Carbone・ZZ's・Torrisiを生んだレストランの天才——ジェフ・ザラズニック

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

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

So tell me about what you had to do to restore it. Like what what was who owned it and like how did you come into ownership of this because you knew about this place when you were what 13?

Wait, tell me about that. So this restaurant in 1959 before this, you know, place opened, anything that was fancy and expensive was French and you would go to fancy French restaurants and the menu would be written in French. The Four Seasons was the first restaurant where that was written in English. And so this was the really the first example of American fine dining. It was the first time that American as a cuisine was actually thought of and celebrated. So it didn't exist before then. There was no such thing, right? American was a hamburger and fries, right? It didn't exist in terms of the luxury fine dining world. And so this was revolutionary in that sense. And it was a guy named Joe Bound, who was a great restaurant tour of his time, the best restaurant tour of his time, and someone who, you know, I've always looked up to um and we've always studied his process, who, you know, came up with this creation and created this place. And it was also the first restaurant where the design, you know, was was equally at the time important to the actual restaurant. So the food was something that was new and spectacular. It introduced the ideas of seasonality. It introduced the ideas of foraging. It introduced the ideas of American cuisine. You know, the list goes on of how many things were created in this room.

So, you know, when we took over, right, JFK had his birthday party here, you know, the famous birthday party before he went to the garden. Marilyn Monroe came out of the cake.

He ate asparagus soup up there. [laughter] Okay. So, so the story goes that

Marilyn, it's unknown. But the uh No,

right? She was Who knows? But um but you know I don't know if you saw in the kitchen we have a quote from JFK but the reason for that is because you know he famously loved this room and he famously had his big birthday where he jumped out of the cake in Madison Square Garden he had the dinner here. Okay.

I don't think you discussed this publicly, but we talked about just the revenue from these two rooms alone would make it if it if this was just the only business, it would make it a substantialsized business.

Yeah. You were telling me in the other room that the panels which are like what gray or white? Yeah, these are so they're gray. When we took them over, they were black, right? Because no one had ever cleaned them. So, they had 50 years of cigarette and cigar smoke that had accumulated and no one in 50 years had ever thought to go clean the tile.

We spent about 40 plus million dollars.

Yeah. So, we we took basically this this is a you have the grill room and private rooms. You have the pool. You have 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. And so we put in what may be the nicest kitchen in New York, if not one of them. um you know not only to be able to do what we do which is a combination of serving the best food to diners in an alleart setting at the grill but also to be able to put out what is you know I think second to none in terms of events right so if you have a 200 person dinner in the room we're sitting in here right now when you get your do soul it's going to taste like the best do so you've had as if you ordered it just sitting with you and me right it's hot it's perfect the food here is what we are known before. No one is able to do large scale events the way that we are here at the quality level we are here.

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

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

So Carbone was our first real big success, right? You know, that was the that was opened in 2013 and that put us on the map on a large scale and from there we went on to open a variety of other restaurants that were all successful and then this opportunity came about and so we were competing for this space. I mean everyone want this was every restaurant tour's dream. So everyone we were competing against was you know he was has been established for 20 plus years in the restaurant business. all the best people that existed in New York at that time. And at the end of the day, you know, we we successfully convinced AB that we were the guys to go with.

I think that, you know, AB was the he was the perfect person to be in control of this because he understood me. He understood us. He understood what we did. He understood in betting on the kind of future of what restaurants could be versus going with the institution, right? Because he was going to end up with another couple old guys that were doing, you know, things they had done before and it was going to be something stale. And I think he appreciated our energy, you know, you know what I mean? And our energy and our thought process and the fact that, you know, our process already had been established, you know, as people who really cared about New York, you know, our company's deeply grounded in New York, deeply grounded in New York history, and we consider ourselves all students of, you know, New York history and New York restaurants. So this had a huge meaning to us and the appreciation of the history of this place combined with the best ideas and the best menu and the best food and whatever we put in front of him. He decided that he was going to partner with us to do this.

He has a great quote that I always think about that I think is dead right. And he's just like you know 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 sit the situation here.

