Since Anthony Bourdain’s 2000 best seller “Kitchen Confidential,” chef memoirs have become a publishing staple. But only recently has the life story of a restaurant owner become memoir-worthy.
Keith McNally, who opened the Odeon, Balthazar and Pastis, published his best-selling book, “I Regret Almost Everything,” in May. Now comes Drew Nieporent, the co-creator of Nobu, Tribeca Grill, Corton and Montrachet, all influential restaurants that changed New York City and helped make TriBeCa the affluent, alluring neighborhood it is today.
In “I’m Not Trying to Be Difficult: Stories From the Restaurant Trenches,” which publishes on Sept. 23, Mr. Nieporent, 70, makes the case that his skills, experience and taste have as much to do with a restaurant’s success as those of a chef. He claims to have been the first restaurateur to accept credit cards, employ food runners and limit diners to a fixed amount of time at the table.
He also admits that he talks too much, too loud, and suffers from incurable hubris. In 40 years, he opened more than 40 restaurants, but only the Nobus remain open today.
Among the chefs Mr. Nieporent hired early in their careers are David Bouley, Claudia Fleming, Bill Yosses (who went on to become White House pastry chef), Traci Des Jardins, Masaharu Morimoto, Ryan Hardy, Chris Cosentino, Jonathan Waxman, Stuart Brioza, Nicole Krasinski, Markus Glocker and Harold Moore.
I interviewed Mr. Nieporent (pronounced nee-POUR-ent) this month about his memoir. Here are some high and low points from his 53-year career (he started at a Manhattan McDonald’s in 1972), followed by his comments:
A Plum Opportunity
Mr. Nieporent’s first job after graduating from Cornell’s prestigious hospitality school was as assistant manager of Maxwell’s Plum, the highest-profile restaurant in New York in the 1970s. Partly because of its risqué reputation as a singles (and swingers’) bar, it was perpetually stuffed with celebrities like Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty, crystal light fixtures and balloons, all under a multicolored Tiffany glass ceiling.
Drew Nieporent: Maxwell’s was a madhouse, but it was a great proving ground and I had a great time. But I also learned a lot about how not to run a restaurant. The kitchen was too small, the menu was too big, and everyone who worked in the restaurant was on the take. The inmates were running the institution.
No Walk in the Park
The restaurant’s creator, Warner LeRoy, oversaw a spectacular renovation of Tavern on the Green in Central Park, where Mr. Nieporent worked from 1979 to 1981, managing several dining rooms that served a total of up to 3,000 customers in a day.
Mr. Nieporent: Working in these environments with thousands of customers and hundreds of employees, you gotta know what you’re doing, and who you’re hiring. Tavern was a beautiful restaurant, but the food was terrible.
Warner would go to a headhunter and sight unseen, he’d hire a fancy hotel chef from Europe. Every time he did this, he got a great chef who was either an alcoholic or a lazy bum or both. What I’ve learned in my career is that the personality of the chef is paramount, that their character is the way into the food.
A French Education
After a formative trip to France, Mr. Nieporent left Tavern for a two-year stint at the high-end Manhattan restaurants often called “The Le’s and La’s”: Le Périgord, La Reserve, La Grenouille. He writes that he was shocked by the verbal abuse that French cooks and servers were willing to put up with. He was working at Le Régence when Daniel Boulud arrived as chef in 1984. He said he and Mr. Boulud eventually had a screaming match, but ended up as friends.
Mr. Nieporent: It fortified me to open my own restaurant, so I started looking in the paper for a space. A raw space at 239 West Broadway was the only one I could afford — $1,500 a month. Chanterelle and the Odeon were already open in Tribeca, but the neighborhood still looked like a wasteland and I couldn’t believe people from uptown, where all the money was back then, would go there regularly.
I knew I wanted to get away from the stuffy French tradition. And I knew I wanted to hire David Bouley. I had eaten his food in San Francisco, after he came back from working in France, and it haunted me like nothing before or since.
Three Courses, Three Stars
Montrachet opened in April 1985 with a $16, three-course prix fixe menu. When they learned that The New York Times would be publishing its review, Mr. Nieporent and Mr. Bouley took the subway to Times Square after midnight to get the first copies that rolled from the presses in the newspaper’s basement. The restaurant received three stars, but tensions between the two soon undermined the partnership. Mr. Bouley left and opened his own restaurant nearby, Bouley, in 1987.
Mr. Nieporent: Three stars. The validation was thrilling. But even in that moment I knew I’d have to spend the rest of my life trying to protect those stars. And it turns out that as soon as you get three stars, the chef wants to put the stars in his bag, steal your key people and walk across the street and open their own business. I understand that, it’s business. But I also understand it because David, like all chefs, believed that he got the three-star review, not me.
Cooking for the Critics
Montrachet remained open for another 20 years, closing in 2006. Mr. Nieporent reopened it as Corton with the chef Paul Liebrandt in 2008, and then as Bâtard with the chef Markus Glocker in 2014. Both restaurants earned three stars from The Times and two from the Michelin Guide.
While some restaurateurs decide not to bend over backward for critics and inspectors, Mr. Nieporent never stopped trying to game the system.
Mr. Nieporent: When you obsess about the critics like I did, you might never even agree with them, but at least you can try to beat the odds. Once you get to learn that critic’s likes and dislikes, you have an understanding of their taste, and therefore you understand their reviews. With Mimi Sheraton, we knew never to put a shrimp on a menu because she always said they tasted like iodine. Gael Greene was always writing that fish was overcooked, so we undercooked it for her.
Inventing Nobu
Meanwhile, Robert De Niro had moved to TriBeCa, bought the former Martinson Coffee building to turn it into a film center, and recruited Mr. Nieporent to open Tribeca Grill in 1990.
In 1994, Mr. Nieporent opened both Rubicon in San Francisco and (with Mr. De Niro and the chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa) Nobu in TriBeCa. The next year, his restaurants won four national James Beard Foundation awards: Nobu for best new restaurant, Montrachet for outstanding service and outstanding wine program, and Rubicon’s Traci Des Jardins for best new chef.
Mr. Nieporent: That’s not a coincidence. Those are three different restaurants that I built, all run by people I hired and trained. That’s what a restaurateur does.
Before Nobu, all of the Japanese restaurants were marketed to Japanese customers. At upscale restaurants you saw shoji screens, you saw tatami mats. No one was trying to appeal to Americans. I saw that the food Nobu was doing at Matsuhisa was extraordinary, it was revelatory. So what did I do? I made the friendship between De Niro and Nobu happen, I brought on [the designer] David Rockwell, and I was very careful about making it accessible. Expensive, sure, but accessible.
A Global Footprint
Nobu was an immediate hit, soon expanding to London and beyond, and spreading the gospel of sushi around the world. The global Nobu brand of sleek, Japanese-tinged luxury now encompasses 56 restaurants, as well as hotels, spas and condos. Mr. Nieporent writes that he was elbowed out of the expansion in 2000, but retains part ownership of the Nobus in New York and London.
Mr. Nieporent: De Niro always says Nobu was a no-brainer, but it was my brain that put it all together. And I saved them a ton of money: no silverware, no tablecloths, no bread and butter; just chopsticks and a napkin. It was a brilliant setup. Still is.
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Julia Moskin is a Times reporter who covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking.
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