Blame it on Le Cirque.
Ever since Manhattan’s legendary temple of French dining opened a clone of itself in the Bellagio a decade ago, a steady stream of celebrity chefs and big-name dinnerhouse groups have followed its path to the jackpots awaiting in Las Vegas.
Big, splashy media parties and press conferences continue to trumpet the extraordinary marriages of billionaire casino owners with hot chefs or renowned operators who plan to raise the gastronomic bar in a city where all income appears to be discretionary.
But in the past few years, and with far less hype, celebrity chefs and prosperous multiunit independents are branching out from their home markets in different directions, bypassing Las Vegas to debut or lend their names to projects in cities with no slot machines in sight.
No one is saying that Sin City has played out with operators.
With its lucrative market of vacationing high rollers and its countless spectacles of dance, music and neon, Las Vegas—promoted as “the world’s most exciting city” in a current marketing campaign—continues to reel them in.
But concepts that already have a presence in Las Vegas—such as recent-arrival Japonais, an upscale Asian-fusion spot out of Chicago with a transplant in the Mirage resort on the Vegas Strip—also see irresistible opportunities in other cities, as Japonais did with its new outpost in New York City.
Indeed, operators are seeking pay dirt away from the comfort zones of their hometowns, motivated by reasons including opportunities to escape high costs in some regions, personal friendships with out-of-town builders, deals that are too good to turn down, and enticements to keep talented employees on the payroll.
Among recent deals:
Max Restaurant Group, a multiconcept company with a dozen diners, bakery concepts, cafes and fine-dining establishments, opened for the first time in its 25-year-history outside of its San Francisco Bay Area home market with a thirteenth unit in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., styled after The Cheesecake Factory. Chef-restaurateur Mario Batali and his partner Joseph Bastianich invested in, helped design, and consulted on the menu and service style of chef-partner Nancy Silverton’s two-month-old place, Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. However, Batali’s next two restaurants are slated to open in Las Vegas. B.R. Guest, a 16-unit multi-concept dinnerhouse operator based in New York and already boasting an operation in Las Vegas, two years ago debuted its seafood concept Blue Water Grill in Chicago. John Symon, one of Cleveland’s most attention-getting chefs and Food and Wine magazine’s best new chef of the year in 1998, is broadening his profile by playing a steady consulting role at New York’s new Greek restaurant, Parea. Danny Meyer, president of Union Square Hospitality Group in New York and an operator who once declared he would never open a restaurant that he could not walk to from home, has plans to open one in a few months in Tokyo. It’ll be a version of his signature establishment, Union Square Cafe, launched with partner and executive chef Michael Romano and the Japanese hospitality group Wondertable. Eric Ripert, chef and co-partner of the renowned Le Bernardin in Manhattan, is on board as opening consulting chef at a big-ticket, fine-dining America-theme restaurant in Washington, D.C., later this spring. Tom Colicchio, the former chef of Gramercy Tavern in New York City who has launched two fledgling chains—’wichcraft and craft-bar—and operates two steak-houses in Las Vegas and New York called Craftsteak, is expected to open a version of his flagship operation, Craft, this spring in Los Angeles. He already has another Craft in the W Hotel in Dallas. Internationally acclaimed chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten of New York has opened his first restaurant in Houston, an Asian-fusion concept called Bank Jean-Georges in a building that formerly housed a bank. James Beard Award-nominated chef-owner Mark Tarbell, of Tarbell’s in Phoenix, has opened a restaurant called The Oven Pizza e Vino in an innovative, redesigned, mixed-use neighborhood in the downtown business district of Lakewood, Colo., a Denver suburb. Nobu Matsuhisa has opened a well-received satellite of his growing Nobu sushi chain in the French-styled Hotel Crescent Court in Dallas. The Stephen Starr Restaurant Group last year debuted its 13th and 14th units, Buddakan and Morimoto, in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, marking the first time the group ventured from its home base in Philadelphia. To make sure that a valued cook and now partner wouldn’t leave him, Freddy Sanchez, owner of Chicago’s 20-year-old Tex-Mex restaurant Adobo Grill, has opened a new place in a surging residential neighborhood in Indianapolis.
According to Peter Elliot, restaurant reviewer for the Bloomberg news service, one reason for the spate of out-of-town openings is that chefs and operators are not watched by the media or judged as harshly by their guests in other towns as they might be in places like Las Vegas, New York or Los Angeles.
