the caves, and understanding how it’s made and why it’s made. And similarly, going to a Lombardia and visiting areas where they make Gorgonzola and understanding the difference between Gorgonzola, dolce, and [inaudible 00:16:30] picante. I think to be a great chef and have a real understanding of food, whatever you’re food you’re doing, whether it’s Japanese or Chinese or Italian or all of the above, understanding that tradition gives you authority then to screw around with it later.

SSR: Right, put your own spin on it. What brought you back to New York?

AC: Well, I ran out of money.

SSR: Love the honesty. Love it.

AC: Yeah. It’s really what it boiled down to. The idea I was to come back to New York and work in a great place and get great training and then save enough money to go back. But I came back to New York and I got a job at another great restaurant. Probably one of the best restaurants of its time for sure. It was a restaurant called Las Penas. We got four stars at that restaurant when I was on the crew there. It was in the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 55th Street. It was the platonic ideal of grande cuisine.

And I’d been cooking Italian for three years now, both in Italy and in New York, and I wanted to do something different. I wanted some discipline. I wanted to expand. I love Italian food and Italian cooking, but the Italians are unorganized. It’s a different kind of discipline, and I’d seen scenes in French kitchens when I was working around for free in New York just to see what was going on. I wanted to experience that.

I worked at a French restaurant with a Swiss chef that cooked a lot of Southeast Asian ingredients and was very revolutionary in a way because he brought a lot of these flavors from India and Singapore and Thailand and Vietnam into fine dining, which at the time, I mean the French had been doing that since the ’70s, for sure. All the French chefs in the early ’70s ran to Japan and had restaurants in Japan and would bring some of that stuff back. But you would see how that would come on the plate.

In France and in London, would be sauteed foie gras with lychees and ginger. And that was basically taking a French dish and then putting a couple Asian ingredients on it and calling it fusion. Gray Coons is the chef who recently passed away, who was I think, revolutionary in that way, is that really took a deep dive. He lived in Singapore for most of his life even though he was from Switzerland. He cooked in Singapore. Singapore, there’s a lot of cross cultural Asian communities in Singapore and the food reflects that.

Similar to New Orleans, if you will, and the history there, and he brought that into that food. So it wasn’t just like taking a French dish and plopping some ginger on it and calling it fusion. It was really bringing techniques from India and techniques from Thai sauce making, and putting them in this fine dining environment. And the food didn’t pull any punches. It was spicy, it was pickled, it was salty and smoky, it was sour and sweet. And it was very jarring for someone not used to that, especially in the fine dining, and it was exciting. We got four stars from the Times and it was considered one of the best restaurants in the country for sure. It was an exciting time to be around that. I worked there for four years. I did everything there. I worked all the stations of the kitchen, and wanted to open up my world beyond a Euro-centric cooking. It was a great training ground.

SSR: Through trying all the different stations and different areas of the kitchen, did you start to figure out what you liked best?

AC: I had more or less decided I was dedicating myself to the cooking part, and to the chef part. I mean, I’m spoiled in the sense that I really got a chance to visit with a lot of the great winemakers. I went to every chateau you can imagine in France. I went to Burgundy and Sauterne and Bordeaux and Barolo, and traveled all these different regions, spent a lot of time learning about that. And I love wine. I have a lot of respect for it, but it was really the cooking thing that, really, really focused me. The flavor part of that was very intoxicating to me.

SSR: And so, after four years there, is that when you went onto Le Cirque? What was the steps before there?

AC: I saved up enough money to go back to Europe.

SSR: Oh, nice.

AC: I just loved, besides the cooking part is, the cultural part of it was really great for me and I think an important experience, and I loved being there. I really wanted to go to France, and I was in France for a year with a three-month stop in London. Yeah, just cooking. I worked at Arpege in Paris for six months, and did some part time work at a belangeri there in Paris. And then, went down to the South of France to Nice, and I worked in a small bistro there called—it’s not there anymore—called Le Becurion.

And after that, I was getting tired of that, not working for hardly any money and my learning curve had stopped. So I leased a car for three months and with a very specific idea. I got a Michelin map of France, and I basically plotted out an idea that I was going to go to every departments, the little, almost states, if you will, inside France, little regions. I was going to visit every department south of Paris, and I was never going to go on the highway ever.

