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I'll never forget when Ferris Rasheru hired the former editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, and they took me aside before his first visit and said, 'By the way, the only thing he eats is cornflakes for lunch.' And so we would walk across the street to the deli right across the street from the Union Square Cafe and buy cornflakes.
This is Taste. I'm your host Matt Rodbard. It was truly a blast to have Danny Meyer into the studio. Danny is a great spokesman for the restaurant industry and one hell of a storyteller. On today's episode, we focus on his most near and dear restaurant, New York's Union Square Cafe, which turns 40 this year. We talk about the early years, the legendary customers, and what it was like to pack everything up and move a couple blocks over. What a great conversation. Also on the show, I have a terrific talk with Lena Ciardullo, the executive chef of Union Square Cafe. We talk about what it's like to shepherd this iconic restaurant and get into her personal style and tastes. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Danny Meyer, welcome to This Is Taste. How are you, my friend?
I'm good. I'm happy to be here with you and I'm a fan of your podcast.
I appreciate that. Very kind words. I've always wanted to have you in here. I think I've interviewed you for print before, but we have so much to cover and I hope if we have a good time, you'll come back and we'll talk about Shake Shack because we're not going to talk about that here. We're going to talk about 40 years of Union Square Cafe. A remarkable restaurant, so important to the industry. I've been three or four times in the past couple years and just top of your game. And we're going to have Lena on after this interview and chat with her about what's going on now at Union Square Cafe. But let's go back a little bit for this conversation and hear about the early days. But before we get to that, I just want to know from you, where are you dining out in New York City right now?
I'm dining primarily in our places because I have to. You know, for the first 20 years of my career, I would not sit down and eat at Union Square Cafe or at Gramercy Tavern.
It's bizarre. I remember thinking it was really weird when the old tennis player Pete Sampras's parents wouldn't watch him play in a match.
Because they were too nervous. Yeah. I found that whenever I would try to eat at my restaurant, I would do a really bad job of being with the person I was with while I was doing a really bad job of not dealing with all the things that were pissing me off that I was seeing in the dining room. And then I was neurotically afraid that if I were seen eating in the restaurant, invariably someone would be having slow service or the food didn't come out the right way or whatever and they'd be going and look at the owner sitting over there just enjoying himself. So I just didn't do it. So I'm kind of making up for lost time. And I think especially coming out of the pandemic when 100% of our restaurants were new.
We could talk about that with the Union Square Cafe because reopening it was not reopening. It was starting from scratch.
It's been really important for me to eat in our places. That said, I'm finally getting out because I need to see what other people are doing and I get great ideas. I'm spending a lot of time in Brooklyn recently.
Oh, wow. Our daughter Hallie, who owns Cafe Pana, is in Greenpoint and so we go see her all the time and we were doing a lot of eating around there.
Well, before like you, Brooklyn in the '90s, what was Brooklyn to you?
Peter Luger, right? Or nothing.
Or nothing. Correct. Yeah.
Yeah. But it's a place that I get a lot of inspiration from. I love the scale of the restaurants.
Yeah. Because I don't think most of the restaurant, unlike being in Manhattan where the cost of doing business is so much higher.
And you kind of have to be all things to all people. What I love about Brooklyn is you can have a much sharper point of view.
Very smart. Yeah. You feel the rents are much higher in Manhattan than Brooklyn.
Well, they're getting higher in Brooklyn for sure. But I just think that again that's the scale. We have so many more seats to fill. Of course, typically in a Manhattan restaurant, but I've eaten at places like recently I ate at Hearts, which was very good.
Yeah. So, some really fun places. Some bakeries like Paloma.
Yeah. What do you look at first when you enter a restaurant that you've never been to? What's the first thing that you assess? Because I know you are assessing by nature. I'm just, it's not that I'm assessing because for me that word implies judging.
Cold, right? I'm feeling stuff. And you know, I'll take Theodora as an example. There's a restaurant that I had always loved, Tomer's first restaurant, Miss Ada. He used to work at Gramercy Tavern, so I knew him. And I was actually taking the subway and I got off on the wrong stop and I accidentally walked by the brand new Theodora on my way to Miss Ada for dinner. And without knowing the first thing about the restaurant, what I felt was this beacon of light on the inside of the restaurant that just said, 'You got to stick your nose in here.' Or you're going to be missing out on something really good. There was something about the aesthetic viewing it from the outside and this light that just drew you in.
Or you're going to be missing out on something really good. There was something about the aesthetic viewing it from the outside and this light that just drew you in.
Yeah. And when a restaurant can draw you in even before you've walked in the door, even before you've called to ask for a reservation.
Assuming they have a telephone. A lot of restaurants these days don't even have telephones.
That's a great point. But anyway, so I made it a point to go back there and it's fantastic.
I love those memories and I think it's cool to hear that you do go to Brooklyn. Let's do a little quick sidebar about Cafe Pana. How proud are you of Hallie? I mean, it's incredible. Like, clearly this is an important operation. Everyone loves it. The lines are crazy. You must feel good about this.
I feel so proud of Hallie. She is somebody who has been cooking her entire life. She was an English literature major in college. So, this is not exactly what she was, I don't know what English literature majors are trained to do, but she's been eating ice cream every day of her life as long as I've known and cooking every day of her life. And she brings kind of a cook's ethos to making ice cream. The thing I'm most proud about is that people now ask me, 'Is Hallie Meyer your daughter?' It used to be the other way around and that would drive me crazy and her crazy.
That's amazing. I mean, there's a whole generation who have no idea who you are and that is wonderful to hear. It's a great place and I think just the style of service as well and the innovation with working a very long line and of course the toppings bar and just the whole thing is great. Tremendous. Let's go to Union Square Cafe. I'd like to hear a little bit about the opening night from you. I think that you likely have memories of that night. Are they fond memories? What was going down that first day?
