Tweet
The Now-You-See-It Restaurant
By FRANK BRUNI
JOHN FRASER’S new restaurant is doomed. It may make a splash at the start, but by this time next year it will be over, done with, kaput.
At least if you take him at his word.
For his follow-up to Dovetail, an elegant success on the Upper West Side, Mr. Fraser has chosen a project with a death foretold. He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate.
He was also freed from many of the little and big concerns that can turn the opening of a restaurant into such a protracted odyssey and the running of it into such an expensive one.
Because he’s not fashioning a keeper, he can — and must — keep his investment low. He’s not paying for, or bothering with, a proper sign out front. The dozens of chairs, used, were bought on eBay for under $10 each, and if they’re not so durable, no sweat.
The bar, a mobile cart, will be stocked with only one brand of each spirit, and on a given night there will be just two whites, two reds and one sparkling wine. “I want to strip things down to what’s really important,” Mr. Fraser said, “and figure out what’s really essential.”
That’s an impulse that more and more chefs are indulging. Uninterested in the old formalities, impatient with the conventional rigmarole and eager simply to put their food in front of people, they’re asking themselves how much they can toy with the rest of the equation. Which trappings can be jettisoned, which rituals abandoned, and what novel shapes can a restaurant take while still fulfilling its core mission?
Mr. Fraser’s novelty, scheduled to open on Jan. 25 for what he estimates will be a nine-month run, is one answer — an especially striking, even eccentric one. It’s called What Happens When, and if the thought were finished and the predicate filled in, it would mention rules being rewritten and assumptions challenged.
Diners, for example, will be expected to set and reset the cutlery on their tables with utensils from drawers beneath. That way Mr. Fraser won’t need as many servers. It will save him money, he said, and translate into fewer intrusions for diners. “You’re visited only at points of the meal when you really need help,” he said.
Rather than woo bigwig investors who might make big-time demands, Mr. Fraser has decided to solicit hundreds of what are essentially contributions, from $5 to $2,500, through a micro-financing Web site, Kickstarter, which helps raise money for creative projects.
It’s an improvisatory approach for an improvisatory time, when chefs are finding all sorts of ways to eliminate overhead, streamline operations, edit out distractions and focus on the cooking, which is the beginning, end and point of it all.
In Chicago, the chef Grant Achatz is preparing to open Next, where diners will buy tickets in advance for an appointed hour and a predetermined menu. The pinpoint planning that allows him will save money on service staff.
Some chefs are hatching pop-up restaurants, which squat for just days or weeks in locations already furnished and equipped. Some are giving meals on wheels a spin.
Will Goldfarb, a refugee from several flashy, failed Manhattan restaurants, has done both. From 2009 to 2010 he collaborated on a barbecue trailer in the financial district called Picnick Smoked. And in late November he and several assistants made desserts for two days in borrowed bar space in SoHo.
“We just walked in and cooked,” he said. “We didn’t have to do a whole launch.”
Word of mouth brought in all the business needed for the pop-up’s fleeting existence.
By serving just one fixed multicourse dinner menu to a small group, the downtown restaurants Momofuku Ko and Torrisi Italian Specialties produce ambitious food from limited kitchens.
And they’re extravagant next to Porchetta, which the chef Sara Jenkins spent $200,000 (not much, in restaurant terms) to open in the East Village in 2008. It occupies just 275 square feet on the street level, seats all of six people and, at the start, served three main items: a porchetta plate, a porchetta sandwich and a mozzarella sandwich. But it reinvigorated her career while satisfying a bedrock desire. “What makes me happy,” she said, “is cooking good food and seeing people eat it.”
All around the city — and, for that matter, the country — restaurants are assuming unfamiliar, impromptu forms. To bide time and drum up revenue between the closing of Cabrito last month and the construction, in the same Village space, of a successor, its owners are playing host to a rotating cast of guest bartenders, whose libations will be accompanied by a succinct menu of ham sandwiches, ham plates, ham-stuffed fried chicken, a burger and peel-and-eat shrimp.
A menu of small plates that the chef Ari Stern serves at the bar Culturefix on the Lower East Side is also succinct, but what’s more noteworthy is the setting. Culturefix is conjoined with an electronics store above it and an art gallery in the back. The painting commissions and lamp and clock sales relieve him of pressure to move a large quantity of food or wring a big profit from it.
