The Restaurant Genius Behind Carbone, ZZ’s, Torrisi & More | Jeff Zalaznick

I want to start the conversation with one of the craziest stats I’ve ever heard. You’ve started 77 restaurants and bars, and 76 are still operating and profitable.

Yes.

Okay. Can you tell us about the one that we’re sitting in right now?

Right now, we’re sitting in one of my favorites, The Pool, which is probably the most historic restaurant in America. It was originally opened in 1959, built in 1959 by the Seagram family. At the time, these were the 2 most over-the-top luxurious restaurants ever built, and they were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson—one of whom was the most famous architect of the time, and the other of whom was soon to become the most famous architect of his time.

This room we’re sitting in today is one of the only interior landmarks in America. In fact, it’s the only interior landmark restaurant in America. We had to restore this entire room to what it was in 1959 when we took over about 8 years ago. What you have here is the most incredible restaurant history, and we’ve been able to be the custodians of that history and take it into the next generation.

That pool behind us has been sitting here since 1959, and we’ve really just brought it back to life.

Tell me about what you had to do to restore it. What was it, who owned it, and how did you come into ownership of this? Because you knew about this place when you were, what, 13?

I grew up in New York City. If you grew up in New York City and cared in any way about restaurants, you were obsessed with restaurants and food. Like you, I was obsessed with what I do today for a living since I was a child.

I was watching cooking shows when I was 10 on PBS, before there were any cooking channels or anything like that. I was aware of what was going on in the big picture of New York restaurants. If there was any restaurant that you would know of and say, “One day I want to go there,” it was the Four Seasons, which is not related in any way to the hotel.

The original Four Seasons was a restaurant, which is where we’re sitting right now. This was called the Four Seasons. That was called the Grill Room. This was called The Pool Room, which is where we’re sitting right now.

That was really the most incredible, aspirational restaurant that you would want to go to, that you would have a chance to go to. I think I came here and actually sat in this corner for my grandmother’s 75th birthday or something like that. This was a place that you would come for major special events.

Or, if you were one of the kings of New York, you would be having lunch in The Grill every day, and that was really where power lunch was invented, right? There’s a huge history of both what this restaurant means in terms of food, because it does have an incredible and interesting history in terms of food. It was the first restaurant that ever had seasonal ingredients, and the first American restaurant that ever wrote its menus in English rather than in French.

Wait, tell me about that.

In 1959, before this place opened, anything that was fancy and expensive was French. You would go to fancy French restaurants, and the menu would be written in French. The Four Seasons was the first restaurant where the menu was written in English, so this was really the first example of American fine dining.

It was the first time that America as a cuisine was actually thought of and celebrated. It didn’t exist before then. There was no such thing, right? American cuisine was hamburgers and fries, right? It didn’t exist in terms of the luxury fine-dining world.

This was revolutionary in that sense. It was created by a guy named Joe Baum, who was a great restaurateur of his time—the best restaurateur of his time—and someone I’ve always looked up to. We’ve always studied his process. He came up with this creation and created this place.

It was also the first restaurant where the design was equally important to the actual restaurant. The food was something that was new and spectacular. It introduced the ideas of seasonality, foraging, and American cuisine. The list goes on of how many things were created in this room.

The stuff that’s still talked about today originated back then.

This was the first place.

Okay.

When we took over, John F. Kennedy had his birthday party here—the famous birthday party before he went to Madison Square Garden, where Marilyn Monroe came out of the cake.

Okay.

He ate asparagus soup up there.

Okay.

The story goes that he was so busy walking around talking to people, as you can imagine, that he didn’t get a chance to eat. He actually went up to this room. This room didn’t exist up there; that was a storage room where some people would hide and do whatever they needed to do. We’ve now opened it up and made this beautiful lounge up there, but before that, when we took it over, it was just a storage room. Those doors were all closed.

Famously, he snuck in there, and his favorite thing to eat was cream of asparagus soup. He said to the kitchen, “Make me a cream of asparagus.” They said, “Of course, Mr. President, whatever you want.” So he ate this cream of asparagus soup.

Was Marilyn here?

Marilyn? It’s unknown.

She’s upstairs.

Right. She was—who knows? But I don’t know if you saw in the kitchen, we have a quote from JFK. The reason for that is because he famously loved this room, and he famously had his big birthday party where she jumped out of the cake in Madison Square Garden. He had the dinner here.

Okay.

We still have an ode to that dish on the menu. Depending on the season, the dish will come back in the spring, called Jack’s Pie, which is a cream of asparagus pie that we make to honor that moment that happened here.

So many moments happened here. That may be one of the most famous and public, but so many incredible moments happened in this building that you have to understand that when I came in and we were able to take over this restaurant, this was beyond your wildest dreams. It was an institution that you never thought would change, right?

You couldn’t even penetrate your brain that, no matter how successful you had become in restaurants like this, you could take over this place. It was run by 2 guys who had been handed it down years ago. After Joe Baum, 2 of his guys who worked there took over, and they handed it down to 2 other guys.

Those 2 guys, unfortunately, ran it into the ground. They didn’t reinvest any money in it. They were basically using it as their own cash machine, not reinvesting. This is a giant facility that needs a lot of upkeep, cleaning, and restoration at all times.

I don’t think you’ve discussed this publicly, but we talked about how the revenue from these 2 rooms alone would make it a substantial-sized business if this were the only business.

This business has The Pool, which has probably been the most famous event space in New York for the last half a century. Then you have The Grill, which was most famously known not only for its architecture, but also for being where power lunch was founded.

Conversations like these all happened for the last 60 years in that room next door. Where you were placed in that room and where you sat was all very significant to your status. It was written about in the Post: “Where did you sit? Oh my God, they saw so-and-so in Siberia the other day. What happened? Maybe he’s getting fired.”

What’s Siberia?

Siberia was the second level up the stairs, where you never wanted to be seated—or you were thrilled to be seated because you were finally let in, right? You would work your way up, and based on who you were and what you did, they would allocate the booths and the main tables.

The second floor was always called Siberia, and that was always very public. It was always about where people were seated and what was going on.

One of the things we did when we came in here, which has given this place new life, was part of a crazy process to get this place. This building, the Seagram Building, was designed by Mies van der Rohe. These interiors were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. The Seagram family obviously built the building and paid for these restaurants to be built.

Later, it was bought by Aby Rosen, who still owns it today. As a great lover of the arts and architecture, he was frustrated with the way the 2 guys who had been here for 20-plus years were keeping it up. He decided that he wanted to get rid of them because they wouldn’t invest in it.

He would come, and the place was full of dust. It had really been run down.

You were telling me in the other room that the panels, which are gray or white—

They’re gray.

Yeah.

But when we took them over, they were black, because no one had ever cleaned them. They had 50 years of cigarette and cigar smoke accumulated on them, and no one in 50 years had ever thought to clean the tile.

How much did you spend on restoring this place?

We spent about $40-plus million. Basically, this is a complex with the Grill Room and private rooms, The Pool, and the Pool Lounge.

Downstairs, we have another restaurant called The Lobster Club, and we obviously rebuilt a beautiful, first-class kitchen. The kitchen hadn't been redone since 1959, so you couldn't run a super-high-end restaurant to our standards without rebuilding the entire kitchen. We put in what may be the nicest kitchen in New York, if not one of them.

It allows us not only to do what we do, which is a combination of serving the best food to diners in an à la carte setting at The Grill, but also to put out what I think is second to none in terms of events. If you have a 200-person dinner in the room we're sitting in right now, when you get your Dover sole, it's going to taste like the best Dover sole you've had, as if you ordered it just sitting with you and me. It's hot. It's perfect. The food here is what we are known for. No one is able to do large-scale events the way that we do here, at the quality level we do here.

So, go back to how you got the opportunity to take this place over.

We got the opportunity because there was a rumor in Page Six that Aby Rosen was going to throw out the guys at the Four Seasons. I was sitting on a plane with my partner, Mario. We were reading the Post, like we always would. This was 10 years ago.

We had the Post, we were on the plane, and Mario said to me, “Do you see this?” I said, “It can't be possible.” It was one of those things that couldn't happen. It was such an institution that you couldn't believe this could be happening.

I knew Aby a little bit. We were friendly, and I had his number in my phone, but we didn't talk all the time or anything. I said, “It's worth a shot,” and I texted him, “Four Seasons?” He wrote me right back: “Let's discuss ASAP.”

We were actually on our way back to New York. I literally went from the plane to his office, which was, at the time, across the street from where we are now. I said, “What's going on with this?” He said, “I'm getting rid of these guys. They've let the place go to shit.”

He basically decided he was going to run, because of the significance of this place, his own RFP process, like a city process. But he was doing it personally, which fits very much with his personality, which I love. He was going to run his own RFP process for different operators to come in.