Cheers, brother. Thanks for thanks for doing this. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, that's important. It has nothing

Before we get to fun, tell me how a restaurant tells a story because we set a narrative. It's no different than we often compare it to making a movie. If we're right here in the place we're sitting, right? We're telling a story of, you know, American fine dining seen through our lens while it paying homage to the time period the building was built in and all the history that had happened before it. as we, you know, create a menu and a service style and uniforms and music and artwork and all the different things that go into creating hospitality spaces, but are often overlooked. We make sure that that entire story makes sense. So, you know, whether it's the chair you're sitting in right now, like this chair was designed by M Vandereo in 1959. We had it remade by the same people. 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 how it was 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. And in my business, the only thing that's even relevant is the most important thing, which is are they coming back. I always tell everyone that works for us, it's not a matter of if they come because anywhere we would open, you know, 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, you know, and everyone will come once, right? Anyone can do that, right? You know what I mean? But it's how the will they come back? How often will they come back? Is it where they're going to choose to have special moments, special occasions?

Yeah, because I mean listen, the restaurant business, especially in today's day and age, is, you know, it's it's a trendy business, right? And everyone wants to try something that's new, right? I mean, and everyone's excited to go to an opening. Everyone's excited to go to a place for the first time to say that they went here. 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, you know, we could talk is a whole other topic, but do they still want to come back, spend money with you, right, and feel good about the money that they spent when they left, right? Because at the end of the day, that's what we're we're in the business of providing people with an incredible evening, right? We're we're here to entertain you. We're here to delight you. We're here to feed you. And we're here for you really to 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 that 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's so many seemingly great restaurants that are you're reading about every day that are opening that you want to try and you want to go to this one, you want to go to that one. So, how do you become something that people are coming back to all the time that becomes something that people you know identify with a place they want to gather for business, for pleasure and you know also for special occasions but all the time, you know what I mean? And on a regular basis and I think that you know we have a great blend of that, right? We have a great blend of, you know, the demand, you know, all of our regulars that are consistently coming back to many of our properties, you know, once a week or more, and people that have been trying to get in for months at a time and are there for their first time, and hopefully they can't wait to make their next reservation to come back. That's the critical piece. You you'll you know, they have a statistic, right? We've all heard it. You know, nine out of 10 restaurants close within the first year of their being open. That's like the famous rule of thumb. Many restaurants have a great first three months and then no one shows up again. But that, you know, that that's that's historically probably what has plagued the most restaurants throughout time.

Yeah. I mean, I think that to your point what we were talking about, right, my generation, myself and my partners Rich and Mario, like when we came in and started coming up with our own restaurants, right? You know what I mean? That was kind of the last generation of, you know, of people that were doing this solely based on blind passion for this business. It was the only thing that, you know, we could imagine doing. And, you know, it's the type of thing that, you know, if you love this business, it is, you know, by, you know, by math like 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. And that's truly the essence of hospitality, right? You know, we love to bring people together and serve them great food and have, you know, make people happy and have them have a great time and leave with a big smile on their face and we that brings us great joy. I think that for better or worse, what's happened is that with the rise of social media, with the rise of, you know, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc., it did two things, right? You know, so two things happened. First, you had food TV going back 20 years, right? And I mean that started the whole idea of celebrity chefs, celebrity restaurant tours, etc. Right? So now cooking became cool, right? And cooking was in the spotlight and people were watching Food Network. And then the internet started and you had, you know, websites and blogs and all these different food content. And then, you know, obviously now we're living in an extreme where you have viral, you know, food related content on all these platforms. And the thing is is that now to have a line around the block, right, you don't necessarily even making something that's that good. It just has to go viral, right? And that last a pretty finite period of time. There's very few examples of this food that went viral that, you know, that went for years, right? It might go for 6 months, it might go for four months, might go for a year, but it's very rare that that happens. And in that the whole all those things combined turned the restaurant business and restaurant tours into a much more glamorous business. Right? When I came in it was not a glamorous business. It was a business that people were like why on earth would you go into that business? Right? Like are you crazy? You know you're going to be broke. You're not going to there's nine out of 10 are going to fail. You're not going to have any chance of success. But they didn't know what's going on in my head or my partner's heads and what what what we believed and knew we could do from the beginning. Now that it has become more glamorous and you have all these other not only people that want to go into it, right, but you have another reason for customers to come. You have different entry points, you know what I mean? That didn't exist before. people see it as, you know, are are saying, "Let me try to create something that's going to go viral, not some let let me create the best version of this product because I have a great passion for it. Here's the history of it and 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 know the history and the history for them does not matter because all that matters to them is how does it look on my Instagram and how is it look on my and how is it going to catch on, right? And that's just a totally different approach. That being said, you know, everyone always says, "Well, you have 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 when that all when that all started, you know, however many years ago, you know, restaurant tours would talk to each other, hospitality people would talk to each other. They'd say they'd say, you know, oh, I mean, now everyone's a food critic, you know, like, oh, you know, how do we deal with this? Everyone's a food cricket. And I'm like, this is fantastic. You know what I mean? And 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 and sometimes only to just take a picture of a dish, that's an incredible shift of things. These are not cheap dishes, right? You know what I mean? So, I'm not selling a bagel and a donut, you know? I mean, I'm selling expensive meals. And if that's going to drive people's willingness not only to spend on it, but also it does drive their awareness and their understanding of food because naturally if you're looking at food content all day, you understand it better than if you didn't, right? So we have a more informed customer, right? Some of them are there for the, you know, just just to take the picture, but many of them are there for both also to enjoy incredible experiences because they've tried all these different ones because they become more engaged with food and beverage and more comfortable with it being something you spend money on. And I think that's probably the biggest thing that happened during my career was that right when I really started and right when we opened kind of Carbone and things started to explode for us. um you know food truly kind of joined the rest of culture as one of the significant things right so you know if you were growing up in New York there would people would talk about you know Broadway shows and ballet and dance and sports and you know restaurants became another form of cultural currency. It was something that if you were a cultured sophisticated person, you need to know about restaurants. You need to talk about it. It became the topic of every where did you eat last night? What did you have? Oh my god, I want to try that. None of that really existed at the level that it did before, even when we we started. And then that's just now been amplified to a level that is, you know, exponential and hard to even measure at this point. You know, when you add in all these new ways that people share their experiences,