As a result he can shop and cook himself. “This is my hands doing everything,” said Mr. Stern, 33, who worked in a populous crew as the executive sous-chef at Asia de Cuba. “I don’t have to manage employees.”
That sort of control is part of what Mr. Fraser said he craved. At Dovetail, he noted, the menu can evolve only incrementally, because around two dozen cooks have to be retrained.
At What Happens When, which will serve fewer guests from a menu with at most five options each for appetizer, entree and dessert, “I’ll have to convince five people,” he said.
It was early last week, and he was sitting in Dovetail’s main dining room. Nearby was a row of three service tables that had been custom made at a cost of $3,000 each. The scattered lamps within view had cost $450 apiece, not counting shades. There were bud vases on the tables, ornamented Christmas wreaths on the walls. Asked how much of this could be subtracted without diminishing a meal, he said, “Probably all of it.”
He is a principal owner of Dovetail as well as its head chef. To open it in 2007 took about 18 months and more than $2 million, what with the outfitting of a 2,000-square-foot kitchen, the acquisition of wine inventory and all the rest of it. Most of that money was rounded up via a process he disliked.
“There’s begging,” he said. “There’s pleading. It’s like you’re trying to talk someone into going on a date with you.”
Dovetail earned three out of four stars from the New York Times, three out of five stars from New York magazine and a Michelin star. But Mr. Fraser said that as proud as that makes him, the scale of the operation and the weight of its fans’ expectations made him feel shackled.
“It’s almost like death, to achieve your dream,” he said.
He was wondering what it might be like to have a restaurant he could fool around with and walk away from when, less than three months ago, he happened upon the SoHo space, on Cleveland Place, where Le Jardin Bistro had just closed. The landlord was willing to write an eight-month lease, beginning in December, with a likelihood of several month-by-month renewals until the building, mostly vacant, can be redeveloped.
In a certain death Mr. Fraser saw a certain freedom. He set an opening budget of just $100,000, about half from his own pocket and half from acquaintances making minor investments, and forced himself to be resourceful. He traded a fancy plancha that he had been awarded in a chefs’ contest, but had never used, for two less-fancy stoves, to be installed in a kitchen of about 200 square feet. He rounded up tables and even a walk-in refrigerator that were castoffs from other restaurants.
And he enlisted a graphic and industrial designer (Emilie Baltz), an interior designer (Elle Kunnos de Voss) and an avant-garde composer (Micah Silver) for little guaranteed money by setting up What Happens When in a manner that allows them to strut their stuff. Every month the restaurant will adopt a new theme, underscored not only by a new menu but also by new graphic icons, tweaked décor and a new multichannel soundtrack (crackling fire, swirling snow, synthesizer whooshes and whoops) in lieu of the usual play list.
“Sometimes no money is better than money,” said Ms. Baltz, referring to the creative risks allowed by the monthly reinventions. Those reinventions are why Mr. Fraser pledged to close the restaurant at the nine-month mark, even if the building is still standing. He won’t have the energy to go on, he said.
When the team met last week for coffee, Ms. Kunnos de Voss alternately described her challenge as “a financial disaster” and “a dream project.” She is trying to do a lot with black paint and artfully clustered light bulbs, and she will spend an estimated 80 hours upholstering all of those eBay chairs herself. What Happens When has a seat capacity of about 65, in comparison with roughly 115 at Dovetail.
When Mr. Fraser said the restaurant would be closed only on Mondays, she chimed in that she might need more than a 24-hour pause for the monthly décor alterations.
“Overnight,” Mr. Silver, the composer, said, kidding. “You get overnight.”
“You’re not working hard enough if you can’t do that,” Mr. Fraser added, smiling.
They hope to raise at least $20,000 and as much as $45,000 through Kickstarter to help with continued expenses, including furnishing the back garden with more seating. As a reward, Kickstarter contributors will get, at the least, their names on a restaurant wall. Bigger contributions yield books of restaurant recipes, say, or dinner for two. If the money doesn’t come in, Mr. Fraser said, he’ll figure out something else. The restaurant is intended to be lean and nimble enough to adapt.