We ended up in what was, for us at the time, a huge jump. My company had only existed for 15 years, and this was eight or nine years ago. We didn't have half the amount of restaurants we have today. We had some great successes, and we were definitely the up-and-coming group.

What was your biggest success? What were you most well known for at the time that you were bidding on this place?

Carbone.

Carbone?

Carbone was our first real big success. That opened in 2013, and it put us on the map on a large scale. From there, we went on to open a variety of other restaurants that were all successful.

Then this opportunity came about, and we were competing for this space. Everyone wanted it. This was every restaurateur's dream. Everyone we were competing against had been established for 20-plus years in the restaurant business—all the best people that existed in New York at that time. At the end of the day, we successfully convinced Aby that we were the guys to go with.

How do you think you did that?

I think Aby was the perfect person to be in control of this because he understood me, he understood us, he understood what we did, and he understood betting on the future of what restaurants could be versus going with the institution. He was going to end up with another couple of old guys who were doing things they had done before, and it was going to be something stale.

I think he appreciated our energy, our thought process, and the fact that our process already had been established as people who really cared about New York. Our company is deeply grounded in New York, deeply grounded in New York history, and we consider ourselves all students of New York history and New York restaurants.

This had huge meaning to us. The appreciation of the history of this place, combined with the best ideas, the best menu, the best food, and whatever we put in front of him, led him to decide that he was going to partner with us to do this.

There are a couple of things that are obvious from speaking to you, and I see this with anybody who gets to the top of their profession. You have this crazy database of your entire industry's history in your head that comes out in conversations, and you tell these beautiful stories about it. But it's also blatantly obvious that you're very passionate about this, and I would say passion is infectious.

I wonder—obviously, I think you express that to everybody you interact with. You definitely expressed it to this guy. You know Josh Kushner, right?

Very well.

He has a great quote that I always think about, and I think it's dead right. He's said, “If it comes down to picking the most experienced person, or the smartest person, or the person that wants it the most, you always bet on the person that wants it the most.”

I wonder if that was the situation here.

There's no question about it. That was always our thing: We were going to win no matter what. We went about things that way, and we still do to this day. It's rare in my business that people do that. We literally did something like this last week.

If they asked us to put X, Y, and Z in front of them, we put that in front of them with whipped cream and cherries on top in 100 different variations for them to be like, “Holy shit.” I think that same thing resonated with Aby. We were going to be the best possible group. This meant the most to us, and we would truly be what we said we would be: custodians of the greatest restaurant space in New York.

The concepts that we developed here, and how we would bring this to life—the biggest breakthrough that I had, which I believe ended us up here, was the most counterintuitive one. That's always how it works.

Everyone else, including potentially him at the time, thought that because it was such an institution, you never even contemplated that this room, The Grill, which is now one of our busiest restaurants and one of the busiest restaurants in New York as far as fine dining is concerned, would ever be anything but this power-lunch thing.

It's been power lunch for 60 years. It's been power lunch since my parents were children. Just to put it in perspective, that's how long this has been power lunch.

The first thing I said was, “We're not serving lunch. We're only opening for dinner,” because the truth is that restaurants can't be successful serving lunch.

Why?

No one drinks.

Cheers, by the way.

Cheers.

Thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me here.

Of course. Thank you for being here.

Yeah, of course.

So, basically, what we did was say, “We're not even open for lunch,” because we needed to reestablish this as the place you want to be for dinner.

We already know that history has told us it's going to be a great place for lunch. It's in the center of Midtown, it's obviously a very convenient room, and it has the provenance of being the most powerful dining room to eat lunch in.

We need to do that for dinner, and how do I do that for dinner? I don't open for lunch immediately. I think that resonated with him greatly, because I said, “To do the types of numbers we're talking about, this needs to be a dinner restaurant, not a lunch restaurant. Lunch restaurants don't make money.” And so, that was a big rebranding of what we did here.

We kept the name The Grill, but renamed it from the Four Seasons, which obviously at this point in time had become quite confusing given the rise of the hotel. While they were building the Four Seasons restaurant, he was opening the original Four Seasons in Canada, in Toronto. Nothing to do with one another, but there was huge confusion all the time. People would say, “Meet me at The Four Seasons,” and people would show up here instead of the bar that people used to hang out at on 57th Street.

We rebranded it as The Grill and made it a true dinner destination. We took the history and heritage, which you'll see throughout all of our work, of what it meant to be a quintessential American restaurant. How do we interpret that? We went back into the history books. We only serve dishes at this restaurant that you could have ordered—not the way we make them, obviously, but you could have ordered them; we had seen them on a menu in our menu research in 1959. We built a menu around that, and it turned out to be an incredible project and probably my favorite restaurant that we have because of all this incredible history.

But it also informs and tells a story about our process in general, which always deals with huge amounts of research, studying, reading, going to the New York Public Library archives when we were young—and we're still doing this—and pulling old menus and old articles to learn about what was going on there and to read those articles, things that weren't even available online at the time, or even at all. I don't know if they are now. But we really find out what's at the core of this concept that we're doing and what the story is that we're telling.

Because I think the one thing that we've done, and my biggest contribution to probably the restaurant business, is that we made sure from day 1 that we had a very specific process. The first was that food was paramount. The food had to be the best. That's the thesis of our company, Major Food Group: food is number 1. But not too far behind are 2 other things. One is that the restaurant has to tell a complete story, and if it doesn't tell a complete story, then it doesn't work. And right behind that is that it's got to be fun.

Before we get to fun, tell me how a restaurant tells a story.

A restaurant tells a story because we set a narrative. We often compare it to making a movie. If we're right here in the place we're sitting, we're telling a story of American fine dining seen through our lens, while paying homage to the time period the building was built in and all the history that had happened before it, as we create a menu, a service style, uniforms, music, artwork, and all the different things that go into creating hospitality spaces but are often overlooked.

We make sure that the entire story makes sense. Whether it's the chair you're sitting in right now—this chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1959. We had it remade by the same people. These are the things that you might not even notice as a customer, but subconsciously they have an effect on you, and consciously, different things have different effects on different people.

Some people may talk about how amazing their server was and what it was like to interact with their captain. Some people may talk about the soundtrack that was playing. Some people may talk about the artwork that was on the walls. Most people, hopefully, are talking about how great the food was and how great a time they had.

In my business, the only thing that's even relevant is the most important thing: are they coming back? I always tell everyone who works for us that it's not a matter of if they come, because anywhere we would open, everyone's going to come and try a new restaurant. All that matters is that a customer is going to come back. That's what you need to look at and measure, because coming once is easy.

You could open a restaurant tomorrow, and everyone will come once. Anyone can do that. But will they come back? How often will they come back? Is it where they're going to choose to have special moments and special occasions?

This is key, though, because we talked about this when you and I had dinner a few weeks ago. What I admire is that I'm obsessed with people who do things for a long period of time. Anybody can succeed for 1 year, for 5 years. It's like you've been doing it for 15 years. You're at the top of your game.

I think your future success is going to be much greater than what's behind you. But you were even saying that's even more true in the restaurant business. Can you explain why?

Yeah, because, listen, the restaurant business, especially in today's day and age, is a trendy business. Everyone wants to try something that's new. Everyone's excited to go to an opening, and everyone's excited to go to a place for the first time to say that they went there.

But the big question is, after they've done that, after they've checked that off their list, after they've taken their Instagram photo to prove they went to this place and whatever else—which is a whole other topic—do they still want to come back, spend money with you, and feel good about the money that they spent when they left?

Because at the end of the day, we're in the business of providing people with an incredible evening. We're here to entertain you, delight you, feed you, and have you walk out with a smile on your face, feeling like, “When's the next time I can come back? When's the next time I can get a reservation?”

I always say the perfect thing is someone who comes to the desk and makes a reservation on the way out for the next time they're going to come. That's one of the many factors that makes this business so hard, especially in New York. There are so many restaurants. There are so many seemingly great restaurants that you're reading about every day that are opening, that you want to try. You want to go to this one, and you want to go to that one.

So, how do you become something that people come back to all the time, that becomes something people identify with, a place they want to gather for business, for pleasure, and also for special occasions, but all the time and on a regular basis? I think that we have a great blend of that. We have a great blend of the demand, all of our regulars who are consistently coming back to many of our properties once a week or more, and people who have been trying to get in for months at a time and are there for their first time. Hopefully, they can't wait to make their next reservation to come back. That's the critical piece.

There's a statistic, right? We've all heard it: 9 out of 10 restaurants close within the first year of being open. That's the famous rule of thumb. Many restaurants have a great first 3 months, and then no one shows up again. That, historically, is probably what has plagued the most restaurants throughout time.