There was no real plan, except I was just going to go. And so I left Nice. I went due north, and just kept on crisscrossing everywhere south of France, Burgundy and Dijuron and Savoy and all through the Rhone Valley, and Burgundy. My favorite areas were areas that were less traveled.

The plan was simple. It was just to visit, experience, and keep it food-centric. I would be on these very small roads, the countryside in France, and if I saw something cool, I would stop and just talk to people. I did all kinds of really great stuff. I made goat cheese. I made Cantal cheese. I helped shape Cantal cheese. I did the harvest in Cahors. I visited all different kind of purveyors in Berenjak. I made foie gras, which is now a controversial ingredient, but I stuffed geese. I stopped at the guy that made duck confit. I did anything and everything.

I visited mills where they made special oils. And that was really, again, all pre-internet, so I basically see a sign in the road and just stop and just start to talk to people. And it was amazing because in these areas, most people were just excited that someone cared about what they were doing, and that they spoke French. And they were even more amazed at this young American kid, he wanted to stuff geese with them, or he wanted to be able to shape cantal, or even knew what cantal cheese was. It was really a magical trip and again, shaped my idea of food and just kept on learning.

SSR: Sounds like it. I mean, how do you think it ultimately shaped it? Just, again, that history and understanding? Or just the process? Or all of it?

AC: I’m always looking for the platonic idea of things. Even if we’re doing a very simple dish, we’re just trying to make a great version of it, whether it’s traditional or focused on the super ingredient. I mean, again, this could change, it’s now I feel lately just, try to make just great versions of things. So if we are making a pappardelle ragout, it’s bringing all these things together and just making the best version that we can. Whether it’s the simple thing like you mentioned, sauce. Is it a fresh quick tomato sauce and something that’s super bright and you taste summertime? But whatever we’re doing, just trying to make the platonic ideal of what that is, and bring smiles to people’s faces.

SSR: Amazing. This trip of a lifetime ended up two or three months, and then what? What was next for you?

AC: I got back to New York, again, because I ran out of money. Actually, I wanted to work with Jean-Georges at the time, just before he opened up his restaurant on Central Park South. I was supposed to work at Jean-Georges. He gave me a job to be the head saucier there, and there was some delays in construction. I was out of money. And I went to the Union Square Market on a Wednesday because I wasn’t working and I was just back trying to get into it. And I ran into Marco Marconi with the chef from Le Cirque, and he was with a woman that knew me, and she says, “Oh, Andrew!”  and introduced me to them, one of the sons, the owner of Le Cirque.

Actually the chef at the time is the Sous chef de cuisine of Le Cirque name Sottha Khunn. It’s a Cambodian man that worked in France for a long time, and it was Daniel Boulud’s chef. They said, “Hey, what are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m doing nothing right now. Absolutely nothing.” On the spot, they hired me to be a Sous chef at Le Cirque. And they were looking for an American with a lot of European experience, and I think my Italian last name and the fact that I spoke pretty good French was important. There wasn’t even no cooking tryouts. I could communicate with everybody. I’d had some background working in good restaurants and they hired me right there in the middle of the farmer’s market to be a Sous chef at Le Cirque.

I think part of the reason they were eager to hire me is, they were about to embark on this thing called the Le Cirque World Tour. And mind you, this is not at the peak Le Cirque time, which I would say is the late ’80s, early ’90s, when Daniel was the chef there. And it was on 65th Street. And it was basically the center of high society in New York, and high gastronomy. They were about to launch on the Le Cirque World Tour, which is just, when I think back on it, it’s unbelievable that this even happened like this. But it was basically a two-month tour on the road. And we took the restaurant on the road and we did popup dinners all over the world.

SSR: So cool.

AC: Yeah. They hired me to do that with them, with the chef and the pastry chef at the time, Jacques Torres, and London, Paris, all through Europe, Vienna. And we did once in Hong Kong. It was like basically being in a rock show or a worldwide tour, music tour, but with a restaurant. And you wake up and you’re, “Okay, when’s Zurich? Okay, let’s go. The show’s tomorrow night at 8:00.” It was great.

SSR: I mean, who could ask for a better job than that?

