So you have New England roots....

I was born in western Massachussetts, summered on Cape Cod. I was fortunate enough that my parents had a little summer cottage, so we went every year. When I was high school age, we moved to the Cape full time and I went to school there, then moved to Boston. While I was on the Cape, as a kid, I started working in the restaurant business.

Is that what shaped you, your love of food, or was there cooking at home?

 

I was cooking part time weekends, afterschool, etc, in high school in a restaurant on the Cape. I went to Boston, 1976, and started cooking at Lily's, they were cutting edge at the the time. I've been in the business ever since, 35 years.

 

Anyone else in your family in the culinary field?

 

Funny enough, my dad, many years ago was in the restaurant business, early fast food, chicken concept, in and out really fast.

 

When I left Lily's I kept working in Boston and within two jobs I was a chef of a restaurant,  which is very unusual, because I was still very young. I had this great opportunity in a very small place, C'est Si Bon.

 

Was it classic French?

 

It was a French patissierie right near the Ritz Carlton. Two gentlemen took it over and renovated the upstairs into a beautiful dining room and the downstairs was like a cafe/patissierie. I was recommended to them and brought in to be the chef. What we did, which was unusual at the time, was a prix fixe menu and wrote a (new) menu everyday. At that time it was startingly different and expensive, but it worked. 

Where did you get your inspiration to create your menu from?

 

I worked at Chillingsworth for a summer which is a highly regarded restaurant in Brewster and at a couple of restaurants at Harvard Square.  There were a group of chefs who were starting to do things. There was a chef, Moncef Meddeb, who never got national recogonition, opened a restaurant called L'Espalier, way before Olive's ever opened, he was really hot. Robert Kincaid was really well known in the area, who is now in Washington, DC, never made the big time like TV chefs today, but a great chef. There was a little burgeoning thing happening there [Boston].

 

We look at 'big time' a little bit differently than being on TV. We consider big time that your restaurant if full, your doing a lot of covers every week, the food coming out of the kitchen is stellar and when we come to your restaurant, we have an experience as opposed to just dinner.

 

There are many of these, now, "celebrity chefs" who put their name on numerous properties and obviously at a certain point some have held on and some have not.

 

Our demographic are people interested in what chefs are cooking, not necessarily the TV personas.

 

Let me fast forward - I went from the Cape to Boston, Boston to New York, and then came down here [Miami]. I worked for Peter Glazier in New York. Peter bought a restaurant called Johnny's in the South Street Seaport, I had been working there as a chef for Bobby Shapiro. If you've read Kitchen Confidential, we sort of traveled, within a year or two, of the same places, both of us [Bourdain] worked for Bobby Shapiro. I had a chance to meet him and talked to him about some of these people.  He doesn't name him in the book, but he talks about the guy who drives the Rolls Royce. Peter took over the property and did Bridgewaters Fine Dining and Catering which is still at the Seaport. I left and moved down here.

 

That was the time when NYC was becoming the dining destination, with many chefs doing new and exciting things.

 

Yeah, I was there in the mid-80s to 90s. There was change going on, the old time French places were dropping out of vogue. You started getting more people downtown, not doing the traditional fine dining, but super quality in a more relaxed atmosphere.  Danny Meyer did that in a great way. It was prententious, you could go in a pair of jeans. From those (Gotham) and others you had a whole generation of new people. You had Daniel working at Le Cirque.

 

Jean-Georges was in Boston at that time.

 

Yes, then he came to New York. That's when I was there.

 

Then you come down to Florida where people want to each Macadamia Crusted Grouper! How did you deal with that?

 

You mentioned that dish twice (Smiling), the Floribbean, what we call the "Mango Chefs" which were popular here, Van Aiken and a couple of others. That's what was happening here. It's funny, I was in New York, had left a job, broken up with a girlfriend, had this ridiculously expensive apartment that I was having trouble keeping, and my brother was living in South Beach at the time.

 

He kept saying to me that South Beach is starting to happen. Come down, come down.  I had no interest. He sent me a round trip ticket. He knew I wasn't working and I was trying to figure out what my next move was going to be.

I took the ticket and came down on Labor Day Weekend and I moved down here two months later.

 

There's a pattern. You were in New York when their culinary scene started to pop, then you arrive in Miami, just as the culinary scene starts to develop its own personality.

 

I would say the big change in Miami at that time wasn't quite culinary yet, although there were a lot of restaurants about to open. The models(fashion), hotels, the Ocean Drive thing, the nightlife, was all starting to unfold. It's funny, I moved down with a buddy of mine and the nightlife thing the first year was hysterical. There were 5, 6 or 7 bars and they each had one night...(Laughing).