Hearing you speak, what comes to mind is this great quote that Steve Jobs said toward the end of his life. He says, “The older I get, the more I think that people's motivations for what they're doing matter.” It becomes more important. You have this obsession, when you're a 13-year-old kid, about being obsessed with food, but now you have restaurants that may be higher status. There are celebrity restaurateurs. There are celebrity chefs.

So, I can't help but wonder if the people that you see coming into this are doing it—you said their motivations and why they're doing it are completely different from yours. Do you see that as well?

Yeah, to your point, my generation—myself and my partners, Rich and Mario—when we came in and started coming up with our own restaurants, that was the last generation of people who were doing this solely based on blind passion for this business. It was the only thing that we could imagine doing, and it's the type of thing that, if you love this business, is, by math, the hardest business you could go into.

But if you love it, and if you're passionate about it, and you study it, and you do the work that's necessary, which is critical, you have a chance of being successful, and you have a chance of creating really special places that you're proud of and that you love sharing with people. That's truly the essence of hospitality. We love to bring people together, serve them great food, make people happy, have them have a great time, and leave with a big smile on their face. That brings us great joy.

For better or worse, what's happened is that with the rise of social media, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, it did 2 things. First, you had food TV going back 20 years. That started the whole idea of celebrity chefs, celebrity restaurateurs, and so on. Cooking became cool. Cooking was in the spotlight, and people were watching Food Network.

Then the internet started, and you had websites, blogs, and all this different food content. Now, obviously, we're living in an extreme where you have viral food-related content on all these platforms.

The thing is that now, to have a line around the block, you don't necessarily have to be making something that's that good. It just has to go viral, and that lasts a pretty finite period of time. There are very few examples of food that went viral and stayed that way for years. It might go for 6 months, 4 months, or a year, but it's very rare that that happens.

All those things combined turned the restaurant business and restaurateurs into a much more glamorous business. When I came in, it was not a glamorous business. It was a business where people said, “Why on earth would you go into that business? Are you crazy? You're going to be broke. Nine out of 10 are going to fail. You're not going to have any chance of success.”

But they didn't know what was going on in my head or my partners' heads, or what we believed and knew we could do from the beginning. Now that it has become more glamorous, you have all these other people who want to go into it. You also have another reason for customers to come. You have different entry points that didn't exist before.

People see it as, “Let me try to create something that's going to go viral,” not, “Let me create the best version of this product because I have a great passion for it. Here's the history of it, here's how we're going to do it, and here's why it's going to be the best version of that that's ever been done.”

They don't even know the history.

They don't know the history, and the history doesn't matter to them because all that matters is, “How does it look on my Instagram? How does it look on my…? How is it going to catch on?”

That's just a totally different approach. That being said, everyone always says, “Well, do you not like that?” No, I love it for me, because the other side of that is that you have a much more educated consumer who's much more interested in spending their money on food and beverage than ever before. So we benefit greatly.

Some people looked at it, I think, the wrong way. When that all started, however many years ago, restaurateurs would talk to each other, and hospitality people would talk to each other. They'd say, “Oh, now everyone's a food critic. How do we deal with this? Everyone's a food critic.”

And I'm like, “This is fantastic.” Everyone's like, “Why?” I don't even have Instagram to this day. I don't even know what goes on on it. But what I know is that if these people want to come and wait in line and wait months for reservations to come to my restaurant, sometimes only to take a picture of a dish, that's an incredible shift in things.

These are not cheap dishes. I'm not selling a bagel and a donut. I'm selling expensive meals, and if that's going to drive people's willingness not only to spend on it, but also to increase their awareness and understanding of food, then that's a good thing. Naturally, if you're looking at food content all day, you understand it better than if you weren't.

So we have a more informed customer. Some of them are there just to take the picture, but many of them are also there to enjoy incredible experiences because they've tried all these different ones. They've become more engaged with food and beverage and more comfortable with it being something you spend money on.

I think that's probably the biggest thing that happened during my career. Right when I really started, and right when we opened Carbone and things started to explode for us, food truly joined the rest of culture as one of the significant things.

If you were growing up in New York, people would talk about Broadway shows, ballet, dance, sports, and… Restaurants became another form of cultural currency. If you were a cultured, sophisticated person, you needed to know about restaurants. You needed to talk about them. It became a topic of every conversation: “Where'd you eat last night? What did you have? Oh my God, I want to try that.”

None of that really existed at the level it did before, even when we started. Now it's been amplified to a level that's exponential and hard to even measure at this point, when you add in all these new ways that people share their experiences.

Okay, I want to go to your unconventional path to break into the industry, this industry you were obsessed with since you were a kid.

Yeah.

Let's go back to, I think, your early 20s. Can you tell us what was going on in your life at this time? You even had a different job, if I remember correctly.

Yeah.

And then you take a very unconventional and risky decision to quit your normal job and talk about the path that—

Yeah.

—you actually took and how you got into restaurants.

I was strangely obsessed with food and restaurants from a very young age. While other kids were watching cartoons, I was watching cooking shows. At that time, the only cooking show available was on PBS. It was a show called The Frugal Gourmet.

The Frugal Gourmet?

Yes. There was 1 cooking show that was on after school, and that's what I would watch. So my whole life was always focused around food. In high school, I took a semester and went to cooking school. It was always an incredible focus of mine.

At that time, I could never imagine that this thing I loved to do so much—eating, cooking, drinking, bringing people together, and having a great time—could actually be what I would do with my life. It was hard for me to realize, because I liked doing it so much, that it could actually be what I would do with my life. At that time, it was a hobby, and that's how people looked at it. “Oh, you love to cook? That's great.”

My first job out of college was at JPMorgan as an investment banking analyst. I worked there in the technology, media, and telecom group. That experience very quickly made me realize I didn't care whether this was the highest-paying job. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew that if I could get this job, just on paper, it was the highest-paying job out of college.

And very popular, with higher status.

Yes, but it was a very simple equation: “I'm not sure what I want to do. I don't know what, but if this is the highest-paying job and I can get one, let me go do that.”

You're how old at this time?

I'm 21 years old. I had never even opened an Excel spreadsheet. I didn't go to business school, so I didn't know any of this. I went to JPMorgan, and they basically taught you. It's an amazing thing. It's like a free business school. You go there for the first 6 months, and they teach you how to do everything, which was actually very beneficial to me.

But I very quickly realized, when I was in the office, that there was something a little bit different about me. Every guy, all the other analysts around me, would be reading The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. I'm sitting there reading Travel + Leisure magazine and weird cooking magazines, and everyone's looking at me like, “What's wrong with this guy?”

I also realized the power of restaurants. There were 2 things that happened. One was that, because I was so obsessed, I would go out. This was before you would use a Zagat guide to find the great restaurants in New York, and I had memorized the guide.

A game I used to play was that someone would open the guide, name a restaurant in New York, and I'd tell you the rating. It was 24, 26, 40... It went up to 30. But that was a fun game for me: name a random restaurant, and I'll tell you the rating.

I memorized this guide because I wanted to try all these great restaurants. That was the bible of New York restaurants 25 years ago. That's how everyone figured out which restaurants they were going to go to.

Basically, I found 2 things out. One was that, because I had this incredible passion, it was natural for me to be in restaurants. It was natural the way I felt when I went to restaurants. It was natural the way I got along with the people who worked in restaurants, which is its own culture.

Whether it was waiters, chefs, restaurateurs, or owners, these were the people I got along with. We understood each other. So I would spend all the time I could outside of work—which was not that much at that time—trying this place and trying that place, spending all the money I was making to try these restaurants and try every single thing I possibly could in the amount of time I had.

Two things happened. One was that I realized the power of restaurants. Because I went to these places and had become friendly with a lot of restaurateurs at that time, I realized that the greatest currency I had was that I could get my senior managing directors—people everyone was afraid to talk to—dinner reservations. They thought it was the craziest thing that I could get them into Nobu or wherever it was at the time. They thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them.

So I started to see that there was something here: the currency of restaurants. There was already a currency around these impossible tables—being able to access them, what that meant to people, and what they would do to have those great experiences that were out there. I started to see that, and at the same time I started to see that when you look up to the top of your job, or wherever you're working, you look at the guy who is the top guy, the guy making the most money, and the guy who you're obviously going to try to be like if this is what you're going to do.

These guys were miserable. I was like, “I cannot do this.” I realized very quickly that, A, I don't want to be like that guy. I want to be like that guy I met last night in the restaurant. On top of that, I'm never going to be the best at this. I can be the best—I don't know yet what it is—as long as it's something that has food and people surrounding it, whether it be restaurants, hotels, or otherwise.

So I walked out of my job on my birthday in my second year, which was a 2-year program, so it was right before it was coming to a close. It was in August. At that point, I said, “You know what? I've had enough of this. I got to go do something around hospitality and food and beverage.” It was still such a crazy idea to go into the restaurant business that I didn't even take that route.