So, opening night 40 years ago or 10 years ago, right? Because we moved the restaurant.
Because we moved the restaurant.
No, of course. And you mentioned of course the big move over to Park. Let's talk about, I think we're going back to 40 years ago. The original location.
40 years ago. The feeling I had was what the hell did you just get yourself into? This, you know, the restaurant business for me was the alternative to being a lawyer, which is what I thought I was going to be with a political science major and loved politics, loved following it. And the way that if one were to get into politics back then, you're supposed to be a lawyer. Today, that's changed. You don't have to be a lawyer. In fact, you don't even have to follow the law, it seems. But that's a digression.
We could go there, but let's not.
We won't go there. But I just feel so lucky that the night before taking my LSATs, I was out for dinner at an Upper East Side restaurant with my aunt and uncle called Elios, which I still go to a few times a year. It's a touchstone for me because at that dinner, the night before taking the LSAT, that was the night that my uncle, God bless him, saw that I was in a foul mood and he said, 'What the hell is wrong with you anyway?' And I said, 'Well, I have to take my LSAT tomorrow morning.' And he said, 'Well, of course you do. You want to be a lawyer, don't you?' And I said, 'No.' And he got so pissed off at me. And he said, 'Do you have any idea how long you're going to be dead anyway?' I said, 'No, I haven't thought about that. Why?' And he said, 'Well, I don't know either, but I'll tell you one thing. You're going to be dead a hell of a lot longer than you're going to be alive. Why would you do something you have no passion for?' And I said, 'Because I don't know what else I could do.'
And I said, 'Because I don't know what else I could do.'
Really? You didn't have that spark. I mean, you.
Well, I did, but it was staring me under my nose. And it took him to say, 'You got to be crazy. All I've ever heard you talk about your whole life is restaurants and food.' And it still didn't dawn on me. I said, 'So what? I'm supposed to go eat in restaurants every day of my life?' He said, 'No, you need to open a restaurant.' And that was my aha moment. That was in 1984. And I got with it immediately. I got a job at an Italian seafood restaurant called Pesca on 22nd Street between Park and Broadway. Okay, right across from what's now Coke. Later that space would become Bolo, Bobby Flay's restaurant, and then the building got knocked down. But that's when I got to know the neighborhood called the Flatiron District. And to this day, that's the neighborhood in which I live and we've had so many restaurants there, starting with Union Square Cafe. But the first night Union Square Cafe opened, which was truly only a year and a half after this dinner because after working at Pesca for a handful of months, I went to go cook in Italy and France for a few months. I was afraid to tell my parents that I was going to be a restaurant owner.
So, your uncle didn't snitch on you.
Well, it's not that I was sneaking, but what I did, I had my own fantasy that it was somehow okay to tell my parents I was going to be a chef, but not okay to tell I was going to be a restaurant owner. Because keep in mind back in '84, '85, you started to see some well-educated people becoming chefs. You had Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Joyce Goldstein, Mark Miller. I'm thinking about West Coast people. It was being professionalized in the media and people were starting, this is like a new American cuisine is starting, and it was validated. Whereas when I grew up in St. Louis, you just didn't think about the restaurant business as something. I had the privilege of getting a great liberal arts education, and that's just not something that led to back then. Today, something I feel really proud of. In fact, this has been a chip on my shoulder for many, many years, is that that's not something I should have done. And I wanted to prove that hospitality and restaurants were an incredibly valid entrepreneurial career choice. And I feel like not because of me, but because of many, many other people, I don't think any kid has to be ashamed to tell their parents this is what I want to do.
I mean, just seeing the surge of enrollment at CIA and onward, it's becoming something that parents push their kids towards, which is cool. But let's go back to that first night.
Yeah. So, that first night was fine. It was fine only because we had so few guests. So, we couldn't screw things up too badly. But I will tell you that the word started to get out. Keep in mind, we didn't have the internet. So, it's not like people were busting down the doors because no one had even heard of it. The good news was if we had failed, it would have truly been the tree falling in the forest with no one hearing. So, I didn't feel nervous about that. But here's what I did feel nervous about. Before this, I had been taking wine classes in 1984 and even into early 1985 at L'Academie du Vin, which was run by a woman named Melissa Sere, French woman. And it was just a great class to take. And one of the people in my class was a young guy by the name of Bryan Miller.
Yeah. And Bryan back then was not a restaurant critic. He was a food writer.
He was a food writer. He had just come to New York from the Hartford Courant and we hit it off because I went to Trinity College in Hartford.
And he and I would go out tasting wine together.
And one day when I was cooking in France, I'm at the restaurant La Reserve where I was working in Bordeaux and I get a letter from him because back then we wrote letters. We didn't have email. And we weren't doing collect phone calls or anything like that. And he said, 'I've got great news. I'm moving to the New York Times and they've just given me the job of a brand new column called Diner's Journal.' And I said, 'Cool.' And I wrote him and I said, 'Well, I'm actually in the process of hoping to open a restaurant someday.' So, the thing I was really nervous about when I opened the restaurant was Bryan Miller was going to come in and see that the guy he used to go drinking wine with was not that great of a restaurant.
Yeah. It's like personal at that point.
So anyway, we sucked. We were really bad at the outset. There were nights when we couldn't get the food out of the kitchen. Literally, we couldn't get drinks off the bar. And the good news, I turned this bad thing into a silver lining. I had bought a 49-year-old vegetarian restaurant called Brownies. That's what this was. And I paid $240,000 for the remaining 14 years on their 20-year lease. It was $8 a square foot. Can you get that in your head? $8 a square foot.