Yeah. Let's go back to I think you're what early 20s.

Can you just tell us like what was going on in your life at this time?

talk about the path that you actually how you got into restaurants.

The Frugal Gourmet.

and very popular higher status. Yes, but it was a very simple equation. It was like, I'm not sure what, you know, I don't know what, but if it is the highest paying job and I can get one, let me go do that.

I'm 21 years old. I had never even opened an Excel spreadsheet. You know, I didn't go to business school, so I didn't know any of this, but so I went to JP Morgan and they basically, you know, they they basically teach you. It's like it's like 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, you know, very beneficial to me. But um but I very quickly realized when I was in the uh office, you know, I started to realize, you know, there was something a little bit different about, you know, every guy, all the other analysts around me be reading the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. I'm sitting there reading like travel and leisure magazine and and like weird cooking magazines and everyone's looking at me like what's wrong with this guy? And I also realized the power of restaurants. There was two things that happened. One was, you know, because I was so obsessed, I would go out to, this is before you could even, you know, you would use a Zagat guide to find the great restaurants in New York. And I had memorized the guide, right? So, the guide was memorized. So, like a game I used to play would be like someone would open the guide and I they name a restaurant in New York and I'd tell you the rating. It was 24, 26, 40. It's not It went up to 30, but um that was like that was a fun game for me. Name a random restaurant, I'll tell you the rating. I memorized this guy and I had, you know, so I wanted to try all these great restaurants. That was the Bible of New York restaurants, you know, 25 years ago. That's how everyone figured out what restaurants they were going to go to. And basically, I found two things out. One was, you know, because I had this incredible passion and I na it was natural for me. 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 you know the people who worked in restaurants which is its own culture like you know whether it was the waiters whether it was the chefs whether it was the restaurant tours and the owners these were the people I got along with you know like we understood each other so I would spend time and all my time that I could outside of work which was not that much of that time but you know trying this place or trying that place and spending all the money that I was making to go and try these restaurants and you know try every single thing that I possibly could in the amount of time that I had. Two things happened. One was that I realized the power of restaurants because you know because I went to these places because I I had become friendly with a lot of restaurant tours at that time. You know I realized that the greatest currency I had you know was that I could get you know my senior you know the managing directors that everyone was like afraid to talk to. Suddenly I was helping them get dinner reservations and they like thought I was the great, you know, it was it was the craziest thing, you know, that I could get them into Nou or wherever it was at the time. Like they thought was the greatest thing that ever happened to them. So I started to see like there's something here like you know the the the the currency of restaurants and it had already started you know I mean of people these impossible tables and being able to access them and what that meant to people and what they do and you know to have those great experiences that were out there. I started to see that and at the same time I started to see, you know, when you look up to the top of your job or wherever you're working and you look at the guy who is the top guy, the guy making the most money, you know, in your group, 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, right? And I was like, I cannot do this. I kind of realized very quickly that there were a this was not I don't want to be like that guy. I want to be like that guy that I met last night in the restaurant. And 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, but in 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 is a 2-year program. So, it was right before that was coming to a close. It was in August. And um right at that point, I said, "You know what? I I've had enough of this. I got to go do something around hospitality and food and beverage." And it was still so crazy of an idea to go into the restaurant business that I didn't even take that. I went and go went to go work in a hotel, which seems a little less crazy, right? You know what I mean? like so I walked from from literally a few blocks from here at the time you know you can check he puts it in perspective the timing the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Columbus Circle had just opened right and the Mandarin Oriental was at the time when my travel and leisure I was reading the most expensive hotel to ever open right and it was like the crown jewel of New York and you know everyone it was a big deal because it opened with Columbus Circle and it was it was it was a big big deal. So, I walked into the hotel to uh to try to get a job, right? And so, I went to the front desk and they were like, "Well, we don't give jobs here. You got to go to like the service entrance in the back." And I was like, "Oh, okay." You know what I mean? So, how do I get there? I walk around the thing. So, I walked around the thing. I ended up, you know, going in and say, "I'm looking for a job." And they're like, "Do you have an appointment?" "No, I was on my lunch break." And I said, "No, but I'm in my suit. I'm from JP Morgan, you know, and uh and they said, "Well, you know, you got to come back with an appointment." I said, "Well, you know, please just do me a favor. You can see the guy, the HR dire, you know, it's one of those like half walls, you know, like the half walls like a show like where like you could see the person in the office um through the glass." So, he was like in one of these classic like HR cubicles where you kind of see what was going on.