I went to work in a hotel, which seemed a little less crazy. I walked there from literally a few blocks from here. To put the timing into perspective, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Columbus Circle had just opened. The Mandarin Oriental was, at the time, according to the Travel + Leisure I was reading, the most expensive hotel to ever open. It was the crown jewel of New York, and it was a big deal because it opened with Columbus Circle.

So I walked into the hotel to try to get a job. I went to the front desk, and they said, “Well, we don't give jobs here. You have to go to the service entrance in the back.” I said, “How do I get there?” They told me to walk around the building, so I did. I ended up going in and saying, “I'm looking for a job,” and they said, “Do you have an appointment?”

I was on my lunch break. I said, “No, but I'm in my suit. I'm from JPMorgan.” They said, “Well, you have to come back with an appointment.” I said, “Well, please just do me a favor.” You could see the HR director through the glass. It was one of those half walls, more like a showroom, where you could see the person in the office. He was in one of those classic HR cubicles where you could see what was going on.

He was that far away from me, so I said, “Could you just ask him? Tell him that I'm here, that I'm an investment banker at JPMorgan, and that I will take any job in this hotel that he will give me.” He thought I was out of my fucking mind. I got up and left, and I remember walking back to work. I remember calling someone and saying, “I don't think that went so well, but we'll see what happens,” because he had said, “Yeah, we'll see. Nothing's available.”

Lo and behold, the next day my phone rang, and it was the head of HR at Mandarin Oriental. He said, “Hey, it was nice meeting you yesterday. We just had the head of guest relations quit. Do you want to take that job?” I said, “That'd be fantastic.” He said, “Great. When can you start?” I said, “In 2 weeks.” He said, “Great.” So I ended up leaving and going to work at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

What I got very lucky with was that, at that time at the Mandarin, guest relations—which means a lot of different things in different hotels—could be a synonym for concierge, or it could mean VIP services, which is what it meant in this hotel. It ended up being an ideal starting point for me because I ended up leading the VIP concierge services, whatever you want to call them. I handled all our most important guests, no matter what they were doing, from rooms to restaurants to check-in to every single aspect of the hotel.

I got to learn very quickly what I wanted to learn about how to run a hotel at the highest level, as well as the food-and-beverage outlets that were there, which I got a chance to work in. That was my first foray into it.

Now, my parents thought I was crazy. They said, “You're leaving the best job that theoretically exists to go into what, at that time, again, was not what it is today.” It wasn't this fancy, fun business where you saw people being big successes. It was a place where you could never make any money. I continued to do it.

At that point, I still hadn't fully decided that I needed to open a restaurant. I knew I needed to be around food all the time. I knew I needed to be around people all the time. I loved dealing with customers, I loved dealing with people, and I loved being around food. If I could check those boxes, I was very happy. So I started a website.

This is the very unconventional path.

Yes.

So you go from employee at Mandarin—

Right.

—Oriental to entrepreneur.

For all my VIP guests at the Mandarin Oriental, I built my own Excel database using my JPMorgan skills. This database was so well organized—JPMorgan-style—that it basically had all the restaurants I liked. It had exactly what you wanted to eat when you went there, exactly what table you wanted, who you needed to speak to at the door, and all the information.

They'd call me and say, “I want to go here and here.” I'd say, “Great, I can do that.” I rose through the ranks there because I knew I could get everyone into these restaurants, since I was always spending my time in all these restaurants.

Then one day, I was walking into my building late—we didn't get out of work at JPMorgan until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, as you know. I had an incredible doorman named Max. As I was walking in and talking to him, he introduced me to this kid. The kid was a student at NYU and a programmer.

I said to him, “I have this idea.” This was all while we were standing in the lobby at 2:00 in the morning. I said, “I think I have this database already built in Excel, and there's nowhere to properly search online.” This was before anything existed. There was no website where you could search restaurants properly, have them rated and graded, and also be told what to eat there and what the signature dishes were. All the things that we easily access now.

But I had this vision to create a content site all around restaurants that would allow people to use what I had built for themselves. They could just say, “I want an Italian restaurant downtown,” and it would say, “Here are the 3 that are recommended. Here's what you should eat there,” and so on.

That became a site called Always Hungry that I created, which was a content site. That was really my door into the restaurant business as a whole because now I was on the content-creation side. I got to be very close with the best chefs and best restaurateurs in the city, interviewing them, talking to them, and doing things like this before podcasts existed or anything of that nature. We were having them take us through their process or through the restaurant.

After doing this for a little while, I started to realize, “I understand this.” It all made sense to me. I needed to be doing this myself, not talking about the people who were doing it. It was that feeling of, “This is what I'm meant to be doing,” not some internet thing that I really didn't even understand the internet portion of. I'm just creating food content.

That led me to starting another website called DinePrivate with a guy named Joe Bastianich, who was one of the most famous restaurateurs at the time. He came to me because I was, at the time—this was 20 years ago—the food-web guy. There wasn't anyone else in my space. I was the guy. The biggest restaurateur, one of the guys that I looked up to, came to me and said, “I have an idea. I want to start OpenTable,” which existed at the time, “but for private dining rooms.”

Like this room.

Like this room, right?

Okay.

But he had just opened a restaurant at the time called Del Posto, and he had 7 private dining rooms. He was having trouble booking them all the time. His idea was, “What if we automated this so you could do it online?”

So you were going to be co-founders together on this new project.

Correct.

He was one of the restaurateurs or chefs that you most admired.

He was the biggest restaurateur of that moment. He was partners with Mario Batali.

He was one of the biggest—if not, at that moment, the biggest—restaurateurs, doing some of the biggest projects.

That was smart on your part.

Right. So I figured if I got to have a front-row seat and, beyond that, be his partner and start working with him and figuring out all these intricacies that we would have to figure out around restaurants, I could learn everything.

He never knew my motive was that my motive was to become him, right?

He's the opposite of the guy you saw at JPMorgan.

Right. Correct.

I don't want that miserable guy.

Exactly.

I want that guy.

I was like, "I want to be like that guy. I want to be like Joe." So the opportunity to be his partner was something that I said, "You know what? Even though I don't want to build another website, I'll do it."

So we built it. The biggest thing that it gave me was that I would literally meet him 3 times a week. We'd sit in Del Posto, we'd drink wine, we'd hang out, and we'd talk. I'd watch how he did what he was doing. We'd talk about restaurants and the intricacies of every last detail, many of which we needed to program into this thing that we were building. That really, really put me in a place where I realized I can do this, and I think I can do it my way. I can definitely do it as good, if not better, than what I saw him and the other peers we were working with do.

But this is really important. I want to pause here because this is something that I see reappear over and over again in all these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs I read. It drives me crazy, because if you listen to normal people, they're like, "Oh, you should generate evidence first and then have confidence." It's like, no, you have it exactly backwards. Belief comes before ability.

100%.

You're in your early 20s at this time?

Yeah, about 25.

Think about it. You have this obsession. You're in your early to mid-20s. This is the guy you most admire, and you're like, "Actually, I can do that."

It was natural to me. The only thing I can equate it to when I talk to people is if you're an athlete and you were just naturally good at basketball, and obviously now you've honed your craft to be one of the best.

But I was good at this. I understood why they put this here. I understood why those guys were coming here for service. I understood what was on my plate and how it was cooked. Was it seared? Had they blanched it? Had they done this? Had they done that?

I could tell you, "There's a problem with this because of this," just by tasting it. "Okay, here's what you have to redo with it." Part of it was all the studying: all the years of eating, repetition, studying, cooking, et cetera, et cetera. Part of it was just natural talent.

At the end of the day, you have to have a great palate, right? If you don't have a great palate, it's going to be tough to taste food professionally.

Yeah.

Right? But part of that also just comes with a lot of study and a lot of repetition, no different than anything else.

Well, if you're 25, you've already had this obsession, at that point, for half your life.

Right.

And it's funny, you use the word athlete, because when you were speaking, I heard this weird clip of Larry Bird. A young Larry Bird came to my mind because he played at this small school. They said he's too slow. He didn't play against tough competition. "You're not going to make it in the NBA."

They told him that after he got drafted to the NBA, before he went. He had a lot of self-confidence, but he goes, "Wait a minute." They used to have this thing called rookie camp, where all the rookies would start playing together, and he's like, "It took me—I was hearing all this stuff, like I'm too slow, I had horrible competition."

It took him, he says, 3 days at rookie camp to realize, "Not only can I play in this league, I'm going to dominate in this league."

Right.

It's like the same exact situation here.

That's very similar. What I went through was exactly that. It went from "I can be like these guys" to "I'm going to be able to dominate this world," right? I was 100% confident in that idea, and I took that.