And I kept as much as I could of the restaurant. They had a long lunch counter where they would serve carrot salad and you know icky muffins and stuff like that. And in back of this lunch counter for the whole length of the lunch counter was a set of refrigerators. So I bought the whole thing. Laminated the refrigerators with green so they wouldn't look like 49-year-old refrigerators. And all of them worked except for one. We turned their lunch counter into our bar, mahogany bar at Union Square Cafe. The one that didn't work could not get below something like 35 degrees. It wasn't freezing, but we couldn't get a normal temperature for white wines. So, we turned that into the dessert wine refrigerator because dessert wines do pretty well. And we called that the medicine cabinet. And we used it as medicine truly because so many people were complaining about stuff that they had every right to complain about that whenever there was a big problem I would say go to the medicine cabinet, get them some medicine, and we'd pour a glass of really good Sauternes or some from Italy, Malvasia delle Lipari.
It was, we had 20 dessert wines on our list back then. That was something I wanted to do.
I looked back when researching this chat and it's amazing that on the Union Square Cafe website, all of your old newsletters are there. It's like scanned in the old print and I read your newsletter from the summer of 1989 and you write to your fans and to your patrons that you brave the storm of the critics. I'm not sure if that was real or if that was being a little cheeky because you then go on to cite the three star review that Bryan ended up writing and talking about how you really were appreciative of the downtown restaurant scene kind of or the diners rallying around your restaurant. But what were those reviews like early on?
The first one was the harshest that I hope ever to get. It was from a guy by the name of Seymour Britchky. Ah, Britchky, of course, had a newsletter. His newsletter is incredible. The recipe kinsman was telling me about it. She's done a lot of research on him. Yeah, Cat knows all about it. She does. As a matter of fact, she helped me to unearth it so that I could see that my memory was correct. But he was the first review we ever got. It was a few weeks after we opened and he gave us a dot. Now, a dot for him was two notches below a star. Okay. And what I remember like it was yesterday was something like the blazer-clad curly-headed owner can't keep his hands out of his hair and the only good news is that we know he's not the chef so at least we don't have to worry about our food having hair in it. And then he talked about we had a beautiful mural, pieces of which are actually at the new Union Square Cafe. It was on the wall and we cut out part of the wall and put them at the new Union Square Cafe. But he said the mural is if the owner was trying to replicate Howard Christie's murals at Cafe des Artistes, he's accomplished something more like a finger painting on heroin. He's going high and he's going low. He's like double blows here. Body blows. Yeah. I was hurt to say the least. I was worried to say the most. And interesting, here's an interesting story. I don't know that I've ever told publicly, but soon thereafter, very soon thereafter, Drew Nieporent's new restaurant, Montrachet, had opened and they got a three-star review right off the bat. David Bouley was the chef. Bryan Miller. So, I took our chef at the time, Ali Barker, to Montrachet for dinner. I said, 'We got to go see what three stars looks like.' Because that's what my aspirations had always been. I wanted excellent. I certainly did not want a dot. By the way, in retrospect, that was probably a fair review. It was mean, but we were probably no better than, it was his calling card, writing like shooting from the hip that style, and he was probably right.
It was his calling card, writing like shooting from the hip that style.
And he was probably right. You know, as I look back at.
We'll get back to your question. The hair in the hands, was that nerves? Was that just how you are? Were you just animated? I don't think I ever do stuff, but I don't put my hands in my hair.
Yeah. Okay. I know what I look like when I'm nervous, and that's just not one of the things.
You might have been happy. Who knows?
Made for good copy. Happy for him for that.
No, but he had some very valid quibbles about some of the cooking. And the look, we were doing our best. When I go to anyone's new restaurant, the two things I'm looking for are how do I feel physically in the space? Because that's not likely to change too much. Right. It either works for you or it doesn't. And the other thing I'm looking at in a brand new restaurant is are they trying? And what I will tell you is that we were trying really, really hard. Even when people would leave or they were unhappy with something at Union Square Cafe, we would twist ourselves into pretzels to make sure that they would leave somehow happy. There was one guest who I said, 'Is there, I just hope you know that if there's anything I could do, I would do it to make,' and they said, 'Well, there's not.' Oh, wow. And I kind of learned an important lesson that night, which is that sometimes people are actually happier when they're unhappy. And it's okay.
Oh, wow. And I kind of learned an important lesson that night, which is that sometimes people are actually happier when they're unhappy.
Yep.
Particularly New Yorkers, maybe a flavor of New Yorker, I would say.
Yeah. I hadn't seen that growing up in St. Louis.
I'm a Midwestern guy myself and it was a culture shock 25 years ago to move here and yeah, that self-loathing attitude.
It's okay. It's okay. But it's important to know that. And if you truly believe you've done everything, but anyway, getting back to Mr. I take Ali Barker there for dinner and this larger-than-life character, Drew Nieporent, who I don't think I had ever met before this.
I take Ali Barker there for dinner and this larger-than-life character, Drew Nieporent, who I don't think I had ever met before this.
Comes out, greets us. Of course, he knew everything about Union Square Cafe because Drew knows everything about everything. Especially in the food world. And he was telling us about all the restaurant critics that had come in, how he knew every single one of them, how he'd spotted every single one of them. And if I wanted to be successful, it would be really worth my while to get to know who they were. And I said, 'Well, I don't even know what Seymour Britchky looks like.' He says, 'Not only can I tell you what he looks like, but I'll tell you what he does every single night of his life after dinner.' And I said, 'What's that?' And he said, 'He goes to a jazz bar called Bradley's, and it's only three blocks from Union Square Cafe.' Oh. So, I went to Bradley's one night with my then girlfriend, now my wife of 37, 38 years. And I sat down on a table and sure enough this guy, he looked exactly like Drew described him, sits down next to us. And I was so insecure that I started talking to Audrey before the jazz started about I just had the best meal at Union Square and Audrey looks at me and she said, 'Are you crazy? He's going to know who you are.' But I was determined.
