On Monday, May 13, Jean-Georges Vongerichten got into a car outside his apartment in the West Village and asked to be taken to the airport. It would have been an odd time to leave town: The next day he was opening a new restaurant, the Fulton, in Lower Manhattan, on the waterfront facing Brooklyn. But Vongerichten wasn’t flying anywhere. He was going to check in on another restaurant, this one opening on Wednesday, inside the new TWA Hotel at J.F.K.
Opening two restaurants back to back, on consecutive days, would be impressive for a Chipotle or an In-N-Out Burger. It’s absolutely unheard-of for a fine-dining chef like Vongerichten. It also wasn’t part of the plan. The two openings had been years in the making, both tied up in larger redevelopment projects that the chef had no control over, so he could do little but watch as the deadlines slowly converged on each other: The opening date for the Fulton kept getting pushed back, while the other, for the Paris Café, didn’t budge. As late as mid-April, Vongerichten still thought he would have a few days’ buffer between them, but then that, too, disappeared.
The 62-year-old Vongerichten looked grumpy, or whatever grumpy turns into when it’s deployed on the face of a man whose default mode is glee. He squirmed in his seat and kept glancing out the window distractedly. The developers of the TWA Hotel had only turned the Paris Café kitchen over to Vongerichten the day before, which was ridiculously late. At the Fulton, the kitchen was ready six weeks before opening, and Vongerichten and his team had been training nonstop since then. The goal for both restaurants was to stage an opening night that felt like nothing of the sort, as if the restaurant had been up and running perfectly for months. At this point it looked as if only the Fulton would make it. “It’s a massive pressure,” Vongerichten said.
The Fulton and the Paris Café would give Vongerichten 14 restaurants in New York and 38 around the world. In the time it took to report and write this article, he added two more, both in the new Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. Four restaurants in three months — it’s a lot, but 2019 will probably still be slower than 2017, when he opened seven, in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, São Paulo and London. This pace is intentional. “My dream,” he told me, “would be to open a restaurant a month and then get rid of it.”
His friend Eric Ripert, who has spent a career focused on only one restaurant, Le Bernardin, says Vongerichten would be “bored to death” if he was stuck with only his New York flagship on Central Park, Jean-Georges, to run. Ripert was equally insistent, however, that Jean-Georges remained one of the best restaurants in the world, despite his colleague’s ever-expanding portfolio of commitments. Even his detractors, those who think the individual restaurants suffer for the good of the whole, have trouble hiding their wonder at the juggernaut he has assembled. One critic, in a review of a relatively early addition to the Vongerichten culinary universe, asked if the chef had perhaps been cloned. Vongerichten himself credits it all to “the formula,” a set of procedures that he and his team put in place to make all these openings run as smoothly as possible.
In the car’s back seat, one member of that team, Daniel Del Vecchio, executive vice president of Jean-Georges Management, was taking calls and typing on a laptop. In addition to Del Vecchio, who hardly leaves Vongerichten’s side, the two most important players for openings are Gregory Brainin, who leads a sort of commando unit that trains cooks at Jean-Georges restaurants all over the world, and Lois Freedman, the president of the company and the only person I saw (regularly) overrule Vongerichten himself. “We’re a very tight-knit group,” Del Vecchio told me. “Greg Brainin has been with Jean-Georges, what, almost 20 years. I’m 27 years. Lois is more than 30 years.” All of them started as cooks and grew into executives as the business grew. They now oversee 5,000 employees in 12 countries. (Facebook, by comparison, had only 3,200 employees when it went public.) Last year, the Jean-Georges group did $350 million in total sales.
In the car, Vongerichten took a call from his fish supplier, running through a list of sea creatures that grew increasingly obscure as he went down it. He and Del Vecchio then talked about the new menus they were having printed for the Jean-Georges flagship. They had decided to jettison the à la carte menu and offer only a six- or 10-course tasting, each in omnivore and vegetarian versions. Vongerichten called it a “major change,” the biggest move he has made since the restaurant opened in 1997.
The mood in the car changed slightly during this conversation, from nervous energy to something more pensive. Despite Vongerichten’s insistence that he values all 38 of his restaurants equally — “they’re all my babies” — Jean-Georges was still the one that dominated his imagination, not the firstborn but the doted-upon middle child, the one who had achieved the greatest success but also required the most care and attention.