This is a very unconventional path.

So you go from employee at Manor oriental to entrepreneur

So, wait, you were going to be co-founders together on this new project. He was one of the restaurant tours or chefs that you most

That was smart

he's the opposite of the guy you saw at JP Morgan. I don't want that miserable guy.

But this is this is really important. I want to pause here because like this is something that I see reappear over and over again all these biographies of history entrepreneurs I read and it drives me crazy cuz if you listen to normal people they're like oh you know you shouldn't you should generate evidence first and then have confidence. It's like, no, you have it exactly backwards. Belief comes before ability. You're in your early 20s at this time.

You have the obsession. You're in your early to mid20s. This is the guy you most admire. And you're like, actually, I can do that. It was natural to me. You know, the only thing I can equate it to when I talk to people, it's like like a, you know, it's like 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 are coming here on the service. I understood what was on my plate, how it was cooked, was it seared, had they blanched it, had they done this, had they done that? And I could tell you there's a problem with this because of this just by tasting it, right? Okay, here's what you got to redo with it. And part of it was all the studying, right? All the years of eating, repetition, studying, cooking, etc., etc. And part of it was just natural talent at the end of the day. Like, you have to have a great pallet, right? You know what I mean? Like if if you don't have a great pallet, it's going to be tough to taste food professionally,

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

And it's funny you use the word athlete cuz I hear hear when you were speaking this weird um clip of Larry Bird, a young Larry Bird came to my mind because, you know, he played at this like small school. They said he's too slow. He's not he doesn't have like he didn't play against tough competition. you're not going to make it in the NBA. They're telling him after he got drafted at the NBA before he went. And so he had a lot of self-confidence, but he goes, "Wait a minute." So they used to have this thing called rookie camp where all the rookies would get and start playing together. And he's like, "It took me I was hearing all this stuff like I'm too slow. I have horrible competition. Took me goes three days of rookie camp to realize not only can I play in this league, I'm going to dominate in this league."

That's very similar. So like what I went through was exactly that. I went from I can be like these guys to I'm going to be able to dominate this world, right? You know what I mean? Like, and I was 100% confident in that idea and I took that. We were for, you know, I was able to sell off these two businesses that I had started. I took the very small amount of money that I made on those.

Yeah. So basically what happened was I don't know why you know is that I had both businesses running and at that point I was like I got to go and open my own restaurant. This is this is this is what I'm meant to do. I was so locked in on this idea and I got to get out of these businesses. And you know one thing led to another. I spoke to a friend of mine who was in kind of the venture capital world. We sold Always Hungry, which was the content site to in the matter of a few months, right? You know what I mean? We sold that and we sold Dime Private. So, I was able to get out and then basically I hit the streets saying, "I'm going to find a restaurant space." The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from. And today, that team includes people and agents. But most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business, like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter, and what didn't. This is what HubSpot fixes. [music] It connects AI to your real customer data. So, when you ask AI to write an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing 3 weeks ago. It knows [music] what campaign brought them in, and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month. And that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready. And when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch. It's the same platform that more than 300 startups who have grown to over a billion dollars in valuation grew their businesses on. And now, HubSpot for Startups offers this service at up to a 90% discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups.

No.