I was able to sell off these 2 businesses that I had started. I took the very small amount of money that I made on those.

Oh, wait, so you burned the boats.

Yes.

So you sold off your website before you started your first restaurant?

Yeah. So basically, I had both businesses running, and at that point I was like, "I have to go and open my own restaurant. This is what I'm meant to do. I have to get out of these businesses."

One thing led to another. I spoke to a friend of mine who was in the venture capital world. We sold Always Hungry, which was the content site, in a matter of a few months. We sold that, and we sold DinePrivate, so I was able to get out. Then I hit the streets saying, "I'm going to find a restaurant space."

Did you think you were going to be the chef at the time?

No.

Did you know who you were going to partner with, or no?

No. What happened was, watching Joe and other restaurateurs, I learned that the biggest reason why restaurants don't work out, if it's on the restaurateur-owner's part, is because there's always been this classic tension between the restaurateur and the chef. It's been happening throughout history, right? It's a classic thing.

The chef wants to make this food, the restaurateur wants to make more money, and they're fighting all the time about these things. Then eventually they break up. That's the stereotypical restaurant story.

So I watched that happen a lot of times while I was watching the industry so closely. I also realized that the best partnerships were when restaurateurs and great chefs were partners. That was still somewhat of a novel idea, right?

From day 1, I was looking for who I was going to partner with. I'm not going to hire a chef. I'm going to look for people that have the same ambitions that I have, but most importantly, that can make the most incredible food in the world, as I'm looking around for spaces.

Simultaneously, I decided that the restaurant I wanted to open, which was my favorite type of restaurant, was my version, in my head, of what Carbone was at that time.

Carbone's going to be the first restaurant you would do?

The idea—

Yeah.

—of this elevated Italian-American restaurant was my big idea, right?

Okay.

Because what I saw was the following. To me, everything made perfect sense, but other people didn't see it, right?

I saw that some of my favorite restaurants to go to—Il Mulino, Scalinatella, Rao's, et cetera—were the best experiences. But at the end of the day, the food is not that good, and they were very expensive restaurants. I would spend as much time and go there as many times as I could, spending all my money going to these places. That's how much I loved them.

I loved the moves at the beginning of the meal. I loved what they put down. I loved the whole thing. As a New Yorker, that's the most classic style of New York restaurant, right? These kinds of finer-dining Italian restaurants.

My idea was, what if I took this, but took the entire thing to a different level? Instead of a veal chop being the shittiest veal you could buy, pounded this thin, why don't we buy the best veal you can buy and make it a beautiful chop and still make a veal parm out of it, but not pound it so thin that all you're eating is breadcrumbs?

These little ideas: What if I made a lobster fra diavolo, but the lobster was perfectly cooked? That had never happened at that point in time. Never, okay?

What if you reinvented a Caesar salad, but the lettuce was perfect baby gem lettuce, and you used ricotta salata instead of Parmesan? What if you took these dishes and gave them the love and respect that people would give when they were cooking fancy French food, in terms of ingredient sourcing, et cetera, and you applied that to Italian-American food?

And to this archetype that was very much beloved by New York and beloved by me especially. Right around the same time, my 2 partners opened a small, 10-seat Italian-American restaurant on Mulberry Street. It had started to gain some traction. People were talking about it, and they served sandwiches during the day and a 5-dish prix fixe menu for $35 in the evening.

People would line up to go to the $35 prix fixe, and so it caught my eye. At first, I just had the sandwiches during the day, and they were spectacular. They were very much in line with this philosophy that I was looking for. They were doing elevated versions of chicken parm sandwiches and chicken francese sandwiches—all the same idea, but in sandwiches.

At night, they were doing reinvented versions of classic Italian-American dishes, with different influences and a little bit more avant-garde in that way, but it was still this elevated version of truly Italian-American cooking. At this point, I was a food expert. I was eating 6 meals a day at different restaurants. I was tasting food for a living at that point.

I went into that restaurant, and another restaurant owner I was friends with took me there and said, “You’ve got to try this place.” I didn’t have a restaurant or anything at that point. He knew me from my web stuff, and we were friends, and he took me to this place. He said, “You’ve got to try this place.”

I was so blown away by the food. I thought, “This is crazy. The hundreds of meals I’ve eaten this year, this is by far the best food I’ve had.” It happened to be the exact same philosophy and genre of things that I was thinking about and actively looking at spaces to do.

That night, Rich and Mario were working at the pass, and we started talking. They tell the story all the time: all the guests would come over and start talking to them, but when we started talking, it was a little different because I knew what I was talking about. So the high-level food conversation, which has now been going on for 15 years together, began.

We had this great conversation. I was blown away by the meal. I got home that night and told my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife, “I think I found the guys I want to partner with, and I want to bring you back to the restaurant.”

There was a line around the block, so I called, just doing what I would always do. It was a Hail Mary. I didn’t really know them or know what was going to happen, but I didn’t want to wait in line. I called and said, “Hey, it’s Jeff Zalaznick. I was hoping I could come in tonight for 2 people.”

The girl who picked up, Nicole, who ended up working with us for many years after, said, “Hold on 1 second.” It was a leap of faith that they would have any idea who I was. I wasn’t a well-known person at this point. In restaurants, I was, but it all comes full circle because Mario, my partner Mario Carbone, had worked at Del Posto, which was Joe’s restaurant.

This is your partner on DinePrivate?

On DinePrivate.

Yeah.

When Joe and I would meet, we would sit in the dining room at Del Posto like you and I are sitting now, and we would drink wine, hang out, work, laugh, and talk. Mario would see me sitting with Joe in the dining room.

Mm.

So he knew me and recognized me, and we had said hi once or twice. When I called, they said, “Actually, we’d love to have you, but can you come in at 10:00 p.m.?”

Is this after you had the high-level conversation with him?

We had just had a quick, high-level conversation on my way out.

Okay.

5 or 10 minutes.

Okay.

I only knew later, because we tell this story all the time, that they felt that. I thought it was a great conversation.

They felt the same.

Apparently, they felt the same. They said, “Can you come in at 10:00 p.m.?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “Because Mario gets off service at 10:00, and he would actually love to talk to you about something.”

Oh, great.

I said, “That’s crazy. I want to talk to him about something. That’s why I’m coming in.”

This is all real, not made up. I remember hanging up and thinking, “It’s the craziest thing.” I told my wife, Ali, “We’ve got to go at 10:00, because the thing I was telling you about, he wants to talk to me, too. So we’re going to go at 10:00, I’m going to go out with him afterward, and we’ll talk.”

We went for dinner, and after service, he and I went for drinks. The rest is history. We basically sat down at The Jane Hotel. I told him my idea, what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do with Italian-American food, and he immediately said, “That’s exactly what we want to do. That’s our dream.”

We were there until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, just talking about what we wanted to create. He had worked for Joe for a long time, so we talked through it. We said, “We don’t want to just be…” Joe only made Italian restaurants, for the most part. We didn’t want to just make Italian restaurants. We wanted to make different types.

Should this first thing work, my ambition is to be the biggest, greatest restaurant company in the world. My ambition is to grow into hotels and into much bigger things, and the entire hospitality experience. We talked about all these things in our first conversation, which has basically been the exact roadmap that we have followed up until today. It was all talked about in our first conversation.

We stayed there all night talking, and it was like meeting your soulmate. If you play in a band and you guys start playing, then it just all starts working. I met Rich the next day, and we decided to partner up.

I quickly started working with them at Torrisi, which was the original restaurant, different from the one that it is now. From there, we started on our path to try to find the right space to do Carbone. That was probably in the summer of… They opened in January. That summer, I joined them, and we set our sights on creating what would be the greatest Italian-American restaurant ever opened.

The ambition was only to be the greatest New York-style Italian-American restaurant that had ever opened, and to truly reinvigorate this art form that we all had grown up with together in New York, which was slowly fading and being left for dead. No one was paying attention in fine dining to spaghetti and meatballs.

Fine dining at that point had become this very, very, very serious tasting menu. The chef’s always right: “I’m going to serve you these 5 dishes. That’s all you can have tonight. That’s the only thing that I’m making. No substitutions, no allergies. You eat what I tell you and say thank you.” That was the general tone of restaurants, and people loved it.

Those were the only options as we were coming up. If I wanted to eat a great fine-dining meal, those were the only options. So we loved this Italian-American thing, and we were also very blatantly and collectively fighting against something that we had liked at one point in time, but were at this point just sick of: this incredibly inhospitable, robotic style of fine dining.

The whole idea of hospitality, the whole idea of restaurants, is taking care of your customers. When did it become that you come to my restaurant, I tell you exactly what you’re eating, you can’t have anything else, and I don’t care what your preferences or allergies are? When did that become the way that people want to eat?

