Town

Climbing the ladder and looking for a chain

For much of his career Zakarian had worked behind the scenes in supporting roles, leaving the institutions that employed him—some of the most storied in New York—to bask in the spotlight. Town propelled the chef into another sphere altogether.

Today, the restaurant is the flagship property of a burgeoning empire. In 2005, riffing on the branding muscle built into the restaurant’s name, the chef opened Country, another labor of love that ran months behind schedule.

With three more New York projects already on the books and a fast-food concept and future Town and Country restaurants on the theoretical drawing board, he’s just getting started.

“Even before I opened Town, I knew that I wanted to open eight, maybe 10 restaurants,” he says.

Zakarian came up in the restaurant business with some of New York’s most prominent chefs like Terrance Brennan, David Bouley and Michael Lomonaco. As young men, they all worked on the line at Sirio Maccione’s original Le Cirque. Like so many of his peers of a certain generation, he came to the kitchen after exploring other career options first.

His first taste of the hospitality business was tending bar, underage, at El Morocco in his hometown of Worcester, Mass. Midway through an economics degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Zakarian landed a stipend to fund a year doing “research” in France. He spent most of his time, and money, eating his way from one Michelin-starred restaurant to the next.

“On my days off, I’d eat bread and cheese,” he says.

At one top spot in Paris, the sight of the chef and his beautiful bride working the room had a particularly lasting impact. The man, Zakarian thought, seems so absolutely in charge of his restaurant.

“They were the sexiest couple,” he recalls. “I thought to myself, that is who I want to be.”

Back in the United States he set about turning that dream to reality, enrolling in The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., then offering himself after graduation as free labor at Le Cirque, then run by French chef Alain Sailhac. Three months after he started, a paid position came open.

Zakarian stayed five years, eventually rising to chef de cuisine. Le Cirque gave him a taste for work in high-profile kitchens. His next brief stop was another bastion of New York power and money, the “21” Club, just then emerging from a full renovation. For Zakarian, “21” gave way at the start of the 1990s to the restaurant in Ian Schrager’s Royalton Hotel, the property that ignited today’s boutique hotel mania.

Risky move pays off

“It was a restaurant in a hotel lobby: dark, no windows,” says Zakarian, who opened the spot. “Back then hotel restaurants were awful. Everyone said I was crazy to take the job.”

44 was an instant sensation.

Although other positions would follow at Schrager’s Delano Hotel in South Beach and the steakhouse Patroon in midtown Manhattan, 44 is the restaurant that made way for Town. When Zakarian first began thinking of launching a place of his own, he pictured a throwback version of the modern, lounge-style 44.

“Really,” he says, “I’ve been opening the same restaurant for years.”

The premise was simple, he says: “a classic New York restaurant, elegant, sexy, but not too formal.”

He had a the straightforward name in mind even before he landed a space.

“It’s not uptown, it’s not downtown, it’s Town,” he says. “‘I’ll see you in Town,’ ‘call me when you get to Town.’ The possibilities are endless.”

He considered a large raw space in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, but fearing the renovations might turn into a financial black hole, begged out just before going to contract. The location would later become Craft, the cornerstone of his friend Tom Colicchio’s own growing empire.

Meanwhile, hotel developer Ira Drukier approached with what seemed like the ideal proposal. Drukier had begun transforming an old parking garage on West 56th Street into a David Rockwell-designed boutique hotel. Intrigued by Zakarian’s cooking and hotel experience, he invited him to come on board as a restaurant partner.

“For a chef to understand what a hotel restaurant is, is a big deal,” Drukier says.

Zakarian took one look at the cavernous sub-basement set aside for a restaurant and pictured the Town of his dreams.

Setting a city scene

“I immediately knew what I wanted to do with the place,” the chef says. “David [Rockwell] drew up a few sketches and that was that.”

Rockwell transformed the concrete pit with exposed pipes and dangling wires into a “nosh pit dreamed up by Busby Berkeley,” as it was described in the New Yorker. The decor, based largely on Zakarian’s direction—“I’m very hands-on,” he says—is just as he envisioned, simple and elegant.

Suede banquettes give way to a sweeping wall of alternating textural patterns and shimmering curtains mimicking Champagne bubbles in crystal beads. The entrance bar, described by the reviewer for the New York Observer as “reminiscent of a 1930s Pullman Club Car,” lines a long corridor that ends at a staircase leading down into the vast high-ceilinged, sky-lit dining room.

“I wanted you to walk through this dark narrow space,” Zakarian says. That hall-like setting draws guests to enter because, he says, “you’d want to see what’s on the other side.”

Setting the table with standards

The food, meanwhile, is as polished as the decor. Zakarian calls his cooking “dynamic-American,” or sometimes even “eclectic New York.” The terms are essentially meaningless.

“I wanted to come up with something that would allow me to do whatever I want,” he says. “How do you express your entire personality in two words? If I really had to define my food, I’d probably say it’s French-American.”

His dishes, as he once told Newsweek, are not “an ingredient lovefest.” You’ll find in his repertoire inspiration, and ingredients, from all over the planet—Indian dal, Spanish Marcona almonds, Thai kaffir lime—used sparingly with only a few other elements.

When he can find the time Zakarian “stays fresh” through working vacations watching and learning in acclaimed kitchens in Europe. Over the years he’s spent time at Arpége in Paris, Auberge de L’ill in Alsace and Pierre Orsay in Lyon. Next on the agenda are a few spots in Sicily.

Despite this constant thirst for new ideas, Zakarian is not one of those chefs who feels the need to be constantly reinventing himself or his food. By design, the basic selection of dishes at Town hasn’t changed much in the last six years.

“I’m not looking for surprises when I go out to eat,” the chef says.

His top-selling dishes are in constant rotation. Many of the most iconic items—the foie gras terrine with sweet pepper jelly, the risotto of escargots with sweet roasted garlic and black truffle essence, the duck steak with soba buckwheat pilaf—grew out of ideas he’s been trying for years.

“Sometimes new ideas come,” he says. “More often they don’t.”