For the first time since we left the West Village, Vongerichten grew silent. But then he saw the sign for the TWA Hotel, and he yelped with happiness. “Look,” he said, “there’s our staff!” Pressed up against the second-floor window of the restaurant was a group of about 40 servers and line cooks. They had just turned on the gas in the kitchen. The first customers would be arriving in 48 hours.
To get a sense of what Vongerichten has built, without quite yet understanding how he built it, it might help to learn his breakfast schedule when he’s in New York. He doesn’t cook in his (huge, immaculate) kitchen at home but rather tours his restaurants. On Monday he eats at the Mercer, in SoHo; on Tuesday he’s at the Mark, on the Upper East Side; on Wednesday he’s at ABCV, in the Flatiron district; Thursday is the wild card; and Friday it’s breakfast at Jean-Georges.
What are his 38 restaurants? They don’t feel as if they are part of a chain — though in a manner of speaking, they are. They aren’t hotel restaurants, though a small number of them are in hotels. And, with the exception of Jean-Georges, they aren’t formal dining rooms, though the service at each exudes some of the stateliness of the highest-end, black-tie-and-silver-cloche places. They resemble instead a species of restaurant that has proliferated with the rise of the middle-class foodie. Precise but not fussy. Lush but not luxe. Expensive but not meant for expense accounts. A place you might go on a date night, but before you leave the house, you have to stare at your closet and ask, “Can I wear jeans?” (The answer is yes.)
Most of the restaurants in this class are one-offs, neighborhood joints created by culinary-school grads and sous chefs who have reached escape velocity from whatever kitchens they trained in. These are passion projects — the realization of a single chef’s vision, now that she finally gets to run her own shop. The bewildering trick that Vongerichten and his team have pulled off is to replicate these labors of love, but at scale.
The result is a group of restaurants that feels more like a commonwealth of independent states than an evil empire. They are inflected by a single sensibility — French technique; Asian spices; light, acidic sauces — but the joy the Jean-Georges team takes in making each place new is apparent. “That’s the best part: creating a menu, a concept,” Vongerichten said. “The hardest part is to keep it running for the next 20 years.”
The highlight reel is impressive: potato-and-goat-cheese terrine with arugula juice at Jojo (Vongerichten, Freedman and Del Vecchio go there for it every Tuesday); scallops with cauliflower and caper-raisin emulsion at Jean-Georges (a version of which Brainin and Vongerichten use to test new chefs during the hiring process); tuna and tapioca pearls with Thai chiles, Sichuan peppercorns, cinnamon, chipotle and makrut lime at Spice Market (“We’ve never made food that complicated again,” Brainin said); wild-mushroom burdock noodles, tempeh and pickles at ABCV (reflecting Vongerichten’s recent preoccupation with health and environmental sustainability). The molten-chocolate cake that took over dessert menus all over the country in the aughts? That was cribbed from the menu at Lafayette, the first New York restaurant run by Vongerichten, which he left in 1991.
The astounding thing about this system is how consistently it works. It’s one thing to build something that looks like a neighborhood gem. It’s another to make it a place that people really want to go, producing dishes that sway even critics who might otherwise grumble about the whole towering Jean-Georges edifice. (Pete Wells recently coined the term “Vongerichtenstein” in a review.) Each new restaurant is instantly a Best New Restaurant. The achievement might be compared with James Patterson’s regularly being shortlisted for the National Book Award, except Patterson in this analogy would also have to write seven books a year (maybe he already does this), while constantly touring the country to promote every book he’d ever published.
This prolificacy has led to some suspicion about his methods. The metaphors shift from the realm of art to those of the business world: Vongerichten has built a factory, a franchise, an assembly line. You might imagine an enterprise of cut-and-paste, from the lighting in the dining room to the items on the menu. The reality, however, is weirder, a space where rigidity and a more freewheeling spirit can mix. At the Fulton, I saw how granular the formula Vongerichten mentioned could get, but I also saw improvisation right up to the last minute — all to breathe life into that rare, counterintuitive thing: a neighborhood restaurant, created by a cast of thousands.
[Read Pete Wells’s review of the Fulton.]