No. So, what happened was I learned watching Joe and other restaurant tours. The biggest reason why restaurants don't work out if it's, you know, on the restaurant tour owner's part is because there's always been this classic tension between the restaurant tour and the chef. It's been happening throughout history, right? That it's a classic thing. The chef wants to make this food, the restaurant tour wants to make more money, and they're fighting all the time about these things, and then eventually they break up. That's an age-old that's like the stereotypical restaurant story. So, I watch that happen a lot of times, right? While I was watching the industry so closely, um, I also realized that the best partnerships were when, you know, were when restaurant tours and great chefs were partners. That was still somewhat of a novel idea, right? You know what I mean? And so I from day one was looking for who am I going to be partners 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 and as I'm looking around for spaces. So, you know, everything h so simultaneously I decide that the restaurant I want to open, which is my favorite type of restaurant, was whatever my version in my head of Carbone was at that time.

was my big idea, right? Because what what I saw was the following. And you know, to me, everything made perfect sense, but other people didn't see it, right?

is your partner on the

is this after you had the highle conversation with them

5 minutes 10 minutes

and I only knew later because we tell this story all the time that they felt that you know what I mean I thought it was a great conversation

and apparently they felt the same

And 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 literally say like I remember hanging up being like, it's the craziest thing to my wife Ally. I said, Ally, we 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 to 10 and I'm going to go out with him after and we'll talk. And so, we went for dinner and after service, him and I went for drinks. And, you know, the rest is kind of history. I mean, we we basically sat down at the Jane Hotel. I told him my idea, what I wanted to do, you know, what I wanted to do with, you know, Italian-American food. And he immediately said, "That's exactly what we want to do. That's our dream." We were there till 4 or 5 in the morning just talking about what we wanted to create, you know, and we talked through he had worked for Joe for a long time. So we talked through like we don't want to be he Joe only made Italian restaurants for the most part. We don't want to just make Italian restaurants. We want to make different types. And should this first thing work, you know what's my ambition is to be the biggest greatest restaurant company in the world. And I my ambition is to grow into hotels and into much bigger things, right? And you know and the entire hospitality experience. We talked about all these things in our first conversation which has basically been the exact road map that we have followed up until today, right? was talked about in our first conversation and we stayed there all night talking and it was like you know meeting your uh you know soulmate kind of you know like you're like if you playing in a band you guys start playing and then it just all starts working. I then met Rich, you know, the next day and we decided to, you know, to partner up and, you know, I I quickly started working with them at Theresi, which was the original restaurant different than the one that it is now. From there, we started on our path to try to find the right space to do Carbone. And so that was probably in, you know, the summer of they opened in January and that summer I joined them and we set our sights on creating what would be the greatest Italian-American restaurant ever opened and with no other ambi the the ambition was only to be the greatest New York style Italian-American restaurant that had ever opened and to really truly reinvigorate this art form. that we all had grown up with together in New York that was slowly fading and being kind of left for dead, right? You know what I mean? Like it no one was paying attention, right? In fine dining to spaghetti and meatballs, right? You know what I mean? Fine dining at that point in time had become this very, very, very serious tasting menu. The chef's always right. I'm going to serve you these five dishes. That's all you can have tonight. It's the only thing that I'm making. No substitutions, no allergies. You know, you eat what I tell you and say thank you. That was the general tone of restaurants and and people loved it. That was the general tone was I'm going to go in if I want to eat a great meal, uh, you know, a great fine dining meal, the only options as we were coming up. So, we love this Italian-American thing and we were also very blatantly and very collectively fighting against something that we also liked at one point in time but were at this point just sick of which was this incredibly inhospitable robotic style of fine dining, right? Okay. Which was didn't make any sense when you started to break it down. 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'm telling you exactly what you're eating. You can't have anything else. I don't care what your preferences or your allergies are. When did that become the way that people want to eat? It had its moment and we basically were ready to say like we're done with that. And so when we came out with Carbone, which the Italian-American restaurant has that spirit of abundance and built into it, we celebrated to the maximum. And that's why, you know, Carbone famously has I made the menu the biggest menu in Manhattan, right? Cuz at that point, everyone was giving these tiny little cards with like six ingredients listed on it that everything had become so austere. So our menu was big, it was bold, there was 70 things on it. And on the very top of that menu, it said a cherry. Aia means whatever you want, right? Because my whole thing and our whole thing was that if we're so good, if someone asked for a piece of grilled chicken, why can we not make that for them really well? Like what that means is like we're not that good because I can only make you if I anyone just so you understand without even that much culinary training could make you four or five dishes if they make the same exact dishes every single night and probably get them to a point that is acceptable, right? 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 that's got to be prepared for. How much do you prepare? What ingredients came in? Did they all come in right? You got all these different move. You 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. Like, you know, I mean, your job is to do that at an incredibly high level if that's what you're putting in front of people. Now, if I have the ingredients, obviously, if you come in, you ask me to make you Chinese food. That's that's that's what I call food terrorism. That's that that's not that's not, you know, that's like coming to when people come to our Italian restaurant say they want nothing. They they they love a time where they would nothing with onions and garlic, which actually we now accommodate, but at the time we thought that was the craziest thing. You're coming to an Italian restaurant, you can't eat onions and garlic. But um but they're outside of crazy requests, you know what I mean? Our opinion was we're here to serve you. We can make you anything you of course if you want that plain and not with sauce on it we can do it. Of course you want a pasta done a little bit of that pasta with this sauce. Of course we can do that. What do you mean we can't do that? And that was at that point in restaurants that was a crazy thing. So we came in not only with this big bold Italian restaurant, you know, serving the best versions of Caesar salads and beef carpacios and baked clams and, you know, obviously the spicy riatoni vodka and, you know, different pastas and ve parm and all these different dishes done in a way that no one had ever been presented, a quality of product that no one had ever used for them. And that really resonated with people. And what really also resonated with people was that we created the category which is now thrown around in every conversation of experiential fine dining. Meaning that coming to carbone because of the nature of what we created because of the types of captains that I went out and hired you know they all were part of this movie. We were telling to your point earlier about we were telling a story we were finding our voices and our creative process. We didn't realize what we were doing at the time that now guides everything that we do. But we were creating that story, right? This was 1959, you know, New York, Little Italy, you know, we were on Thompson Street, which had a great Italian-American history. We were in a restaurant called Rocco, which was the oldest exist open when we took it over Italian-American restaurant that was still open since 1929 in New York City. Uh, so we always loved history. That was the space we put the original carbone in. We kept the original sign which has obviously become an iconic thing.