AC: Yeah. It’s kind of an interesting experience, not typical I would say. I did that for a couple of years. I came back, worked at the restaurant, and we got four stars again there. That’s where basically I got recruited by Daniel Boulud, who would come to eat there on Sunday sometimes. I would cook for him. And he was looking for a young American chef to take over Restaurant Daniel on 76th Street at that time. And this is 1998 at this point. He was going to move his Restaurant Daniel, his flagship restaurant on 76th Street between Fifth and Madison. He was going to move it to the old Le Cirque, because Le Cirque had moved. And it was big news, because he was the old chef of Le Cirque and he was going to move his flagship restaurant to 65th Street. There was a lot of drama around it, and speculation. And the restaurant on 76th Street was going to turn into a restaurant called Café Boulud, which was named after his grandparents’ restaurant outside of Lyon, France. And he wanted an American chef to run it, and he hired me.

I was there for seven years as the chef, it was my first chef job. I took that job when I was 29 years old. I had been cooking already professionally quote unquote for 10 years already, and I was ready for it. And it was great, really, really great time. Great time to be cooking, great time to be cooking in America, had a lot of freedom there. Daniel was wonderful. He also wasn’t around too much because he was mostly working at Restaurant Daniel so he didn’t bother me too much. It was great, really great experience, and we got along. I’ve had zero complaints from that time cooking.

SSR: What did you learn from him?

AC: It’s interesting, because I never worked for him before, and he hired me from the outside to be the chef there. Which was not a popular choice with some of his current team, especially since I was American. So there was a lot to prove there. It was a challenge. It was hard, but what I learned from Daniel was, I would say, the overall scope of the business is maybe what I would learn the best from Daniel. Whether it’s greeting his customers in the front, and the way he interacted with staff, which is especially back then very intense. His passion for cooking, but his also way he dealt with the business, it was a great eye opener to understand how to run a professional kitchen, but also run a couple of different restaurants. Because at that time, he was going through the process of going from one restaurant to two restaurants, and then three restaurants. There was a lot for me to learn there and observe.

He’s really a consummate professional chef, in-house chef, chef-chef, if you will. And that was really important to me, and I adopted that style. But understanding how to run the business as a whole, whether it was dealing with food costs or dealing with how to put the menu together. Or dealing with how to talk to your sommelier and how to talk to your pastry chef and all that stuff together, was just a big absorption time for me to understand that as best I could.

SSR: Yeah, for sure, especially now, looking at your amazing portfolio. Did you go to A Voce from here? Was that your next step?

AC: Yeah. That was interesting, and at that point I was doing that for quite a long time. I think that it’s a good run to be a chef for someone for seven years.

SSR: And you won a James Beard, or two, right?

AC: Yeah, I won a couple of James Beard. Café Boulud, as a James Beard Rising Star Chef. And just before I left, I was Best Chef New York, which was an amazing thing to get. But I wanted to go do my own thing. I reached my plateau if you will working for Daniel. It’s actually interesting, because I wanted to just actually be continue working for him, but I think there wasn’t anything for me to do in the company anymore.

And I never really wanted to get out there and put my name out there, do cookbooks and promote myself, because it’s not what I like to do. I don’t even like to talk about myself too much or promote myself. It’s not in my DNA, and for most I think to be out there in the world you need to do that because you need people to come to it, besides just make good ravioli.

So I went out and I was trying to start my own restaurant, which is hard. It’s hard if you don’t come from a place of means, and you don’t come from a background that has a lot of entrepreneurial spirit or the finances to do that. It’s hard to make that step and how to find money, how to talk to lawyers, how to negotiate a lease, to understand all these principles that aren’t just cutting the fish. And that I really felt it was really important for me to understand that so I could run the business part of it as best I could.

I was trying to do that, and I was just about to execute that kind of vision and sign a small little lease on 10th Street when this group out of London recruited me to do a restaurant. It ended up being called A Voce, which is an Italian small saying, meaning word of mouth. Yeah, that was good. It was a good experience. It was two years. I got a Michelin star there. I get three stars from The New York Times. It was a fairly celebrated modern Italian restaurant.

But I had some business problems there. The whole thing was a good lesson business-wise because it taught me the value of partnerships and to do due diligence when you’re doing business with people. We broke up about two years later.

SSR: All those business things that you never think about until you need to.

AC: There’s no MBA for restaurants, really, and you can go of course do an MBA and apply it to restaurants. It’s a blue collar job, being chef, and working in restaurants for sure. It’s not a white collar job. And usually, now it’s a little bit different because it’s different socio-demographics, getting into restaurants and cooking. But to make those leaps, it’s a lot of learning on the job and a lot of mistakes can be made. Unless you don’t have someone behind you and mentoring you through that process. But I don’t regret any of those things. It was just part of the learning process to get there.