“We don’t have to live up to certain expectations,“ he said. “We just have to be.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/di...tml?ref=dining
JOHN FRASER’S new restaurant is doomed. It may make a splash at the start, but by this time next year it will be over, done with, kaput.
At least if you take him at his word.
For his follow-up to Dovetail, an elegant success on the Upper West Side, Mr. Fraser has chosen a project with a death foretold. He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate.
He was also freed from many of the little and big concerns that can turn the opening of a restaurant into such a protracted odyssey and the running of it into such an expensive one.
Because he’s not fashioning a keeper, he can — and must — keep his investment low. He’s not paying for, or bothering with, a proper sign out front. The dozens of chairs, used, were bought on eBay for under $10 each, and if they’re not so durable, no sweat.
The bar, a mobile cart, will be stocked with only one brand of each spirit, and on a given night there will be just two whites, two reds and one sparkling wine. “I want to strip things down to what’s really important,” Mr. Fraser said, “and figure out what’s really essential.”
That’s an impulse that more and more chefs are indulging. Uninterested in the old formalities, impatient with the conventional rigmarole and eager simply to put their food in front of people, they’re asking themselves how much they can toy with the rest of the equation. Which trappings can be jettisoned, which rituals abandoned, and what novel shapes can a restaurant take while still fulfilling its core mission?
Mr. Fraser’s novelty, scheduled to open on Jan. 25 for what he estimates will be a nine-month run, is one answer — an especially striking, even eccentric one. It’s called What Happens When, and if the thought were finished and the predicate filled in, it would mention rules being rewritten and assumptions challenged.
Diners, for example, will be expected to set and reset the cutlery on their tables with utensils from drawers beneath. That way Mr. Fraser won’t need as many servers. It will save him money, he said, and translate into fewer intrusions for diners. “You’re visited only at points of the meal when you really need help,” he said.
Rather than woo bigwig investors who might make big-time demands, Mr. Fraser has decided to solicit hundreds of what are essentially contributions, from $5 to $2,500, through a micro-financing Web site, Kickstarter, which helps raise money for creative projects.
It’s an improvisatory approach for an improvisatory time, when chefs are finding all sorts of ways to eliminate overhead, streamline operations, edit out distractions and focus on the cooking, which is the beginning, end and point of it all.
In Chicago, the chef Grant Achatz is preparing to open Next, where diners will buy tickets in advance for an appointed hour and a predetermined menu. The pinpoint planning that allows him will save money on service staff.
Some chefs are hatching pop-up restaurants, which squat for just days or weeks in locations already furnished and equipped. Some are giving meals on wheels a spin.
Will Goldfarb, a refugee from several flashy, failed Manhattan restaurants, has done both. From 2009 to 2010 he collaborated on a barbecue trailer in the financial district called Picnick Smoked. And in late November he and several assistants made desserts for two days in borrowed bar space in SoHo.
“We just walked in and cooked,” he said. “We didn’t have to do a whole launch.”
Word of mouth brought in all the business needed for the pop-up’s fleeting existence.
By serving just one fixed multicourse dinner menu to a small group, the downtown restaurants Momofuku Ko and Torrisi Italian Specialties produce ambitious food from limited kitchens.
And they’re extravagant next to Porchetta, which the chef Sara Jenkins spent $200,000 (not much, in restaurant terms) to open in the East Village in 2008. It occupies just 275 square feet on the street level, seats all of six people and, at the start, served three main items: a porchetta plate, a porchetta sandwich and a mozzarella sandwich. But it reinvigorated her career while satisfying a bedrock desire. “What makes me happy,” she said, “is cooking good food and seeing people eat it.”
All around the city — and, for that matter, the country — restaurants are assuming unfamiliar, impromptu forms. To bide time and drum up revenue between the closing of Cabrito last month and the construction, in the same Village space, of a successor, its owners are playing host to a rotating cast of guest bartenders, whose libations will be accompanied by a succinct menu of ham sandwiches, ham plates, ham-stuffed fried chicken, a burger and peel-and-eat shrimp.
A menu of small plates that the chef Ari Stern serves at the bar Culturefix on the Lower East Side is also succinct, but what’s more noteworthy is the setting. Culturefix is conjoined with an electronics store above it and an art gallery in the back. The painting commissions and lamp and clock sales relieve him of pressure to move a large quantity of food or wring a big profit from it.