The Fulton was born three years ago, in a board room overlooking New York Harbor. Its parents were Jean-Georges Management and the Howard Hughes Corporation, the century-old oil, real estate and aircraft company that has been redeveloping Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. Howard Hughes asked Vongerichten to install a restaurant inside Pier 17, a boxy mall on stilts that they were building over the East River. Vongerichten had always wanted to open a seafood restaurant, and here was a space that couldn’t be any closer to the water, steps from the former Fulton Fish Market. The location determined the concept and the name.
And, for a while, that’s all he had. Construction dragged on, and Vongerichten refuses to begin planning a menu until a restaurant’s design is locked in. Freedman takes the lead during this phase, choosing everything from the color of the banquettes (sea-foam green) to the price point of the water glasses (Pure by Pascale Naessens for Serax — a name only Douglas Adams could love, and just over $7 each wholesale).
Freedman started working for Vongerichten at Lafayette, right out of cooking school. Then, in 1991, they opened a bistro together called Jojo. She was all too happy to take over the business side of things and soon found out she had a knack for it. “I wanted to be able to grow my fingernails and dress up,” she said. “In the kitchen, both of my arms all the way up had burn marks.” I asked if she would have guessed she would eventually be running 38 restaurants. “I didn’t think past Jojo at the time,” she said. “No one had multiple restaurants. That just wasn’t what people did back then. Chefs were not expanding.”
Expansion was made possible by a shift in the way that Vongerichten did business. The early restaurants were owned and operated by the Jean-Georges group. Most of the new restaurants are management deals. For a percentage of gross revenue and a percentage of net profit, Jean-Georges Management designs the restaurant and runs the kitchen, but a partner owns or leases the space, does payroll, pays vendors and, ultimately, takes home any profit after the licensing fees are paid. Today these agreements provide three-quarters of Vongerichten’s total revenue. (The group’s most profitable restaurant is Prime at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It and the Jean-Georges flagship each have revenues of $25 million a year, though the cost to run the flagship is much higher.)
At the Fulton, menu planning began in January, once the construction was far enough along that Vongerichten and Brainin felt comfortable hiring an executive chef, who would run things day to day. Normally the Jean-Georges team would promote a sous chef from the flagship to lead the new venture, like a plant that is propagated through cuttings. But this time they plucked a young chef named Noah Poses from the Watergate Hotel, after a trial tasting that impressed Brainin enough that he didn’t even make Poses audition for Vongerichten himself.
Poses, Brainin and Vongerichten spent about three months experimenting in the Jean-Georges kitchen until they had a rough draft of a menu they were happy with. In March, they moved to the kitchen at the Fulton. There they continued to refine the dishes, cutting some and adding others. Anchovies were on the menu (environmentally friendly), and then they were off (not enough people like them). Snow crab was added to the risotto. (“Once Jean-Georges tries a better version of something,” Brainin said, “there’s no selling him on going back.”) Some dishes were judged too hard to make in a reasonable amount of time, but a labor-intensive Manhattan clam chowder was included at the last minute because it’s just so popular.
Brainin and Vongerichten also agonized over one particular decision: whether to put fluke crudo on the menu. In December, Grub Street published an article with the headline “Fluke Crudo Is a Scourge That Must Be Stopped,” but the chefs decided they couldn’t give up on seafood that was local, sustainable and versatile just because some critic wanted to plant a flag in the ground. Plus, Brainin said, “we love that fish.” To fend off any complaints of unoriginality, they had added a fermented habanero vinaigrette to it, along with Sichuan buds.
Newly hired servers were taught everything from how to properly clear a plate from a table to the pronunciation of menu items like cremant de Bourgogne. “I don’t mind the knife to be a little crooked on the table, but the person must have a personality, and they must be able to sell,” Vongerichten said. Freedman told me she likes hiring actors as servers because they can memorize long blocks of text.
Once Poses brought his four sous chefs on board in April, they could begin the most important part of the Jean-Georges formula: simulating a real dinner service as early and often as possible. The first of these daily mock services was offered to just 20 employees, but eventually the team opening the Fulton would pull staff members from the corporate office, from the Howard Hughes Corporation and from their vendors in order to fill the restaurant. The diners were given menus, but their choices were already highlighted for them. Otherwise, Vongerichten said, everyone would order the lobster and the kitchen wouldn’t be properly tested.