You took a shot. You took a shot, Danny.
After that, I wrote a letter and I know I did the right thing. And I said, 'Look, first of all, thank you for taking an early interest in the restaurant before anyone else did. That means a lot. You're right. We probably weren't that good, but I promise if you keep your eye on this restaurant, we're going to get better over time.'
That's such a great way to phrase it and not just being hard like, 'Come in, we'll cook for you.' Just say just keep an eye on it. Yep.
Very smart. Well, I'm both proud and embarrassed to say I've had that opportunity many times through the years because I've learned that we are the kind of, if we were a chateau or a winery, we're the kind of wine that doesn't drink best right out of the barrel. They all get better in time. So, Union Square Cafe ended up getting a two-star review from Bryan Miller back when two stars really meant very good. And then three years later, it got a three star.
Elevated, which is such a sign of the swell of interest around the restaurant. You're hitting your stride. I read that people would literally write into Gourmet magazine trying to get a reservation to Union Square Cafe. Can you, is that true?
I think it's true. You know, my wife Audrey worked at Gourmet for seven years and so she was the one fielding a lot of these requests. So maybe that's what you read about.
I mean they were like literally and this is leading to the next question. Things take off. It's the hottest restaurant in New York in many senses, at least downtown. And how are you managing the diners, the book, this swell of interest being a single restaurant operator, having your high standards for service, but having this incredible volume and demand for this restaurant?
So keep in mind, Union Square Cafe was my one and only restaurant for the first 10 years of my career before opening Gramercy Tavern. And it was, remember back then we were taking all of our reservations by telephone. Because we didn't get OpenTable until 2000. So this, you know, we opened 15 years before that. And we had paper and pencil reservations. One of my favorite things to do was to be on the reservation lines. But we couldn't keep up with the phone calls.
How many lines did you have?
We had six lines and typically we would take four of them off the hook because for better or for worse, I made the choice that it was far better for someone to get a busy signal, frustrating as that may be, than to be put on hold for 10 minutes only to hear we're booked. So, we had two lines. We had two or three reservationists answering going through these calls. I had so much fun plotting out the book. But one day we had a rule that the phone must be answered within two rings. And one day I'm up in my office, which was built out of a former restroom on the balcony of the original Union Square Cafe, and the phone was ringing two times, three times, four times, five times. What the hell's going on? So, I had two telephones in my office and I pick up both lines at the same time and I go, 'Good afternoon, Union Square Cafe.' With one phone in each ear and each of these two people asked for what they wanted and I just broke out laughing and I hung up on both of them. That's Mr. Hospitality.
That's Mr. Hospitality. Yeah. No, but you have your moments that you can just have a little fun with it. I'm sure.
I did not mean that, but no. So, we always wanted Union Square Cafe to feel like a very inclusive club as opposed to a very exclusive club. And what I meant by that was that if you were a regular, and we had two very different businesses. Our lunch business was primarily made up of book publishers and agents and authors and magazine editors and authors. And it was great because I got to learn so much about what was going on not only in New York but in the entire world. And when I call it an inclusive club, when you have people who are having lunch there three, four, five times a week. We had bar regulars. We had dining room regulars. The dining room regulars all had their table and god forbid you didn't plot out their table the right way. That wasn't a cool thing. But when I say inclusive, you didn't have to be a regular to get a reservation. And I just loved the juxtaposition of, you know, we had farmers from the green market eating at the bar with high-profile magazine editors sitting next to them and it was just the most democratic great place. At dinnertime we had a different crowd. And what was great about Union Square Cafe, especially in those early days, was that New York had not really seen this kind of restaurant back then. If you wanted to eat really, really well, it was expensive. Probably Midtown. It probably started with Lola or Eel. Or you could go somewhere really, really casual, chain restaurant. Not that great. And so it was really fun to have a restaurant where we were serving amazing quality food, incredible wines, incredible wines by the glass, fair price. You didn't have to get dressed up for it. It was a downtown version of an uptown restaurant and an uptown version of a downtown restaurant.
Yeah. Revolutionary. And when you talk about fair pricing, I mean, are you keeping a margin that makes sense for you, but you're not trying to make those extra bucks here and there just to have that club that feels inclusive?
No, we were never ever of the mentality that just because you can charge so much that therefore you should. And why? Because I had a philosophy growing up. This might have even been in my yearbook in high school, which is you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. And I always designed Union Square Cafe from the very outset as the restaurant that if only it existed would be my favorite restaurant. And so I spent a lot of years dining solo. I was a salesman for a few years. I'd go eat by myself at lunch counters. I traveled in Europe, dined by myself. And I saw how solo diners often got the worst table or no reservation or treated really snootily. And so there I'm going to give great hospitality to solo diners. I'm going to have great food at the bar. I'm going to design the bar for eating.
Yeah. Which is not a place to be relegated to because you weren't good enough to. I mean this was a movement that you revolutionized and truly invented in America at least. This solo diner at the bar and having a bar menu that stood up to the dining room menu and you could dine and have the same meal. I mean, how many times has that been copied in every single city in this country?