It had its moment, and we were ready to say, “We’re done with that.” When we came out with Carbone, the Italian-American restaurant had that spirit of abundance built into it, and we celebrated it to the maximum.

That’s why Carbone famously had—I made the menu the biggest menu in Manhattan. At that point, everyone was giving you these tiny little cards with 6 ingredients listed on them. Everything had become so austere. So our menu was big. It was bold. There were 70 things on it. At the very top of that menu, it said, “A piacere.” “A piacere” means “whatever you want.”

My whole thing, and our whole thing, was that if we’re so good, if someone asks for a piece of grilled chicken, why can’t we make that for them really well? What that means is that we’re not that good, because anyone, without even that much culinary training, could make you 4 or 5 dishes if they made the same exact dishes every single night, and probably get them to a point that is acceptable.

Obviously, you need to be great for it to be great, but the whole difficulty of a restaurant is that you’ve got 70 different dishes. All of that has to be prepared for. How much do you prepare? What ingredients came in? Did they all come in right? You’ve got all these different moving parts. You’ve got hundreds of moving parts just to put out the menu that you’re putting in front of people.

That being said, that’s your job. Your job is to do that at an incredibly high level if that’s what you’re putting in front of people. If I have the ingredients, obviously, if you come in and ask me to make you Chinese food, that’s what I call food terrorism. That’s like coming to an Italian restaurant and asking for something completely different.

When people come to our Italian restaurants, they love Italian food, but they want nothing with onions and garlic, which we now accommodate. At the time, we thought that was the craziest thing. You’re coming to an Italian-American restaurant and can’t eat onions and garlic?

But outside of crazy requests, our opinion was, “We’re here to serve you. We can make you anything. Of course, if you want that plain and not with sauce on it, we can do it. Of course, if you want that pasta with this sauce, we can do that.”

“What do you mean we can’t do that?” At that point in restaurants, that was a crazy thing. We came in not only with this big, bold Italian restaurant serving the best versions of Caesar salads, beef carpaccios, baked clams, spicy rigatoni vodka, different pastas, veal parm, and all these different dishes done in a way that no one had ever been presented, but with a quality of product that no one had ever used before. That really resonated with people.

What also really resonated with people was that we created the category that is now thrown around in every conversation: experiential fine dining. Coming to Carbone, because of the nature of what we created and the types of captains that I went out and hired, they were all part of this movie. To your point earlier, we were telling a story and finding our voices in our creative process. We didn’t realize what we were doing at the time, but it now guides everything that we do.

We were creating that story. This was 1959, New York, Little Italy. We were on Thompson Street, which had a great Italian-American history. We were in a restaurant called Rocco, the oldest existing Italian-American restaurant in New York City that was still open when we took it over. It had been there since 1929. We always loved history, and that was the space we put the original Carbone in. We kept the original sign, which has obviously become an iconic thing.

Now, explain the sign part, because that was interesting too.

The sign is a crazy story. This was my first big lease that I was negotiating. It was our first big restaurant, but we found the space because I was standing there one day and a guy I knew tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I think I have a space.” We’d been looking for a space for Carbone for over a year.

Why was it taking so long?

Because it needed to be the perfect space, and we wouldn’t settle for anything less. We had our restaurant Torrisi running. We decided we were going to build a sandwich place next door called Parm, which ended up being the first restaurant that I had built from scratch. That was more of a sandwich shop, and it was small—we’re talking about 18-seat restaurants.

We moved the sandwich concept out and moved it next door. We did that because we were waiting patiently, developing the food and developing the concept, but we hadn’t found the space. We knew it had to be a very specific type of space. One day, a guy came up to me and said, “I think I have a space you might be interested in.” He said, “It’s right around the corner.”

Just from seeing the sign?

I said, “Great. Let’s go right now.” He walked me down the block, we turned right on Thompson Street, and I saw the sign. As we were walking up the block, I looked at him and said, “We’ll take it.”

Just from seeing the sign?

Just from seeing the sign. He said, “You haven’t even seen what’s inside.” I said, “It doesn’t matter. I know this sign. I know this place. This is exactly what we’re looking for.”

We went in, and obviously, the place was a mess. It hadn’t been maintained in many years. There was an old Italian guy in the corner smoking cigarettes who had been there and wasn’t paying rent—six months or something. At that point, the landlord was saying, “I’m dying to get rid of this guy. I don’t know what to do.”

I said, “Well, give him until the end of the year. Let him get through the holidays. We should start January 1st.” I was trying to be very friendly. In the lease, I had put very specifically that I had this vision for the sign. We had to do a whole bunch of construction inside, change where the kitchen was, change the dining rooms, and do all this other stuff, but it had the perfect bones. It had this incredible history, and the building had an incredible history of New York and Italian-American stories. This place was obviously a very storied place. It had been there for close to 100 years.

Basically, we put in the lease that we needed the sign. The sign had to stay. They put it in the lease, and it didn’t seem like a big ask. Right before we were going to execute it, I got a phone call that the owner wanted $10,000 for the sign—to keep it there.

It seems irrelevant at this point in time, but for us, at that point in time, $10,000 was a big decision and conversation. We had a whole discussion, and we decided, since the sign had to stay, “Yeah, fine. Let’s just pay him. It’s worth it in the scheme of things. This sign is very important.”

Even though we gave him the money, in kind of a classic New York fashion, he was so angry that he was being removed, even though he hadn’t paid rent in close to 6 months.

This is the guy who—

The guy who had been in the restaurant—

Okay.

—for the last 40 years or whatever.

He’s not the one who’s getting this $10,000, though, right?

No, he’s getting it.

Oh, okay.

He was saying, “If you want me to leave the sign, I want the—” So we agreed finally. New Year’s Eve was supposed to be his last night, and we were taking over January 1st.

That night—or rather, when I showed up on January 1st—there was shattered glass. The sign was there, but all the neon had been shattered by him. If you’ve been to Carbone, it’s a neon sign. It was this old sign called “Rocco.” It said “Rocco Wines & Liquor” below it in green, and it had “Rocco” written in red.

At first, I was pissed off. I was yelling, cursing, calling the landlord, and doing the whole thing. After a few minutes, I thought, “Yeah, I think this guy gave me the biggest gift he could have given me. We’re going to keep this sign, and instead, we’re going to put ‘Carbone’ in neon on top of the Rocco sign and put back the ‘Wines & Liquor.’”

That became what is probably the most iconic sign in fine-dining restaurants in the world, which we now have obviously all over the world. But that sign was incidental. Only because he broke all those lights did it become the quintessential Carbone sign that it is.

We’re deep into this conversation because I think your lore and history are really, really fascinating. It’s so in line with the rest of the people I talk to, the people I read about, and my own experience. It’s like this true interest revealed early, and it’s so smart. You kept using the word “natural,” which I think is really important—that this just felt natural to you.

I think that’s the biggest thing. If you want to get to the top of your profession, it’s going to be really hard fighting against your own innate desires and the things you’re interested in. You should just go with whatever is natural, even if it’s low status. I’m sure when you started, you thought, “Okay, I can dominate this industry,” but the size that the industry has become, the amount of opportunity that you’ve already experienced so far and that’s ahead of you, too, is probably beyond what you could have predicted back then.

Can you give us the state of the business now? When someone says, “Okay, what’s Major Food Group?” what does it entail?

I would say at this point, Major Food Group is on its way to becoming a fully vertically integrated hospitality company. We started as a kind of luxury fine-dining restaurant group, which is what, for the majority of our careers, we’ve been. Now, we’ve started to add private members’ clubs, which has been a huge business for us.

We’re also doing branded residential towers. We’re just finishing one in Miami right now called Villa, which will be an 80-unit, super-high-end condo building that we’ve designed. We’re doing all the amenities, all the food and beverage, all the apartments—every detail, everything you touch, everything that you feel in there. We’re doing branded residential, we’re doing hotels, and we’re really expanding the scope of what we’re doing so that we can take care of you 24 hours a day.

Say more about that.

I think where we’ve gotten to right now, our approach to hospitality has proven to be incredibly successful and beloved. I always say that our process isn’t that difficult: We just create places that we want to go to. That’s been our entire ethos. We build places where we want to go, and that’s it. If we don’t want to go there, we don’t want to build it.

Whether it’s a restaurant, a private club, or a hotel, we know how to do it, we know how we would want it done, and we create those environments. You can apply that idea anywhere. The most difficult part of any hospitality property is the food and beverage. It’s the most complex, no matter what.

What’s happened over the last decade-plus is that everyone has come to realize that. People building hotels, people building buildings, and people building much larger-format things realize that the food and beverage is actually the most difficult and, theoretically, at this point, the most important part of it.