The sign is a crazy story. So this is, you know, this is my first like big lease on negotiating. I'm not, you know, it's our first big restaurant, but um, you know, we found the space because, you know, I I was one day standing there and a guy I knew taped me on the shoulder and he says, you know, I think I have a space. We've been looking for a space for a carbon for over a year. And

Because it needed to be the perfect space and we wouldn't settle for anything less. We had our restaurant running. We decided we were going to build a sandwich place next door called Parm, which ended up being the first restaurant that I built from scratch. And that was more of a sandwich shop, you know, uh, small though. We're talking about like 18 seat restaurants that happened to be we h we moved the sandwich concept out and moved next door. We did that because we just we we we were waiting patiently developing the food, developing the concept, but we hadn't found the space and we weren't going to we we knew it had to be a very specific type of space. And one day a guy came up to me and he said, you know, I think I have a space you might be interested in. And he said, you know, it's right around the corner. And I said, great, let's go right now. And he walks me down the block. We turn the right on Thompson Street and I see the sign. And as we're walking toward up the block, I look at him. I said, "We'll take it."

No, he's getting it.

He's saying, "If you want me to leave the sign, I want to No." Okay. So, we agree finally.

you know, like a … you on the way

So, I would say at this point, Major Food Group is a, you know, on its way to becoming a fully vertically integrated hospitality company. So, you know, we started as a kind of luxury fine dining restaurant group, which is what we, you know, for the majority of our careers, we've been uh and then now we've started to add to that, you know, private members clubs, which has been a huge business for us. Branded residential towers, like we're just finishing one in Miami right now called Villa. um which will be a you know 80 unit super high-end condo building right that we're doing that we've designed we're doing all the amenities for all the food and beverage all the apartments you know every detail everything you touch all the everything that you feel in there um so we're doing brand residential we're doing hotels and we're really kind of expanding the scope of what we're doing so that we can you know really so we can take care of you 24 hours a day