Yeah, I can't say I was first by this. As a matter of fact, I was inspired. There was a restaurant I went to before opening Union Square Cafe in San Francisco in the what is this called? The north end, what do they call the North Beach? Yeah, North Beach called Vanessi. And Vanessi was this wonderful, maybe it's still open, wonderful southern Italian cooking. And the cooking line was the back bar. And it was much more fun eating at the bar even than eating in the diner. And we don't have a cooking line behind the bar. That would actually be an inspiration for me many years later with North End Grill, which only lived for about eight years. Yeah. Downtown. But I love eating at the bar. So, I didn't invent it by a long shot. But I do think that in New York, most of the bars back then were designed purely for drinking. And you could always tell because they had a big lip on the edge of the bar to put your.
while and so your drink wouldn't fall off.
Yeah. We always had bars that were flat
or spills wouldn't fall over on your lap. Yeah. And now that you're designing even the bar to serve restaurant diners, tell me about some of your regulars. There's got to be some cool names, some cool people
back in those days. So many of them came from the publishing industry.
Yeah. '80s '90s. Who's dining in your
Well, people like editors like Gary Fiskichon and Morgan Entric, authors like Jay McCannernney. The biggest ones though were publishers. Roger Strauss from Ferris Straeru was there every single day on table 38. Paul Gotautle
Uh was there from Harry Abrams there every day on 24 from Crown. We had Betty Praser uh in the front window every day for lunch. We had two upstart magazine editors, Kurt Anderson and Graden Carter who had started Spy Magazine. And they would eat there all the time until we eliminated or I eliminated smoking at Union Square Cafe in 1990 and Graden boycotted me at that point.
Since then we've become very friendly again.
But he wouldn't eat there for several years. Neither would people like David Reef, another editor. He stopped coming in because of that. What a to have this crowd and you're referring to a lot of magazines but a lot of book industry, the publishing industry and you talk about learning about the world from your guests. How are you interacting with these leaders of the world of letters?
Well, I had a neverending supply of books to read.
Well, that's true. They're always dropping new galleys, I'm sure.
Yeah. And what was also fun. I should also say for all the names I've mentioned, there's so many I haven't. Jonathan Galassi was there all the time. Bud Trillin was there all the time. The book agents, the Lessers, Bob Leer. It was just great. I'll never forget when Ferris Rasheru hired the former editor of The New Yorker, William Sha, to be one of their senior editors. And they took me aside before his first visit and said, 'By the way, the only thing he eats is cornflakes for lunch.' And so we would walk across the street to the deli right across the street from Union Square Cafe and buy cornflakes because we weren't buying them wholesale and that's what he had for lunch while everybody else was having a wild time at Union Square Cafe.
That's hospitality. I'm sure the milk was good though. Sure. Milk came from a nice farm.
I hope so. But one of the really fun things also was that right about this same time Barnes & Noble had opened for the first time right on Union Square. And so whenever we knew an author was coming in, we would go buy their new book and put it at the front maître d' stand and get an autograph on the book. They'd be really happy. And we ended up having a really nice collection of books.
That's very cool. I mean, have you ever do you still have this collection in one of your offices? All these books?
I'm afraid I haven't checked, but we better.
Oh, that would be amazing.
I would love to see your library. That's the other cool thing is that because of our clientele, we ended up attracting another big thing that's changed in our industry is that when we needed a new server at the restaurant back then we would either put an ad in the New York Times or the Village Voice and in the early days we would get lines around the corner to come be a server at Union Square Cafe.
Is that why why why so did they want the training? Did they want the business?
I don't think there were many other restaurants in town.
Or it we there weren't nearly as many restaurants in town. Again, if you go back to the model I just described, we weren't hiring people who were classically trained to be a French waiter in a French restaurant or an Italian waiter in an Italian restaurant. And so we were getting really the pick of the litter. And a lot of the people that were applying to us knew about not only how much money they could make, but they also knew who our clientele was. And so it was a wonderful virtuous cycle where our servers ended up becoming friendly with the literary crowd.
Yeah, they were sliding manuscripts across the table when they could.
They were doing that, but they were also very interested and interesting people. And as a result, our guests ended up falling in love with our staff. And it just is and has always been part of the magic of Union Square Cafe is that I never wanted to feel in this industry that service was servitude. And I don't want anyone on our team ever to feel that way. And the most wonderful thing is when you see that relationship, a human relationship happening between a guest and a server. You can always tell a lot about someone based on how they treat servers.
Agree fully. And by and large, we have always had an amazing clientele for that reason. But they do go hand in hand.
I mean, we were having dinner at Union Square Cafe 6 months ago. A large group, maybe seven or eight of us had a big round. It was a work dinner with some corporate chefs. They had picked the place and I was like, I'll gladly come along. And I remember the server vividly. She knew everything about the menu, but she was like a young woman of color. She was extremely Gen Z and I was loving everything about it because it was not my generation. She was so into the food and so different from what I think you would expect at a lot of restaurants with that age. I was just so impressed by it.
That feels good to hear that.
Yeah, it's the truth. Let's talk about Stephanie Danler's book, Sweet Bitter, which I love. I think it's a terrific book. And she worked at Union Square Cafe and the book is set in a restaurant without naming the name. Did you read it early and what did you think?
I did well early on. Stephanie's terrific and she married someone else who worked at Union Square Cafe. Brad. She wrote me before publishing it. Just I just want to give you a heads up. I'm writing a book and a lot of people may say it's Union Square Cafe. Just want you to know that. And I said great, congratulations. Can't wait to read it. So I read the book. It is absolutely set at Union Square Cafe. I mean, she nails every single detail of the restaurant. Yes. Right down to and including some of the exact wines by the glass that we were serving. Then that said, the story is as fictitious as it can be. Unless I was completely asleep at the wheel. I don't think most of that, and I think she would say this, I don't think most of that stuff happened, but she's a terrific writer. The only butt I have is that the stage set is so perfect, pitch perfect that it would be very easy to believe that everything that happened in her novel had actually happened in real life.