Moreover, Elliot said, the cult of celebrity among restaurant-goers in some cities is subordinated elsewhere to the sheer pleasure of having a memorable meal.
“I think what is abundantly apparent in many of these concepts, like Craft or Nobu, for example, is that they work fantastically anywhere because their guests know that Nobu means great sushi and Craft means great, fresh, market-driven products,” he said. “Yeah, Tom and Nobu are the heart and soul of the places, but it’s what’s on the plate the guests care about.
“Only in New York or Vegas, maybe Los Angeles, would we say, ‘Is Tom in the kitchen tonight?’”
Dana Cowin, editor of Food and Wine magazine, said she expected that, given the fortunes to be made in the restaurant business in Las Vegas, chefs would continue to brand themselves there as their reputations and media exposure transcend their home markets to a national audience. But, she added, other major cities would be beneficiaries of the same trend.
“Chefs love to be in Vegas. There is so much money to be made, and the deals have in general seemed to be pretty good,” she said. “But there is much more interest around the country for getting name-brand chefs, and we will see more star chefs going into underserved, fantastic cities—not just Las Vegas.”
Yet no two operators are branching away from home for the same reasons.
Dennis Berkowitz, founder and president of Max’s Restaurants in San Francisco, said he probably would not have explored the possibility of opening in the Chicago metropolitan area were it not for the sizable increases in the cost of doing business in California in the past two years.
His company’s outpost in Skokie, Ill., is in an abandoned Houlihan’s, which still was gutted to be reconfigured as a 250-seat Max’s.
“It has just become oppressively expensive to do business [in California],” Berkowitz said. “It was bad enough that we probably have the highest minimum wage in the country. Now the city of San Francisco has passed a sick-leave ordinance that permits one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. That works out to about nine sick days a year, or 72 hours, you are automatically entitled to whether you are sick or not.
“Add that to our $9.14 minimum wage, in a state without a tip credit, and it’s enough to drive you out of the mid-range part of this business. It’s kind of hard selling a $10 hamburger when minimum wage works out to something like $13.”
Berkowitz said that maintaining contact with friends and former colleagues who knew the Chicago market was helpful in deciding to give Skokie a shot.
Tarbell of Phoenix, who opened The Oven Pizza e Vino in a completely refurbished development in downtown Lakewood, Colo., called Belmar Center, said that expanding there was not unlike that old saying on landing a job: “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”
In his case, Tarbell was friendly with the developers of the project, and they approached him with the idea of opening in the 124-acre, mixed-use residential, commercial and entertainment district.
“It’s very scary to think about opening your second restaurant 800 miles away, but we’re going into our third year,” Tarbell said.
The possibility of holding onto a talented cooking partner while tapping into a gentrifying residential neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis gave Sanchez the confidence to open a second Adobo Grill after 20 years in Illinois.
“The other thing, too, is that people who live in Indianapolis have not really been exposed to authentic Mexican food outside of the chains,” Sanchez said.
Scott Feldman, president and founder of Two Twelve Management and Marketing, a Manhattan-based firm that provides agent representation for several high-profile chefs, foodservice companies and chef-created retail food products, said that he expected more chefs will be leaving their home markets to expand to other cities in the years to come.
One reason for that, Feldman suggested, is that chefs are learning how to network better during their playtime, vacations and business travels, and they are often exposed to opportunities earlier generations of chef-owners would have been reluctant to explore or invest in.
He said he holds what he calls a private, invitation-only “pop-up lounge” once a year for about 100 VIP chefs in Aspen, Colo., during the Aspen Food and Wine Festival during which operators have a casual, press-free networking exchange where the topic of discussion is often expansion opportunities in other cities.
Even as some chefs strike out to new terrain, others continue to move to cities like New York, New Orleans and Las Vegas to see how well they can compete in towns where consumers and critics take no prisoners.
“New York is a very important city for restaurants,” said Rick Wahlstedt, co-partner and co-founder of the now three-unit Japonais chain, which has branched out from its Chicago birthplace to Vegas and the Big Apple. “Because Japonais had been very warmly received in Chicago, we looked to enter another market on the East Coast.
“Naturally, as a New Yorker with other restaurants in the region, it seemed like the next logical step,” Wahlstedt said. “It is important to present the property differently for each market while keeping the integrity and feeling of the restaurant the same throughout.”