Danny Meyer
What restaurants do you visit when you’re in St. Louis? St. Louis icons like Steak ’n Shake, Ted Drewes, maybe Crown Candy Kitchen—the kinds of things I can only get in St. Louis. I would go somewhere on the Hill and eat a salad with Provel cheese and some toasted ravioli—and then I might eat some barbecued pig snoots.
BY ELAINE X. GRANT
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF UNION SQUARE HOSPITALITY GROUP
Danny Meyer has always loved food, but when he left his Ladue home in the mid-1970s for Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., he planned to pursue a career in politics. A quarter-century later, Meyer runs some of the best restaurants in New York, including Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern, named by Zagat the most popular restaurants of 2004 and 2005, respectively. His two most recent endeavors prove his culinary range: This year he opened The Modern, bringing fine dining to the Museum of Modern Art, and last year he debuted the Shake Shack, a kiosk selling burgers, frozen custard and hot dogs in Madison Square Park. Now a New Yorker through and through—he lives there with his wife and four children—Meyer nevertheless feels deeply connected to his hometown.
How did your calling to the public life morph into a career in restaurants? After graduation, I went to Chicago, dabbled in TV, then got a job with John Anderson’s presidential campaign. After the campaign, I moved to New York. That’s where I really wanted to be. I loved the restaurants, theater, horseracing, jazz. I got myself a job selling electronic tags to stop shoplifters. I would plan all my sales calls around where I would want to have lunch. In late 1983, I finally decided to get serious and do what I’d gone to school for. The way to get into politics was to get a law degree, but on the eve of taking my LSAT, I freaked out. I was talking to one of my uncles, and I said, “I don’t want to be a lawyer.” He said, “All I’ve heard you talk about your whole life is food and restaurants, so why don’t you get into restaurants?”
How did you go about switching gears? The first thing I did was take a class in restaurant management at the New York Restaurant School with a college roommate. About two weeks into it, his dad caught wind of it and made him drop out and go to business school—restaurant school was not what he was to have done with a liberal arts degree. He felt so guilty for leaving me in the lurch that he connected me with a $250-a-week job as an assistant manager. I said to myself, “I need to get this out of my system; I’m either going to love it or I’m going to hate it, but I can’t wonder about it.”
Did you intend to stay in restaurant management? The fantasy was that I would be a chef, so I went off to cook in Italy and France. I had a great experience and learned a lot, but I also learned that I was more of a generalist. I love food, and to this day I’m very involved with the food in my restaurants, but I’ve surrounded myself with chefs who can cook circles around me.
And how have New Yorkers reacted? Oh my God, it’s packed. We’re open from 11 a.m. to 11 at night, and the line never stops. We had no idea how it would captivate the New York public. Blue Smoke, the barbecue restaurant, was also infused with a lot of things I love about St. Louis—we had homemade toasted ravioli when we first opened, and to this day our most popular ribs are the St. Louis spare ribs.
Anything new on the horizon? There are two things we’re working on right now. One is to establish a catering company, which will be called Hudson Yards Catering. It will be located in a new area called Hudson Yards, where there are a lot of old railyards. If New York had won the Olympic bid, a lot of the development would have happened there. I’ve always enjoyed trying to locate businesses in what I consider to be emerging neighborhoods, then naming the restaurant after the neighborhood and trying to play a role in that community.
The other project nearing the finish line is a business book I’m writing, a peek behind the scenes in the restaurant world that will be applicable to a lot of different businesses.
Have you ever considered bringing your restaurant expertise back home? No, I really haven’t. The Modern represented the first time I’d ever even opened a restaurant outside my own neighborhood. Oddly, there was something in the Post-Dispatch about how I was going to be working with Busch’s Grove. The man who is doing the project, Lester Miller, FedExed me the article and said, “I know we’ve never talked, but I thought I could get your attention by putting this in Jerry Berger’s column.” I connected him with a top restaurant-designing company called David Rockwell in New York.
How have your St. Louis roots colored your New York endeavors? The thing I learned growing up in St. Louis—going to Schneithorst’s, Dominic’s, Giovanni’s, Busch’s Grove—was the power of hospitality, the enormously warm feelings of loyalty that come from feeling welcome and being recognized and having the sense that the restaurant is happy to see you. When I came to New York in 1980, that didn’t exist. It was the velvet-rope era—how many people can you keep out to make more people want to come. Which never made sense to me. One of things we’ve done, with Union Square Café first and then all of our restaurants, is to bring that sense of welcome to New York.
So that’s your recipe for success? Yes. Hospitality is king. The trend that is never going to go out of style is that when people go to a restaurant, they go there to be restored. It’s not just how a restaurant nourishes people but how it nurtures people. The emotional experience is everything.