Yeah. I mean, this before the trend of autofiction, and I think at the time, she's a great storyteller. She's a screenwriter. I think you could deduce that a lot of it was amplified. It's a terrific book. It's a decade old or so and I recommend picking it up. Let's talk about the good news is that the character she calls owner I don't think does anything too stupid in the book.
But the bar that everyone post shift hung out at is, you know, Park or the Park.
That bar was amazing just in general and I think she nailed that too.
As a post shift hangout for your staff.
Let's talk about 2013, 2014 that era. What's the phone call like when you hear that the original location, this restaurant that we've been speaking about, was going to be given a very large rent hike?
Yeah. Well, it was more than a phone call. We knew this was coming up. We had actually renewed our lease once already. And by the way, one of the great lines of all time from a New York restaurant tour, the late Joe Baum, used to always say that his definition of a classic restaurant was one that outlived its first lease. So now we've outlived two leases. That first lease you got was a great $8 a square foot rent. Covers up a lot of other mistakes. We did a lot of things that would have put a lot of restaurants out of business. I was buying wine like crazy. Where would I have gotten the cash flow except that our rent was so low? But that's the magic. That's why you got to the margin that you needed to get to eventually because your diners evolved with you and they paid more. But we could also give good value to our diners as a result. So, it was a great real benefit, but it was something we knew was coming up like 5 years before the lease expired. We started talking about it internally and we started having conversations with the landlord. You didn't want to feel too eager or the landlord was going to ratchet up the rent, but you couldn't be too complacent or he'd have you by the short hairs.
Yeah. As a matter of fact, in our second cookbook, which came out in 2001, unfortunately the week of 9/11, the cookbook came out called Second Helpings from Union Square Cafe. And that book never left its first printing because the entire publicity got cancelled because nobody wanted to hear about cookbooks for months after that. But in that book, if you could ever get a copy of it, there is a photo essay, there are series of photo essays by the great photographer Duane Michaels. And we included our landlord in one of the photo essays, trying to butter him up a little bit. He was an important part of the team. He was integral to the success of the restaurant. And you'd think that that would have done it, but it didn't because as these conversations went on, it was very clear that he wasn't the least bit sentimental about Union Square Cafe being there. He just wanted whoever could pay the top dollar on the place. And we had a really tough decision to make because at this point, the restaurant was approaching its 30th birthday. And we had won five James Beard Awards for the restaurant. We'd gotten two three-star reviews for the restaurant. And it was very clear that this wasn't going to end happily. The building itself was decrepit. You were patching together however you could without being too annoying. You might not remember this, but the floorboards in the downstairs dining room were starting to sag. I was literally afraid they were going to break through to the basement. The basement, by the way, was a rabbit warren of wires and walk-in refrigerators. We had a makeshift area to make fresh pasta and gnocchi in the basement. It was terrible. And we knew that in order to keep our lease there, three things would have to be true. We would have to invest a lot of money into the space. We'd have to get a lease we could afford, and we'd have to have a lot of years on that lease so that we could pay back the investment we would have to make into this terrible building. And none of those would work out because the landlord wanted to triple our rent. And by this point, we're far from $8 a square foot. We're now 30 years into the thing. And so tripling where we were, plus only offering us 10 years, meant that we would spend 10 years basically just working to pay back the landlord and pay back our construction costs. So we had a lot of voices on our team that said, 'You know what? It's been an amazing 30 years. Just close the book.'
Yeah. So, you're busy. That's the thing.
We're very busy. It wasn't my favorite couple years of the restaurant because everyone on the team knew that our lease was coming up. They didn't know what was going to happen next. And so there were a lot of people going, 'Should I stay on this ship? Where's the ship going?' And I was the voice that was hellbent there. But by the way, at this point we have Gramercy Tavern, 11 Madison Park, Tabla, Shake Shack, Blue Smoke, The Modern. So we had a lot of other stuff going on, but I always had this sense and I still have this sense that as goes Union Square Cafe, so goes the whole company.
Interesting. Even though all of those places had various successes and you clearly could spread out your time effectively with those locations and have very satisfied.
But you know what? I only have one first baby. And while I will never say or feel that Union Square Cafe is my favorite, it is the only one that's my first. It's the only one where I spent a decade of my life learning to be a restaurant tour with nothing else to distract me. And so it's always had a special place. It's what I named our whole company on. It's your northstar in that way. So look, I obviously won the argument. We weren't going to close the book on Union Square Cafe. I wisely listened to some voices on the team saying, 'And we can't reup here,' which I really wanted to do. And so I had the same experience on the last night at Union Square Cafe as I had on the first night, which is I cried. I cried the first night when I opened that door because like what the hell did I get myself into? And I cried on the last night because it had been an experience unlike anything I had ever imagined. I never thought I would be a restaurant tour. I never thought there'd be more than one. I never thought this one would even work. And I've not once walked back into the space.
I was wondering down that block.
I've walked down the block probably three times in the last decade. I've looked in the window once. Look, the landlord did the rational thing. Maybe not the heartfelt thing, but the rational thing for a landlord, which is he got his triple the rent. They found a Japanese udon noodle place and it made total sense because it's part of a chain. They don't have a chef or a sous chef or a pastry chef or a sommelier or tablecloths or flowers, right? So a lot of the costs that go into doing something like Union Square Cafe, if you can strip those out, you can afford to pay that guy's rent. And it's still there. I believe it's still there. However, a broker recently called saying that space is coming up for rent because they got a 10-year lease, and would you be interested? And our answer was, 'No, thank you. We're good. We're really happy with'
Was there a moment, Danny, that you were like something sparked and like what you could do in that space again?