After each of these meals, Brainin, Vongerichten and Poses would take the menu they had planned and tweak it, dish by dish. Or, more precisely, gram by gram: Everything in a Jean-Georges restaurant is measured to the gram, and deviations are not allowed. “We make sure that we test, we test, we test and test again,” Vongerichten said.
At the final mock service, one week before opening, I watched as a line cook prepared a kale salad. Brainin quizzed him on the number of grams of olive oil, of kale leaves, of Parmesan, and the cook knew each one by heart and without hesitation. The partly assembled salad was placed on a scale, and the cook shaved Parmesan onto it until he hit the desired number. Later, after eating an entire bowl of tagliatelle with clams, Brainin announced that the recipe needed six more grams of olive oil. “No other kitchen runs this way,” he said. “Even if they say they do.”
I asked one of the culinary trainers working under Brainin if the cooks ever objected to the rigidness of all this gram-counting. “It sounds tedious,” he said, “but you learn to respect the ingredients and the dish.” Obeying the scales was like obeying the rules of a sonnet — a limitation that allowed for almost unlimited artistry. Vongerichten said it was also a clear-cut way to ensure that, even if he wasn’t cooking in all 38 of his kitchens, the dishes would still be true to his vision, without any unhelpful improvisations by local cooks. The only other way to achieve the same end would be to radically downsize: “I would have a counter with seven seats. I cook, I serve you and I clean. That would be J.G. 100 percent.”
If there is a fault line in the Jean-Georges system as it’s currently constructed, it resides within the namesake restaurant itself. The 2018 edition of the Michelin Guide downgraded the restaurant from three stars to two — the first time Jean-Georges hadn’t earned the top ranking since Michelin started covering New York. “That was a sad day for us,” Freedman said. “I was sad for him, because he is a chef who’s always in his restaurants. Even though he’s really busy, he’s always in his restaurants working.”
Hidden in that defense is a problem that has been haunting Vongerichten and his team. Is it even possible to run a three-star restaurant like Jean-Georges and a globe-spanning corporation at the same time? The first is meant to offer a once-in-a-lifetime experience, while the second depends on being able to take that experience and repackage it for different audiences, cuisines and budgets. To find someone able to do both is incredibly rare, as if Leonardo da Vinci were able to produce both “The Last Supper” and “Last Supper” tote bags. Most of Vongerichten’s peers don’t even try: The median number of restaurants for a three-Michelin-star chef in the United States is two.
If Vongerichten didn’t love both equally — the empire and its namesake — his choice would be easy. Only the spinoffs earn him any money. But he started his career as a teenage apprentice in a three-star kitchen, and that rarefied world maintains an unshakable grip on his imagination. Thus, in a summer dominated by the demands of the Fulton, the Paris Café and the new restaurants in Philadelphia, Vongerichten was forging ahead with the new menu for Jean-Georges. His team had already contacted Michelin and asked it to hold off making its determination for the next edition until reviewers had tried it. It was time, he said, to “claim our status again.”
At the same moment, clone-world Vongerichten was at the Fulton, preparing for the final test before opening: two friends-and-family meals. Guests could now pick whatever they wanted off the menu. They could even, like living, breathing people, make special requests and send things back and otherwise be pains in the neck. At 6 o’clock, I spotted Vongerichten wandering around, on and off his phone. I asked him if he felt ready, and he said: “Yes, it’s time. We had plenty of training.” He seemed a little nervous. A few famous people, called PXes (personnes extraordinaires) by the staff, showed up. One table near the front window was wobbling.
I asked Poses what he could learn tonight that he didn’t already know. With 105 meals, he said, the most they’ve done yet, they would learn which parts of the menu create bottlenecks: “The dish might be great, but is it feasible for a cook to turn out a hundred of them?” he said. During the mock services, the runners kept getting backed up near the pass-through to the kitchen. Brainin had shown me a long list of orders for a single table, some hot, some cold, some quick to prepare and some requiring a nonnegotiably long cook time. The best kitchens will figure out how to prepare everything to come together at the right moment. The Fulton hadn’t gotten there yet, so runners waited with half-full trays.