SSR: Right. Sometimes you need those hard lessons learned.

AC: Better than school.

SSR: I love how you just threw out your first Michelin Star. You got all these amazing awards. So you’re doing something right. How did you start to then establish NoHo Hospitality, which now is an amazing collection of restaurants across the country and many in New York. How did you make that step?

AC: Well, the step was a sloppy bunch of steps, for sure, and there was no intention to open up a restaurant group. And after my successes and then brutal failures at A Voce, I decided I was going to go into business for myself, and I was going to do it on my own, whatever that was. And it took about a year for me to figure that out, of not working full-time and every day waking up. And trying to put all these things together, the money, the location, the concept, the legal part, trying to do it as best as I could right. I got very lucky because all that happened in the middle of the financial crisis.

It’s amazing because when I decided I was going to do business myself and basically started to put the word on the street that I was going to do something, looking around for spaces, I got bombarded with work. I went from, in my second bedroom of my apartment in my shorts at my computer trying to figure all this out, to having a good chunk of money in the bank, about to sign a lease. I was negotiating with a brand new casino in Las Vegas to do something three years away. I was also negotiating with Jay-Z, who was opening a hotel at that time in Chelsea, was going to do a restaurant in Chelsea in this hotel that was two years away. It was all just happening very, very quickly.

And then October happened of 2007, 2008, whatever that was, and it was the financial crisis and that all went away. On Monday of that week, we had more work over the next three years than I could handle. By Friday that week, it was all gone. Had friends who were pulling out of the casino, and the Jay-Z hotel, the same thing. That project was being stalled, similar to what we’re going through now. Everything just stopped.

It was dim times they struck up alliance on trying to figure out what to do. Robert De Niro was a customer of ours when I was uptown at Café Boulud. And he had opened up a hotel in Tribeca called the Greenwich Hotel about nine months previously. And he had a restaurant there that did famously bad, which was an odd misstep for him in this hospitality investing. His people and the people that were running the hotel approached me and said, “Listen, we have this restaurant. We built it. The people that we hired aren’t going to work out. Can you do something with it?”

At that time, it was scary. It was December of 2008, and New York was not a pretty place for restaurants at the time because of the crisis. And I remember I was sitting in the bar in this restaurant. There was four people sitting and having dinner inside it. But, it’s a beautiful hotel, and I know Tribeca very well, and that’s how Locanda Verde came to be.

That was 12 years ago, and it happened all very quickly. Actually, my first meeting with everybody and two weeks later, we had a signed deal. We did a light renovation there. We only closed for 10 days. We did a little bit of cosmetic stuff in the front. I put a brand new pasta cooker in the back, and that was it. We opened and Locanda Verde’s been a tremendous success ever since. 12 years, even with outside dining and everything, it’s busier than ever.

SSR: That’s amazing. And it has one of the best private dining rooms.

AC: Yeah. Thanks.

SSR: I do an event there every year. Well, not this year, but next year.

AC: Thank you.

SSR: Yeah. No, that’s amazing. You have Locanda Verde, and then you slowly opened-

AC: Well, we had 15 restaurants in hotels and my group just stopped due to COVID. And there was no intention to do that. Just different opportunities came about and I loved…there was a kind of iconic corner in SOHO at the corner of Prince and Sullivan, where the room was. It closed during the financial crisis, and I was always obsessed with the corner because it just felt like Sesame Street to me. And it just had a great New York feel. And I wanted to open up another cooking, Italian and French and European food.

My whole career, I wanted to open up a great American restaurant and help define what that was. And so we opened up The Dutch there in 2011 and that was New York Times Restaurant of the year, which was a huge deal for us. A year later, the same thing happened at the Old Tymes Café in the corner of Great Jones and Lafayette. It just had these great big sweeping ceilings, and it just seemed like it should be a French grand café. We opened up Lafayette there.

It’s interesting, there’s some days I wish that I just had one place, and you can just concentrate on that 100%, and live and breathe it every day. When you have multiple stores, it’s amazing to have people that have worked with us for a long time, and then will grow into these positions. People that have been with me that have literally started as a food runner in a restaurant, not speaking very much English, and now they’re general managers working at a very high level, running a $20 million business at a hotel for us.