You mean when we got the call from the broker?
Yeah, of course. But fortunately, the spark was like 10-year lease. The spark was about 6 seconds long.
Well, I hope you had a good moment then just like thinking about what could have been in that space, coming back to that space.
I'll tell you why I didn't. I am so happy with where we moved to that there's not one day I regret what we did when we went to 19th and Park Avenue South. Union Square Cafe I would argue is better at the age of 40 than it's ever been and it's more relevant than it's ever been.
Agree fully and leads to my next question. I mean the space that you are now in was previously City Crab which I think a lot of people have memories from that location and that restaurant and it was Cafe Iguana before that.
It was Cafe Iguana before. I know the name. Did you dine at those restaurants ever? Never went to City Crab and I never went to Duke's barbecue which was right next door. Which became Daily Provisions. So, no, but I was very aware of them because I walked by it all the time. It's just not I actually I went to City Crab when it was in a smaller location on either Second or Third Avenue. When they first opened and it was a cool thing for New Yorkers to get out the mallet and bang on the crabs. Certainly. Great signage. Great iconic. And now you've taken it over but like what a gray block of Park. I mean it's just such a New York block, right?
It was important for us to move the door to having a 19th Street address. I know that sounds silly.
But we did not want to have a Park Avenue South address for Union Square Cafe.
You had to be just a little off. I love that you did that. So that was like right when you were looking at the opportunity you were like we need to move the door. Yeah. 19th. I mean it's your brand is 19th. It's not Park, you know, it's like Park's a very long avenue. So, but when the key thing is we really had one prerequisite and it took us we were nomads for a year. I don't know if you're aware of that, but there was a year between closing Union Square Cafe on 16th Street and opening this one because it took us, even before you get into the construction and the design, it took us a long time to find a place that truly felt like Union Square Cafe. And we were getting some notoriety around the closing. I think I even wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times about how why can't New York be more like London or Paris where restaurants go on forever and it's not about which landlord can eke out the last dollar, but we don't have laws like that, we don't have traditions like that. New York is about what's new. And I mean a lot of restaurants in Europe also are owned by the operators too, there's that dynamic at play. The space itself is owned by the operator, that's true, but even when they're not, there's a sense of continuity and tradition that we just don't have as much here. No, it's um but it's really been fantastic. It was a fantastic experience to ask ourselves how can we do something that rarely works to actually move an iconic restaurant. As a matter of fact, the same year that Union Square Cafe was moving, the Four Seasons was moving. And less successful move for those guys. And I kind of saw that in advance. I know one of the two former owners of the Four Seasons I know pretty well, Alex von Bidder, fantastic guy. And we had kind of self-help sessions with each other. I bet. And I remember saying to him, I said, you know, this is a big challenge. I don't know that many restaurants that have successfully moved. Spago sort of did it. However, the new Spago is nothing like the original. People really reflect on the old Spago and want it back. But you have to say at least the new one succeeded. But there's a lot of restaurants where it just didn't work. And I said, I actually, you know, I'm rooting for you, Alex, with the Four Seasons, but I think we have a slightly less challenging move to make. And I said, if you asked any 10 people who love the Four Seasons, what do you most love about the Four Seasons? I bet you in the top three reasons, eight of them are going to mention the space itself. The iconic space. I said if you ask any 10 people what they most love about Union Square Cafe, I don't think the space is going to be in the top 10. I think we have to move a spirit and some good cooking. You have to move the feeling of the space. And I just don't know where you're going to get the Seagram's building. Yeah, and Johnson's design. That's just architectural history. So, we got an opportunity to actually make something feel better. Well, you fixed a lot of mistakes. We fixed some mistakes. We brought along all of our art, of course. So, we gave you the hug of familiarity. We even brought along half of the original mahogany bar. And we put it upstairs. And what's cool about that is if you're someone who used to eat at that bar every day, it's one of those if you know, you know, kind of things. I didn't realize that that was the original bar up there. It is. And when you touch, when I touch that wood, I actually it takes me back to the feeling of the original because it is. I love the space. I think having a mezzanine and having so many different emotions when dining at the current Union Square Cafe, if you're upstairs in a booth, it's different than a large round on the floor downstairs, which is different from the bar downstairs. It's great. I mean, Lena's going to tell us about the food later on in this interview. But I want to ask you, just right now, how is business at Union Square? I mean, it's a really challenging time for anyone, including yourself, with so many headwinds about dining in New York City with costs and inflation and all that. I know it's a big question, but I'd love to hear your take on it.