As a result he can shop and cook himself. “This is my hands doing everything,” said Mr. Stern, 33, who worked in a populous crew as the executive sous-chef at Asia de Cuba. “I don’t have to manage employees.”
That sort of control is part of what Mr. Fraser said he craved. At Dovetail, he noted, the menu can evolve only incrementally, because around two dozen cooks have to be retrained.
At What Happens When, which will serve fewer guests from a menu with at most five options each for appetizer, entree and dessert, “I’ll have to convince five people,” he said.
It was early last week, and he was sitting in Dovetail’s main dining room. Nearby was a row of three service tables that had been custom made at a cost of $3,000 each. The scattered lamps within view had cost $450 apiece, not counting shades. There were bud vases on the tables, ornamented Christmas wreaths on the walls. Asked how much of this could be subtracted without diminishing a meal, he said, “Probably all of it.”
He is a principal owner of Dovetail as well as its head chef. To open it in 2007 took about 18 months and more than $2 million, what with the outfitting of a 2,000-square-foot kitchen, the acquisition of wine inventory and all the rest of it. Most of that money was rounded up via a process he disliked.
“There’s begging,” he said. “There’s pleading. It’s like you’re trying to talk someone into going on a date with you.”
Dovetail earned three out of four stars from the New York Times, three out of five stars from New York magazine and a Michelin star. But Mr. Fraser said that as proud as that makes him, the scale of the operation and the weight of its fans’ expectations made him feel shackled.
“It’s almost like death, to achieve your dream,” he said.
He was wondering what it might be like to have a restaurant he could fool around with and walk away from when, less than three months ago, he happened upon the SoHo space, on Cleveland Place, where Le Jardin Bistro had just closed. The landlord was willing to write an eight-month lease, beginning in December, with a likelihood of several month-by-month renewals until the building, mostly vacant, can be redeveloped.
In a certain death Mr. Fraser saw a certain freedom. He set an opening budget of just $100,000, about half from his own pocket and half from acquaintances making minor investments, and forced himself to be resourceful. He traded a fancy plancha that he had been awarded in a chefs’ contest, but had never used, for two less-fancy stoves, to be installed in a kitchen of about 200 square feet. He rounded up tables and even a walk-in refrigerator that were castoffs from other restaurants.
And he enlisted a graphic and industrial designer (Emilie Baltz), an interior designer (Elle Kunnos de Voss) and an avant-garde composer (Micah Silver) for little guaranteed money by setting up What Happens When in a manner that allows them to strut their stuff. Every month the restaurant will adopt a new theme, underscored not only by a new menu but also by new graphic icons, tweaked décor and a new multichannel soundtrack (crackling fire, swirling snow, synthesizer whooshes and whoops) in lieu of the usual play list.
“Sometimes no money is better than money,” said Ms. Baltz, referring to the creative risks allowed by the monthly reinventions. Those reinventions are why Mr. Fraser pledged to close the restaurant at the nine-month mark, even if the building is still standing. He won’t have the energy to go on, he said.
When the team met last week for coffee, Ms. Kunnos de Voss alternately described her challenge as “a financial disaster” and “a dream project.” She is trying to do a lot with black paint and artfully clustered light bulbs, and she will spend an estimated 80 hours upholstering all of those eBay chairs herself. What Happens When has a seat capacity of about 65, in comparison with roughly 115 at Dovetail.
When Mr. Fraser said the restaurant would be closed only on Mondays, she chimed in that she might need more than a 24-hour pause for the monthly décor alterations.
“Overnight,” Mr. Silver, the composer, said, kidding. “You get overnight.”
“You’re not working hard enough if you can’t do that,” Mr. Fraser added, smiling.
They hope to raise at least $20,000 and as much as $45,000 through Kickstarter to help with continued expenses, including furnishing the back garden with more seating. As a reward, Kickstarter contributors will get, at the least, their names on a restaurant wall. Bigger contributions yield books of restaurant recipes, say, or dinner for two. If the money doesn’t come in, Mr. Fraser said, he’ll figure out something else. The restaurant is intended to be lean and nimble enough to adapt.
“We don’t have to live up to certain expectations,“ he said. “We just have to be.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/di...tml?ref=dining
Comment