That’s been our way into spreading our wings. We don’t want to just take care of you for the 3 hours you’re sitting in our restaurant. We want to take care of you from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed. The way that we do that is through our style of hospitality. We’re going to do it the way we would want it done, and we’re going to apply the same philosophies that we apply to everything else in restaurants to the greater hospitality landscape.

That’s really what we’re focused on today as we grow into not just being a classic food-and-beverage restaurant company, but also adding all these different arms that come with it.

Then you have luxury hospitality and everything that we're building in that. For example, we've taken the Carbone brand, and it's become such an incredible lifestyle brand that we've applied that, and we now sell Carbone tomato sauce.

I don't think people understand. These products—you're essentially selling products, right? They can scale to an insanely large degree.

Yeah, right. Carbone tomato sauce, for example, is sold in thousands of doors across America—more than you could ever penetrate with a restaurant. Only so many people can come to a restaurant in a day, a month, or a year.

Carbone sauce has become an enormous business for us, which is growing at a pace we never even expected. It's really put us at the top of the premium sauce category, and it has worked incredibly harmoniously. Even though that's a product that you buy in the store and it costs less than $10, it's a little piece of what people see and aspire to at the restaurant.

They don't contradict each other. At the end of the day, they're both standing for the same thing, which is being the best expression of something that you're familiar with. Everyone's had jarred tomato sauce, whether it be Ragú or whatever it might be. We make the best one. It's not going to be something you've never had before; it's going to be the best version.

That's our entire thesis around restaurants and food. If you look at our menus, very rarely am I going to serve you something that's the first time you've ever had these foods or this dish. Our goal is just to make you the best version that you've ever had. That same philosophy goes throughout everything that we do, whether it's how we build a building or how we make a jar of tomato sauce. It's all the same process.

I recorded an episode for this show here in New York with James Dyson, who's my personal hero just because he's probably the most stubborn and determined person I've ever met or read about. He struggled for basically a decade and a half, failing after failing after failing. He did 5,127 prototypes before he got his vacuum cleaner right, and that was his whole point. He's like, "I don't have to invent markets. I can just look at the market, find a product that can be improved, and then relentlessly re-engineer and optimize it."

The end result is that, because he hasn't interrupted the compounding for 45 years, he owns 100% of his business. It's one of the most valuable privately held businesses owned by a single person in the world. It's literally just like, "That vacuum cleaner sucks. Everybody uses vacuum cleaners. I'll just make a better one."

Mm-hmm.

"That hairdryer sucks." He does it over and over again.

That's our whole thesis. I mean, that's really our whole thesis.

It's almost like—I think I said it on that episode—"He identified your mediocrity as my opportunity."

That's really the thing in our belief about food and hospitality. Everything has been done in one way or the other. "Has it been done the right way?" is a better question. There's always something to look at in our businesses and take something that, generally, people already like, and make a much better version of it.

You use the vacuum cleaner. It's things that people are already eating. People have been eating spicy rigatoni with vodka sauce since way before you and I were born. But why does this one taste so much better than all the other ones? It's a very simple thing, but it's something that a lot of work and thought goes into.

So, I want to go back. You guys had this conversation with your partner the first night? You stayed up till 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning talking about, "We're going to do Carbone first, but we want to do other things." What was the first thing that you did that was not a normal restaurant?

The real first divergence was getting involved with hotels, which we did in Boston at The Newbury, which was really our first foray into hotels.

What'd you do there?

We created and opened the entire concept. We became partners in the concept, and we were brought in to basically do everything from design to execution to branding, et cetera.

Were you guys partners with the hotelier?

Yes. The hotel group that was building it brought us in to help with their project. They wanted our assistance with the luxury execution.

But do you own a piece of the entire project?

We own a piece of the brand.

Okay.

We have restaurants, bars, and all this stuff inside the hotel. But we were really brought in to design the experience. That was years ago.

I'd say the biggest step that we've recently taken in the last few years has been private members' clubs. We started with ZZ's in Miami, where you and I had dinner.

It's my favorite restaurant in Miami.

I appreciate that. Then we opened a much bigger one here in New York, at the entrance to Hudson Yards. It's got 2 restaurants and 3 bars. It's a much larger space.

Why make it a private members' club as opposed to just another restaurant? Why'd you decide to do that?

Private members' clubs are fantastic because, as I love win-wins, a private members' club is a win for the business and for the customer. For the business, it's a much better business. All the things that make the restaurant business the hardest business, if you know what you're doing, somewhat go away when you add a subscription model to it.

Now you're Netflix with a restaurant. You have people paying annual dues and monthly dues every single year. It automatically renews. If you do your job well, you have very little attrition, and you know that every year X amount of dollars of subscription revenue is coming in. You start to look at it as a very different business than the restaurant business, where you have virtually no visibility.

I mean, if it starts to hail one day, that's not going to be a good day in the restaurant.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? If it's pouring rain, that's going to be a different day. The restaurant business has 100 different variables that are going to affect it. It's spring break, and everyone's away, so the week's quiet. There are 100 different things.

At our level, you know them, and you can predict them to some extent. But you're putting on a new show every night, where the variables are always changing, and you've got to do it the same exact way you did it the night before. That's why it's the hardest business in the world. Everything's got to flow perfectly, so you're full every night, and nothing is preventing people from getting to your restaurant.

A private club, again, now has a subscription model underneath it, so that's fixed. It changes the whole nature of what you're doing. That's on the business side. That's why everyone's trying to go into private clubs, because it's a much better business.

But that wouldn't be the only reason we could do something like that. The other reason is that, at the end of the day, it's what customers want in the luxury sector. You can apply a much higher level of personalization and a much higher level of knowing your customer—not just anticipating what they want, but knowing what they want.

Here, our job as a restaurant is to anticipate what guests want. In private clubs, you don't need to anticipate. You literally have them fill out a form saying what they want. You know what kind of water they drink. You know what their drink of choice is. You know where they like to go. You know their favorite dishes. You know their diet.

Yes, you know that in a restaurant, but sometimes you've got to talk about it at the table. Everything is more natural and more fluid. It allows for a much higher level of service.

The interesting thing we've done in private clubs is that you've seen private members' clubs start to become much more popular. They always were big in London.

I was going to say, you have to know the history of this.

Yeah. Private members' clubs were always big in London. Even for any of us who have traveled to London, generally, the majority of places you'd be going or being taken for business would be private members' clubs. That was the culture in London. Everything was a private club. That's what it was. It still is, to some extent.

When does it come to the States?

About 5, 6, or 7 years ago. Forget about Soho House, because that was always something a little different. The super-luxury, super-exclusive private clubs that were prevalent in London started to percolate into New York. Right around the same time, you had a few different private clubs open.

The difference with ours was that what I saw and what I knew from London, from being at all these places in London, was that the thing about private clubs was that it was all about being there. The food was never any good. You'd go there for dinner, but really you just wanted to go there to have a drink and kind of see what was going on. You never sought out to go there for dinner. It was a cool place, and it was cool to take your friends to your membership club for dinner.

What we did was apply our expertise, which I think has set us apart in that space, and I take a lot of pride in that. We're very much focused on food and beverage. At our clubs, like ZZ's, the food comes first. It's a great place just to hang out.

It's a great place to sit and have drinks. Of course, you're going to build a beautiful place where people can sit and congregate, and that's a given. There are lots of new examples in New York.

But we actually have a point of view. For example, ZZ's in New York has 2 restaurants. We have an Italian restaurant, a private Carbone, that has about 30% to 40% of its dishes available only there. We have our ZZ's classic Japanese restaurant, and we have bars that all have their own snacks and whatever else.

We're also the first people to ever have a culinary concierge. To double down on that idea, if you're a member of ZZ's, you can call 48 hours in advance, call your concierge, and say, "I have investors coming to town from Egypt. Can you make me an Egyptian feast for my dinner? It's going to be 6 of us?" We have a team of chefs who put together whatever you call and ask for.

It could be a theme, like an Egyptian feast. It could be, "Hey, I want you to make—it's my mother's birthday. Here are her 3 favorite dishes that she had," or, "Here are my favorite 3 recipes of hers. Can you remake them for this dinner?" People do that kind of stuff a lot. People recreate their favorite birthday meals.

Hmm.

Or anniversary meals. We get everything from people saying, "Hey, can you make me 10 courses of just beautiful caviar dishes?" to, "I want chicken nuggets and Big Macs done at the highest level." We'll do anything. We'll make you anything you want and do it very thoughtfully.

But again, it's all about indulging in food, beverage, and excellence around that topic. Everything else is just amenitizing around that. At the end of the day, I always tell people, even friends, "If you're not focused on eating and drinking, there's no point in being a part of our club." That's very different from most clubs, because you join just to hang out there and have a drink.

I just like it because the food's great.

That's the idea.

I also like that it's way quieter in there.