Well, I don't want to sound like Pollyanna, but I don't think it's ever gone any better. And you know, people talk about the various headwinds we have. I don't remember a time in my career when we didn't have headwinds. They're different from time to time. When I go back to opening Union Square Cafe, the biggest headwind was my own inexperience. The next biggest headwind I would say was that we were told who we could and couldn't buy a lot of our stuff from back then. We had to. There was one trash company we were allowed to work with or else. There was one dairy company we had to work with or else, one fish company, one bread company. And what's the 'or else'? Well, I was too stupid to believe it. And so I just did what I wanted to do. So I mean there was one day when there was a group of three guys wearing like right out of central casting the gold necklace, the gold bracelet. Yeah, the most disgusting cologne. And the host says, 'Table 38 wants to say hi to you, Danny.' So I didn't know who they were, so I went over and said, 'Hi.' Could smell their cologne from like three tables away. It was disgusting. And one of them says, 'Sit on the fourth chair. Sit down.' And I go, 'Uh,' and this was before I declined ever sitting down at tables back then. I thank you. So I sit down with these guys and in the middle of the table was a brand new dish on our menu, tagliata di manzo. So sliced steak with rosemary and wonderful olive oil on top over arugula salad. And the guy says, 'What's this?' And I go, 'That's tagliata.' And he says, 'Now what is it?' And with that, he takes the whole pile and puts it on the tablecloth with the olive oil getting all over it. He says, 'Who's going to clean this now?' And I looked at him and I go, 'Uh oh, I think I know what's going on right now.' 'Why are you doing business with my cousin?' So, it was that, you know, when I talk about headwinds, that's the kind of stuff that these are the stories of the days and still today there's lots of intimidation. So, you know, 1987, we got Black Friday. So that was a headwind like our business went away for two weeks and I said great, two years in and we're already done, right? Then we got 9/11. Then we got Hurricane Sandy. We got the great recession. We got the pandemic. Now we have tariffs and immigration issues and it's always going to be something. And I just think that when you sign up to be a restaurant tour, you're not signing up for it because it's easy. You're signing up because however many headwinds and challenges there are, the joy of making people feel better is the thing that matters more than everything.
Thank you for sharing about Union Square. I'm thrilled that we could go back in time and hear about that's only scratching the surface. I mean, really, it is. And I know you're working on a book. You know something, if I can just say something that I feel so happy and proud and grateful for at Union Square Cafe is that in now almost 40 years we've had four chefs. The first one Ali Barker was there for three years. He had promised me two, went an extra year. Then Michael Romano was there for 14 years. Carmen Qualata was there for about a dozen years. And now Lena Chardullo is doing a remarkable job. And she's been there since I think she started either right before the pandemic. Yeah, that was her first month. So she's in five. I want to segue and ask you about critics, restaurant critics in modern time. And we had Ligaya Mishan on right before her first review dropped, which was for your restaurant, The View. And I mean, I want to just get your take because we've had this great interview with her about she we talked a lot about how she wrote the review, how she looked at the restaurant, that terrific lead. But how did you feel about the review and how do you think about criticism in general right now?
I think restaurant criticism has evolved dramatically. Again, if you go back to the opening of Union Square Cafe, you needed the review as a consumer to know what was open, never mind should I go there, never mind what should I eat. And I think that restaurant criticism faithfully answered all those questions. I think as time has gone by and we have social media and Tik Tok and Instagram and all the ways an eater can learn about restaurant openings and where your friends are eating, you can go to Belly to find out where do your friends eat. I love that you called that out. We wrote a big story about Belly. Super modern. It is. And I think that what they all say is that eating out is a really important part of the social fabric of our city. And therefore, I think that mainstream media restaurant criticism has also had to evolve over time. It no longer is the place you need to go to discover that a place is open, where it is, what the phone number is, if they have a phone, or even what the food looks like because you've already seen pictures of that forever. Therefore, I think that there's a premium today with restaurant criticism to do a handful of things. I think that it can turn over rocks that you might not have known about even if you have social media. It can tell a story about where our city is at that particular time from a sociological basis based on how and where people are eating. You know, when I travel to other cities, I watch how people eat as a way of learning about that culture. And I think that more and more today, and I think Pete Wells was doing a lot of this, I think Ruth Reichl was probably the last critic we had that would just swoon over the food descriptions themselves. Bryan Miller was the last restaurant critic we had who would swoon over the wine. You don't read that much about wine anymore, which is such an important part of dining out. So, you know, I think it still plays an important role. What I would love to see, and I don't know if it's the New York Times, it should be the New York Times because certainly they know from all of the food sections that they sell and the recipe sections that people are really interested in food. I think that what's missing in food criticism is to watch restaurants after or as they evolve in time. You know, Ruth Reichl came back and reviewed Gramercy Tavern for a second time 13 months after it opened. She gave it two stars right off. It's all it deserved. Her last paragraph said, 'Like a good red wine, I bet this one will improve with age.' And then she damn it, she came back 13 months later, gave it a three-star review. You saw that with Frank Bruni, The Modern, he did that, raised it from two to three stars. 11 Madison Park gave it two stars right off the bat, then three, then four. And somehow I feel like the New York Times should have the bandwidth with all these different critics they now have and all the coverage to be able to watch what happens to good restaurants as they evolve. That doesn't always happen. Sometimes restaurants on the flip side, sometimes they get demoted. Sometimes they just say, 'All right, on to the next one.'
Yeah. I mean, I think with the investment in the new dual critic system and the real promise of more New York-based reviewing, either the reboot of Hungry City, only speculation, or just more reviews. That's a great thought. I agree with you fully. I think that there should be a lot of space given to new restaurants and new owners and absolutely but also following up particularly if it is a profile restaurant that's been that either went way up or way down. I as a consumer, I want to know about that. Yeah, it's a really good call, but I think of and you see that in wine criticism all the time. You do. I mean, wine is something that has followed through the years and we evolve. Restaurants evolve just as much as wines do. Yeah. I'm going to leave it at that. Danny, would you please come back?
I hope I will. And hopefully after I publish my first book in 20 years.
Yeah, you're working on something here at Penguin Random House. I don't want to spoil a good show, but sure it'll be out soon. So, good luck with that. Thank you so much for joining. This is Taste. Thanks, Matt.
Lena Chardulla, welcome to This is Taste. Great to meet you.
You as well. Thanks for having me.
I'm excited to chat. I'm a huge fan of Union Square Cafe. You've been the executive chef there since 2019. And Danny just told us all about the olden days, the old school stories, and we're going to bring this conversation into the present. Before we get to that though, I always like to ask chefs living in New York. When you're off the clock, where are you dining out these days?