you I think that you know right we get right now our approach to hospitality you know has proven to be one that's incredibly uh successful and beloved and you know I always say that you know our process is not that difficult we just create places that we want to go to right I mean that's been our entire ethos is we build places where we want to go That's it. And if we don't want to go there, we don't want to build it. Whether that be a restaurant or a private club or a hotel, like we know how to do it and we know how we would want it done and we create those environments. So, you know, being able to apply, you can apply that idea. The most difficult part of any property, any hospitality property is the food and beverage. It's the most complex no matter what. But what's happened over the last, you know, decade plus is that everyone has come to realize that. So, you know, people building hotels, people building buildings, people building, you know, 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. So that's been our way into spreading our wings to say we don't want to just take care of you, you know, 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, you know, and the way that we do that is our style of hospitality. We're going to do that the way we would want it done. and we're going to apply the same philosophies that we do to everything else in restaurants to the greater hospitality landscape. So, that's really what we're focused on today as we grow into not just being a food and beverage classic restaurant company, but also adding all these different arms that come with it. And you know, then you have other verticals that are not related to, you know, you know, you have luxury hospitality and everything that we're building in that. For example, you know, we've taken the Carbone brand. It's become such an incredible lifestyle brand, you know, that we've applied that and we now sell carbone tomato sauce. Yeah. So, carbone tomato sauce, you know, for example, which is sold in thousands of doors across America, right? More than you could ever penetrate with a restaurant. only so many people can come to a restaurant in a day or a month or a year, That's our whole thesis. I mean that's that's really our whole thesis. So, I want to go back. You you guys had this remember this conversation with your your partner the first night. You stay up till 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning talking about we're going to do, you know, 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, you know, was uh getting involved with hotels, uh which we did in Boston at the Newberry, which is really our first foray into hotel. We created and opened the entire concept. So, we became partners in the concept and we were brought in to basically do everything from design to, you know, execution to branding, etc. Uh were you guys a partner with the hotelier? But you own a piece of the entire Okay. It's my favorite restaurant in Miami. Why make it a members club, a private members club as opposed to just another restaurant? Why did you decide to do that? Private members clubs are fantastic because it's I you know as I love win-wins right so a private members club is a win for the business and for the customer right because for the business it's a much better business right so all the things that make the restaurant business the hardest business right somewhat go if you know what you're doing somewhat go away when you add a subscription model to it now you're Netflix with a Right? You have people paying annual dues and monthly dues every single year. It automatically renews. You know, you have, if you do your job well, you have very little attrition and you've got, you know, that every year x amount of dollars of subscription revenue is coming in. So, you start to look at it, it's a very different business in the restaurant business where you have virtually no visibility, right? I mean, if it starts to hail one day, that's not going to be a good day in the restaurant. If you know what I mean, if it's pouring rain, that's going to be a different, you know, the restaurant business has a hundred different variables that are going to affect, right? It's it's spring break and everyone's away, so the week's quiet. I mean, there's a hundred different things. Sure, at our level, you you know them and you can predict them to some extent, right? But you're putting on a show, a new show every night where the variables are always changing and you 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, right? You know, again, you now have a subscription model below it. So that's that's now fixed, right? And it changes the whole nature of what you're that's on the business side. That's why everyone's trying to go into private clubs because it's a much better business, right? But the other side of it is is that that wouldn't be the only reason we could do something like that. The other reason is is that at the end of the day, it's what customers want in the luxury sector because you can apply a much higher level of personalization. You can apply a much higher level of, you know, kind of knowing your customer and not just anticipating what they want, knowing what they want, right? So here, you know, our job as restaurant is to anticipate what guests wants. Private clubs, you don't need to anticipate. You literally have them fill out a form of what they want, right? So, okay. Okay. So, you know what their 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 you sometimes you got to talk about at the table. Everything is more natural, more fluid. It allows for a much higher level of service. And the interesting thing we've done in private clubs is that you've seen now that private members club have started to become much more popular. They always were big in London. I was going to say what you you have to know the history of this like where when does it come to the states Um, the super luxury, super exclusive private clubs, right? You know what I mean? Which were prevalent in London, the idea started to percolate into New York and kind of right around the same time, you know, you had a few different private clubs open. The difference, you know, that with ours was that, you know, what I what I saw and what I knew from London, from being at all these places in London, um, was that the thing about private clubs were that it was all about being there. The food was never any good, right? So, you 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, aside from that, it was a cool place and it was cool to take your friends to your membership club for dinner. Um what we did was that we applied our expertise which is kind of I think set us apart in that space which I take a lot of pride in which is we're you know we're very very much focused on food and beverage our club Zezys the food comes first right it's a great place to hang out it's a great place to sit and have drinks of course you're going to build a beautiful