Bruce Cost went from counseling New York City heroin addicts to running a Chinese fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco to conceptualizing Pan-Asian casual dining in the Midwest.
Cost had always been fascinated by China, but as a student at Wesleyan University in the 1960s, he couldn’t study much about contemporary China, which at the time was largely closed to the outside world. The year he graduated, 1966, China’s Cultural Revolution began, completely shutting it off from the rest of the world for another six years.
But that didn’t keep Cost from learning about the country, or its food. After college he started working at Xerox in Manhattan and befriended a colleague from Shanghai who introduced him to fresh ginger.
Then he found a cook and teacher, Virginia Lee, who taught him about authentic Chinese food.
Meanwhile, he won a grant to work in social services, and he set up a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley as a residential treatment center for New York City heroin addicts. Among other things, he taught cooking.
He then followed his family to Northern California and soon fell in with the food community there, meeting local and organic food pioneer Alice Waters among others.
Although Cost still had no restaurant experience, a Hong Kong group asked him to help with a restaurant in San Francisco.
The result, a fine-dining place called Monsoon, enjoyed critical success and stayed open for about three years before failing financially.
After a couple of other ventures—Ginger Island in Berkeley, and then a small chain called Ginger Club—he was contacted by Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and ended up developing their Big Bowl and Wow Bao operations, as well as Big Bowl’s fast-casual spin-off, Big Bowl Express, and a fledgling product company that now sells frozen dumplings in 22 supermarkets in Minnesota.
What was it like going from independent restaurants to Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises?
When I went to work with [LEYE chief] Rich Melman in 1994, people wondered how I could turn my back on what I had been doing. They said I was going on to make money, but the fact is that Big Bowl serves 30,000 people a week, and they’re happy.
BIOGRAPHY Title: Asian-concept partner, Lettuce Entertain You EnterprisesBirth date: June 12, 1945Hometown: New York CityEducation: B.A. in art and art history from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., 1966; graduate work elsewhere in photography and English; teaching certificates in special education from The New School in New York City and State University of New York at New PaltzCareer highlights: being nominated twice for James Beard Foundation awards; being chef at one of six four-star restaurants in San Francisco; writing three cookbooks; developing the Big Bowl and Wow Bao concepts.
And when you have your own restaurant, like Monsoon, you’re doing a lot more than just working on the food. Now there are other people to work with the waiters and run the restaurant, so in many ways it’s a lot more fun.
How did Big Bowl evolve?
In 1994 it was a hodgepodge of health food, all served in a bowl. Then I hit it off with Rich Melman, who had recently sold Maggiano’s [Little Italy] and had some money. People were starting to get interested in Asian food and that’s the direction Big Bowl went. Then the concept was sold to Brinker International in 2001, and I went to work for them for a little while. I did the food, so I kind of had to.
Then Lettuce Entertain You bought it back when Brinker restructured in 2004.
Then it was fun, because I dramatically changed the menu. I’d been in Thailand—I think I was in Khao Yai park there and had some pork laab. Thailand’s probably the only place in the world where the national parks have great food. It was just blow-your-head-off [spicy], and younger people like that.
We also have a lot of Indian customers who like the fact that we have some dishes that are actually hot.
CHEF’S TIPS Don’t keep dipping sauces or chopped ginger, garlic or herbs overnight or they lose their clean taste. Lemons in the United States are much more consistent in flavor than limes, so even for dishes that traditionally use limes develop your recipes using lemons instead for more consistency.
Then lately we’ve moved into local ingredients and naturally raised pork and chickens, which is really very Asian.
I also just developed a bunch of drinks here based on syrups from teas.
We also have a citrus martini with a little passion fruit and orange. For that drink I take sugar and chopped fresh kaffir lime leaf and dip the rim of the glass in that. It’s a nice drink.
Recently, I made a Thai mojito. I muddled kaffir lime leaf and mint, a little bit of Thai chile, and a lot of cilantro, some lemon grass syrup, gin and a little bit of soda water.
You also developed Big Bowl Express. Tell me about that concept.
They’re kiosks in upscale supermarkets. We have eight of them. We’ve worked it out where we cook two or three dishes at a time and they’re held for no longer than 30 minutes. Then we toss them out.
How much do you toss out?
Not much. We time it pretty well for people coming in during the lunch hour. We know when the business will be at each kiosk. And then there are slower times when we just cook the dishes to order.
How about three-unit Wow Bao, where you sell Chinese dumplings that are like stuffed, steamed bread?
People thought we were from Mars when we introduced it, and now we have this big Web following, and with young people it’s really a hit. So that’s fun. And I like the possibility of introducing a new food to the mainstream U.S.
You prepare a lot of your sauces and other items from scratch. How do you do that while keeping costs down?
We have good food cost. When Brinker owned Big Bowl they brought in a lot of prepared products and saved on labor costs. Instead, we have a bunch of prep guys who work all the time, but our food costs are in the low 20s, so labor can be a little higher. Combine the two and you get a much fresher product. If you buy things seasonally and fresh, you get a better price on food, and it means better food without skimping.
We use fresh water chestnuts, too. The kitchen staff doesn’t love them, because they’re a real pain [to prepare], but we can say to our customers “that coconut crunch is actually fresh water chestnut.”
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I’d like to be working with Lettuce Entertain You on something. I’ve realized that I could hire a research assistant and write a definitive Chinese cookbook.