 

There were the same people at each place on a different night.....

 

....the same (Laughing) people, that's right. If you went out every night you saw the same group. They moved from place to place.

It was a time in South Beach when there were some Europeans, some New Yorkers, the model photography group and everyone knew each other.  

 

They became the nucleus of what South Beach was.

 

Yes.  I was the chef of a little hotel restaurant on Ocean Drive called the Colony.  I was only there a year when my brother and I decided to open a restaurant on Lincoln Road, Lyon Frere, just after hurricane Andrew. When I was looking for spaces to open, while talking to a real estate broker, I asked about Lincoln Road.  They told me don't go there, it's never, ever going to happen there. We looked all over but found this place on Lincoln Road and we fell in love with the space.

 

The cost per square foot impacted your decision as well, correct?

 

Of course, but it was also the sense that Lincoln Road should be the place! Ocean Drive was already a little overly touristy.

 

Lincoln Road had its day, then it kinda of went to seed and was stagnant.

 

We really felt this was where the next 'thing' would be, that was in 1992. The building we opened in was on the corner of Lincoln and Pennsylvania. It had horrible aluminum siding, it had been a TV, hifi, appliance shop owned by Crazy Eddie's father. It had been vacant for six (6) years, we could have bought the building.  Ah, don't even talk to me about that.  Anyway we rented the space and got the thing up and running. It was not a restaurant, it was a market-cafe. I wanted to do my version of Dean & DeLuca down here. I was enamoured with them. I knew Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca, I was a wholesale customer of theirs when I was living in Boston, of their olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes, when they were first bringing them into this country. I didn't want to be in the restaurant business down here, partly because the staffing was so difficult back then. There was no way you could get quality cooks, it was so transient.

 

People were using restaurants as a stepping stone to the next great thing. They weren't looking to develop any roots.

 

It was bad, it was rough on the beach. People were getting arrested and taken out of kitchens. I was a little bit scared about the restaurant business down here at that time. It was like Pioneer Days, the Wild West.

The market/cafe would allow us to open up in the morning for coffee, we had take out food, a charcuterie,  an espresso bar, prepared foods and sold things like produce and breads.

 

It worked and what happened was we started to put seating outside. The city came over and asked us what we were doing. We told them we figured people would take a coffee and a danish, or a little plate of food and sit outside. We weren't a restaurant and weren't licensed as one. We thought people would like to eat lunch outside. It was Lincoln Road, there were no cars, no traffic, it was a natural setting. We put out 4 tables which became 30.

 

Were you the first outdoor seating establishment on Lincoln Road?

 

Absolutely! Unequivocably. They came over and had to figure out how to start taxing Lincoln Road.

 

Now look at it.

 

I figure the amount of millions of dollars the city collects in rent from the restaurants is staggering.

 

We were one of the first operations on Lincoln Road, other than the Chinese takeout that had been there since the 50s or 60s and a Baskin Robbins which lasted quite awhile. There was also a Latin America cafeteria where the French bakery is now. There was no outdoor seating and I don't know why. You're in Miami, you'd think people would want to sit outside.

 

It was a natural thing for you to move catering business after that.

 

Yes, it really was like what the French call a catering shop. It served purposes as a restaurant and as the Bohemian Lincoln Road set started filtering in. You could come into Lyon Frere and buy the New York Times and get a coffee.

 

Before we opened I told people we were going to sell espresso and cappuccino. No where on the beach could you get anything other than Cuban coffee. For 60 cents you could get enough coffee to feed an entire construction crew. I told people we'd be selling Illy espresso for $1.50 and they laughed, telling me it would never sell, we were in the wrong place. Within a year, we were the second largest user of Illy in Florida, Disneyworld being the biggest. 

 

There were no Starbucks in Florida, or New York for that matter, at the time. We were early on that. Epicure, on Alton Road, at that time, was the place to get cheese. All they had at the time was Finlandia swiss, a cheddar, and a really bad brie, it was like drek. By the way, they have the best cheese departments in Miami right now.  We kind of lead them down that road. We were up the street, they paid attention and the next thing you know, I'm not saying they were worried about us....

 

You get somebody bringing in quality products they have to pay attention....you were the competition.

 

.....as soon as we started doing really well, we ran into an issue with the construction of Lincoln Road. Epicure was watching what we were doing and the next thing you know they bringing up their product line in a big way. They knew it was changing, understanding that Miami Beach wasn't a bunch of old retirees. You had Italians, French, New Yorkers and their taste level was beyond what was here at the time. We kind of were a catalyst for change. 

 

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