place that people can sit and congregate and that's a given and there's lots of now examples in New York. But we actually have a point of view, you know, which is that, you know, for example, Zezy's in New York, right? We have two restaurants. We have an Italian a private carbone that has, you know, about 30 40% dishes that are only available there. We have our zezies classic Japanese restaurant. We have bars that all have their own snacks and whatever else. We also the first people to ever have a culinary concierge. So, you know, to double down on that idea, if you're a member of Zezy's, you can call 48 hours in advance, you can call your concierge and you can say, you know, I have investors coming into town from Egypt, you know, can you make me an Egyptian feast, you know, for my dinner? It's going to be six of us. And we have a team of chefs who put together whatever you call and ask for. It could be, you know, a theme, an Egyptian feat. It could be, hey, I want you to make uh it's my mother's birthday. Here's uh her three favorite dishes that she had or here are her three f my favorite three recipes of hers. Can you remake them for this dinner? You know, people do that kind of stuff a lot. People recreate their, you know, favorite birthday meals or anniversary meal. I people go, you know, we get and we people, you know, we get everything from people wanting to do, 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. You know what I mean? And so, so we'll do anything. We'll make you anything you want and do it very thoughtfully. But again, it's all about indulging and indulging in kind of 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, you you don't if you're not focused on eating and drinking, there's no point in being a part of our club, which is very different than most clubs because you join just to kind of go hang out there and have a drink. That's okay. Yeah, that's the nice thing. You control the crowd and it's all about the food and that's what keeps you interested. You personally hang out there more. I feel like you gravitate towards that spot more than anybody else. So, how do you do future planning? Let's actually talk about who's pitching you and what are they pitching you? everyone you could imagine under the sun. Generally, people that are building new cities, new developments, new neighborhoods, whatever it might be, new stadiums, you know, whatever it might be. Um, where food and beverage plays an integral role and hospitality plays an integral role. And so that that's all around the world, right? So globally. So, you know, we're constantly looking at different opportunities and geographies that make sense to us. You know, I always say it's for me it's not such a, you know, hard equation, right? If you if you tell me, is this an interesting city to open a restaurant in? All I say is, you know, find me two or three restaurants doing $20 million or more, and then it's an interesting city. There's not that many cities in the world that have restaurants doing 20 plus million a year, fine dining restaurants. And when you can find those places, you you already know that you can come in there with a great expensive concept that if you do your job well, you can blow away the competition in those markets cuz 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 your your accidental discovery that Miami was like this wide open market where people love to go out, they love to spend money. uh they want great food. There's and you essentially found a market with almost no competition. Is that the way you would describe the way you spotted this opportunity? How many times did you have to go out to eat to realize, oh, I'm going to clean up here? Wait, the one that's south of Fifth? You did that in 100 days? Is that one of your highest grossing restaurants? That restaurant does over $30 million in revenue. So that is the smartest way to build restaurants, right? Because people invest so much money in building restaurants, right? Even here where we're sitting, right? We did spend a lot of money, but relatively to build this, right, from scratch would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars today. In a way, you know, the greatest thing is when you can find something that already has the bones because where people get stuck all the time is you invest so much money into buildouts that you can never catch up. When we came to Miami, we were able to open, you know, 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. And certainly there was also a culture there that the customers were ready for it, but there was no one there to train the staff. So everyone would come to me and say, you know, like how are you going to open all these restaurants in Miami? There's no the service there is horrible. And that's the first everyone would say that. And I was like, I don't think the service I think there's no one here teaching people how to do service, right? And that's what we found. You we had a lot of people that moved down from New York. I gave kind of a this, you know, town hall meeting where I invited any of our employees that were, you know, in New York furoughed or not working to come down to Miami and that I'd have a job for them there. We had a lot of our from, you know, from bus boys to seale executives move down to Miami. And uh they're all still there. They're all incredibly happy and they brought the New York sensibility. you know, we brought our training and have found incredible people in Miami. They just needed someone to teach them and, you know, that's how we were able to open. You know, we've opened seven, eight restaurants in the last few years in Miami and about, you know, 12 total in South Florida and a private club and we're about to finish our uh residential condo building. We take over the largest beach uh parcel in America. You know, the three acres on the beach on uh Miami Beach in Imagine the greatest uh beach club you've ever been to, right? Think European style beach clubs with the most incredible food. You know, our take on that. Again, going back to your kind of classic, you know, you've seen it before, but we're just going to do it a lot better. You know, on the kind of beach club and restaurant side, the site is huge. So, it will have it'll have an addition, you know, have another restaurant. It'll have private, you know, private rooms. It will have a spa. It will have incredible pools and beach. I mean, it's 3 acres on the beach. There's no property like that in America. So, it it'll be a a giant campus of kind of indulgence and fun and great food done in a way that in a level that has not been done before and with some, you know, lots of different you'll have your main kind of beach club restaurant, but you also have dinner restaurants. You'll have a Sadels's on the beach for breakfast. You'll have all these different um elements to it, which are are very exciting. But that so that's that's our next big project there. Thank you. Great to see you.