Yeah, well, that's a nice thing. You can control the crowd, and it's all about the food. That's what keeps people interested.

You personally hang out there more. I feel like you gravitate toward that spot more than any of the other ones.

Yeah, I definitely spend the most time there. In Miami, it's my de facto office. I love being there because, first, I love the food. I think it's the best environment for me to spend time in, meet with people, and have the right people around me.

As you move forward, are you going to try to expand the members' club more than the traditional restaurants?

Listen, traditional restaurants for us are an ever-growing thing, based on things that come to us. We don't say, "Okay, we're going to open 10 restaurants this year."

So how do you do future planning? Let's actually talk about that.

Because of the nature of our business, we're generally dealing with so much incoming opportunity. Our general process is sorting through what could be interesting and what's not interesting at all.

Who's pitching you, and what are they pitching you?

Everyone you could imagine under the sun. Generally, it's people who are building new cities, new developments, new neighborhoods, new stadiums—whatever it might be—where food and beverage plays an integral role and hospitality plays an integral role. That's all around the world, globally. We're constantly looking at different opportunities and geographies that make sense to us.

For me, it's not such a hard equation. If you tell me, "Is this an interesting city to open a restaurant in?" all I say is, "Find me 2 or 3 restaurants doing $20 million or more, and then it's an interesting city." There aren't that many cities in the world that have fine-dining restaurants doing $20 million or more a year. When you can find those places, you already know that you can come in there with a great, expensive concept that, if you do your job well, can blow away the competition in those markets because the business is there.

You start in New York, maybe the most difficult place in the world to start a restaurant. But then you came down. I think this was accidental—your accidental discovery that Miami was this wide-open market where people love to go out, they love to spend money, and they want great food. You essentially found a market with almost no competition. Is that the way you would describe how you spotted this opportunity?

Miami was one of the great surprises of my life. I ended up there the day before COVID began and got stuck there.

Historically, as a New Yorker, when you went to Miami, you'd go for the weekend with your family, or you'd go for a night to party and come back. It was really a place you'd go for a couple of nights to have a good time and then come back. What I realized after living there for the first 6 months was that not only is this an incredible place to live in general, but the entire place is a very special place.

That's not at all what you experience when you come in for a quick trip, come to our bars and party for 3 days, or come to hang out for a couple of days. It's this incredible place with incredible people. You also saw during that time an incredible drive that wasn't related to party affiliation or anything political.

There was a drive among all the people I met in Miami, as the momentum toward Miami started, to make Miami the best city in the world. I had never experienced that, because there's so much pushback on one side or the other in New York about everything. If you've got a good idea, someone's got a reason why you shouldn't build it.

There's always a push and pull on everything, and it's very hard to make a lot of progress quickly on things, whether it's filing plans to get a restaurant done, building an entire neighborhood, moving a tree—whatever it is. Try to move a tree in New York. Your grandchildren will still be trying to move the tree. You want to move a tree in Miami, they move it the next day if you're doing something great.

They were running, and that's why Miami exploded the way it did. Of course, it came from the leadership that was there. But what was amazing to me was that the entire city, everyone you'd meet, was working toward the same goal, which was basically, "We've been waiting. We have the best city in America. We've been waiting for people like you to show up and do your thing here. We're ready for more sophisticated products. We're ready to not only have restaurants that aren't nightclubs. We're ready for all this stuff to happen."

I felt that in such a positive, amazing way.

How many times did you have to go out to eat to realize, "Oh, I'm going to clean up here"?

Not that many. There were only a few places that people went. Within a few months, I called my partners and said, "Listen, the opportunity here is the biggest I've ever seen."

On top of that, it was New Year's Eve every single night. Every single night I didn't have a restaurant open, I was like, "How do I not have a restaurant?" Everyone was there, out every night. It was the only place that was open.

So I very quickly found a space. I turned around the Carbone on Collins Street in 100 days from taking the lease and got it open.

Wait, the one that's south of Fifth?

Yes.

You did that in 100 days?

100 days from the day I signed the lease to the day we opened, which was one of the great restaurant feats of all time.

Is that one of your highest-grossing restaurants?

Yeah. That's an amazing story. I found a restaurant that had closed down during COVID because they were afraid of what was going to happen. It was sitting there, relatively new and relatively unknown, and I knew that I could come in. It was in a perfect location.

Everyone said, "How did you find this location?" And I said, "Well, exactly 100 yards in each direction from this restaurant are 2 of the highest-grossing restaurants in America: Joe's Stone Crab and Prime 112. Since I've been a kid, these are 2 of the highest-grossing restaurants in America. Every time that list comes out, there are 2 of them. We're directly in between the 2 of them. That's all the math I'm doing."

They're like, "Oh, well, what about the thing across the street?" I'm like, "I don't care about the thing across the street. You've got the 2 highest-grossing restaurants in America on either side of me. How bad can this be?" Of course, it's going to be a great location.

I knew they couldn't do that much in that amount of time, so I was able to say things I don't normally say. I had an Ocean's Eleven-style operation. Everyone was all over the country, and we flew them in to meet me. Mario came down, and he ended up moving down there as well.

Basically, I said, "You guys can do whatever you want here." I had my designer there. He flew in from San Francisco—Ken Fulk. I said, "Here's the thing: You can spend as much money as you absolutely want, but there are 2 conditions. Nothing can be moved. So if there's a light, it can be a different light, but it has to stay there."

If there’s an outlet, there’s an outlet. It has to stay there. The kitchen does not change, right? The bar that’s there, you can do whatever you want to it, but it cannot move. Nothing can move. The bathroom’s there. It cannot move. Do whatever you want inside.

But here’s the other catch: You have 90 days to do it. So go. Feel free—it’s the middle of COVID—to spend as much as you can possibly spend to make this look and feel like the most incredible Carbone in the world, but you cannot move a single thing.

Because I know from doing this many, many times, once you start moving things, that’s what takes forever, right? It doesn’t take that long to put up new curtains, paint, and make it sound. But Ken and our team did an incredible job. It was ready in 90 days. We didn’t move a thing. It was a brand-new restaurant that opened, and we didn’t even change the floor plan. The floor plan was the same as the restaurant before it.

That restaurant, with the same floor plan, was doing about $7 million in revenue. When we opened Carbone with the exact same number of seats, that restaurant did over $30 million in revenue. So that is the smartest way to build restaurants, right? People invest so much money in building restaurants. Even here, where we’re sitting, we did spend a lot of money. But to build this from scratch would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars today.

In a way, the greatest thing is when you can find something that already has the bones, because where people get stuck all the time is that they invest so much money into build-outs that they can never catch up.

When we came to Miami, there was so much opportunity. There was no one doing what we were doing. There was no great experiential fine dining. There was no real fine dining to begin with. Certainly, there was a culture there where the customers were ready for it, but there was no one there to train the staff.

So everyone would come to me and say, “How are you going to open all these restaurants in Miami? The service there is horrible.” Everyone would say that. I was like, “I don’t think the service is horrible. I think there’s no one here teaching people how to do the service,” right? And that’s what we found.

We had a lot of people who moved down from New York. I gave a kind of town hall meeting where I invited any of our employees who were in New York, furloughed or not working, to come down to Miami, and I’d have a job for them there. We had a lot of people—from busboys to C-level executives—move down to Miami. They’re all still there, and they’re all incredibly happy.

They brought the New York sensibility. We brought our training and found incredible people in Miami. They just needed someone to teach them. That’s how we were able to open. We’ve opened 7 or 8 restaurants in the last few years in Miami and about 12 total in South Florida, as well as a private club. We’re about to finish our residential condominium building, and we’re taking over the largest beach parcel in America: 3 acres on the beach in Miami Beach.

What are you going to build there?

Imagine the greatest beach club you’ve ever been to, right? Think of European-style beach clubs with the most incredible food. Our take on that, again going back to your classic—you’ve seen it before, but we’re just going to do it a lot better—will be on the beach club and restaurant side.

The site is huge, so it’ll have another restaurant, private rooms, a spa, incredible pools, and a beach. I mean, it’s 3 acres on a beach. There’s no property like that in America. It’ll be a giant campus of indulgence and fun, with great food, done in a way and at a level that has not been done before.

There will be lots of different elements to it. You’ll have your main beach club restaurant, but you’ll also have dinner restaurants. You’ll have a Sadelle’s on the beach for breakfast. You’ll have all these different elements to it, which are very exciting. But that’s our next big project there.

Jeff, this has been awesome. Before I got to know you, which has been an absolute pleasure, you had already made my favorite products in the restaurant space.

And now, the more time I spend talking to you, the more it makes sense that it all flows from this obsession and this desire you had to be truly excellent at what you do. I really appreciate you taking the time. This was awesome, man.

Thank you. Great to see you.