I love that part about this business, is that with hard work and dedication to the craft of it, and the consistent part of that, you can have a great career and a great job. And be a restaurant owner one day, or if you don’t necessarily want to be in the business of restaurants, translate that to some other aspect in food. And to have a team like that, pre-COVID we had about 2,000 employees, I know it’s great. Being able to mentor people and that part of that growth has been very satisfying.

SSR: Well, and the community that I love about the restaurant world. It’s almost like a big family when you have companies like yourself and what you guys do. And even just from chef to chef across the board. I mean, it’s just amazing, the fact that all these restaurants, you mentioned The Dutch, and Lafayette and Bar Primi, they’ve all become staples across the city, and have weathered the storm that is New York sometimes. And then you started to expand a bit to Brooklyn, the William Veil, San Diego and Baltimore with Pendry and the Shinola Hotel in Detroit. When did you decide to expand your reach past New York? When was it?

AC: Once you have a couple of spots and people start to be interested in and Vegas starts coming calling, and it’s just the natural evolution of things. I think it’s interesting, because Baltimore and Detroit, Detroit especially, when you mention it to New Yorkers, you say, “Oh, I went to Detroit to open a restaurant.” “What?” They think you’re absolutely crazy.

I look at it from a couple of different angles. Why didn’t you go to Hong Kong? Why didn’t you go to Vegas? Everybody’s in Vegas, every chef, every restaurateur, every brand is in Vegas. And Detroit, I love that it’s a real place, and there’s real community there. It had a very small DIY chef community there that were doing great things already. And there was room there for us to come. We had a great local partner ingrained the community there already. Actually, two great local partner, the fashion brand, and Dan Gilbert, who’s an important part of the rejuvenation downtown. It’s been great.

New York’s hard. We all know that, right? It’s financially hard. The physicality of it is hard sometimes. For some of our people on the team in New York, when we decided to do something in Detroit, it was an easy sell. And we have about eight people now that moved to Detroit from New York. Half of them bought houses, started families, and they’re making the same money they made in New York but they’re living in Detroit for much less money. And there’s a great music scene there. There’s a great arts community there. Yeah, it’s cool. It’s really, really cool. The restaurant is thriving. Again, COVID, goes without saying, but until that, was thriving very well.

SSR: Speaking of COVID, I mean, how has it been for you the last seven months, or eight months, whatever month we’re on now?

AC: It’s been a nightmare. That’s basically what it boils down to. You have restaurants, music, live entertainment, been hit very hard in this. It’s been a super challenge on many levels besides the business level, just emotional level. We furloughed 98 percent of our company, which was just on, again, on an emotional level, very traumatic, because we’re very close to the team. And it’s hard to lay people off. They have families and rely on us, but there’s nothing to do. There’s no playbook for this.

Closing a restaurant is one thing, but having to close everything is…I mean, we closed 15 properties in a matter of seven days. Besides the figuring out actually how to do that, but also doing that in a way where you can’t really take care of everybody, because the music just stopped.

But we’re here still, and we’re open for outside dining, and we’re doing 25 percent indoor and like everyone else, we’re worried about the winter. But I believe that next year, with expanded outdoor dining and I think just pent-up demand—I don’t think everything’s going to return to normal in the springtime by any stretch of the means. But I feel that it’ll just feel better and there’ll be a sense on how to deal better by next spring.

SSR: Yeah. No, let’s hope, for sure. We always end this podcast on the title of the podcast, So What I’ve Learned. Through your amazing career, which I feel like we could talk for another two hours, but we’re going to watch time, what has been your greatest lesson learned along the way?

AC: I think learning how to adapt on the fly and not get too emotional about it. Now I say not get too emotional about it, even though anyone that’s passionate about what they do still does. But just being able to pivot when needed, whether it’s a small thing like a special customary request or dealing with any small little thing that happens in a restaurant, to a large thing like COVID, is just being able to take a breath and try to make a good decision. And if you make a mistake, to not let too many people know that you made a mistake. That’s the art of it.

SSR: Yeah, exactly. Love it. Well, it’s a really good lesson learned, for everyone to remember. Well, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule for this. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you.

AC: Great. Have a great day.

SSR: Thank you. You, too. Talk soon.