Vongerichten was right: Everyone ordered lobster. The Fulton served 65 of them before the first friends-and-family meal was over. But if there was one dish they were most excited about, something that was meant to be both a showstopper and deeply familiar, it was the sea bass en croûte. This was a whole sea bass for two, head on, served underneath a flaky crust. “It’s the one,” Vongerichten said. “It’s a classic that nobody else is doing in town.” He called it a fourth-generation dish: Fernand Point, author of “Ma Gastronomie,” developed it at La Pyramide in France, passed it on to Louis Outhier, who taught it to Vongerichten at L’Oasis near Cannes, who taught it to Poses.
The sous chefs put one up on the pass-through and Vongerichten, Freedman and I followed it upstairs to a table of four. The pastry had been etched with the tip of a paring knife and painted in egg wash to give it fishy definition: scales, eyes, spines in the fins. The crust was cut tableside with scissors and delicately placed on the edge of the platter. The skin was peeled back, and the fillets were moved to a plate, deboned, reunited with the pastry and served with some tomatoes and hollandaise. The whole ceremony felt both formal and whimsical and was done with unbelievable delicacy. “It’s beyond,” Freedman said.
By 9 o’clock, the downstairs had mostly emptied, but the upstairs had become almost rowdy. Freedman said that they didn’t like to invite restaurant people to friends and family, that it was more intimate than that. She wasn’t eating yet: Del Vecchio and Vongerichten would probably sit down with her around 11. In the meantime, Del Vecchio claimed a place at the bar, where he was trying to solve a seating problem at one of the restaurants uptown via a WhatsApp chat with the staff there. While he was typing, he got a text from Singapore congratulating everyone back in New York on the impending opening of the Fulton.
The first paying customers in the history of the Fulton arrived at 5:30 on May 14. They were greeted by hostesses, had their coats taken and were shown to their seats. They weren’t friends or family or PXes. They had made their reservation using an app. Poses gave a start-of-service speech to his staff, stressing the importance of moving tickets along quickly to the runners, and then the first orders began to come in. I asked if he was nervous. “I go into every service with a certain level of anxiety,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s necessarily an unhealthy amount of anxiety. It’s a normal chef feeling, the anxiety.”
Poses had opened a restaurant before, a place called the Mildred in Philadelphia. He started as a cook there, in 2012, and was eventually promoted to chef de cuisine. The restaurant didn’t last: Business was inconsistent, and the employees didn’t always work together the way they should. “Maybe part of that was due to not setting up those systems and training staff properly,” Poses said. The experience made him a big believer in the Vongerichten way of opening a restaurant. “Look at this room,” he said. “Look at the support. If I was doing this by myself, I would probably have no hair and would be shaking.”
At that moment, Vongerichten arrived. “It feels good in here,” he said. He noticed a young woman eating alone at the bar and wondered if it was perhaps Hannah Goldfield, the food critic from The New Yorker. It was not, and I told him so, but he didn’t believe me. He ran over to the pass-through and grabbed a printout with headshots of prominent restaurant critics, including Goldfield, Pete Wells of The Times and Adam Platt of New York. He showed it to me and pointed to Goldfield, then looked again at the woman at the bar. O.K., he admitted, false alarm.
We watched as Brainin demonstrated proper plating of the kampachi, with mounds of radish sitting atop the fish, to one cook. Freedman was at the hostess stand, busily solving a seating problem. Five men who lived in the neighborhood wanted a table but didn’t have a reservation. They handed Freedman $100 (for the staff, they said), and she said she would see what she could do. After a minute, during which she added the money to the staff tip pool, she told the men she could seat them. They were ecstatic.
There was no chance that the first dinner at the Paris Café the next day would be nearly this seamless, but it was easy to imagine how much worse it would be if the Jean-Georges team weren’t running it. Shut out of the TWA Hotel, the cooks had been able to practice at ABC Kitchen and the Mercer and Jean-Georges itself. On opening day, the culinary trainers would help the greener members of the line. And they would all be presided over by the gram and the scale. Tomorrow, the Paris Café would probably be the worst of Vongerichten’s 38 restaurants, but it would still be one of the best restaurants in the city. “We have it down to a science with our team, with Lois and Greg and Danny and everybody,” Vongerichten said. “We know how to put it all together.”
In certain moods, Vongerichten will talk wistfully about the simpler days of having just one restaurant to run, when all he had to worry about was Lafayette or Jojo. Downsizing, if he could ever do it, could also provide the quickest path back to that third Michelin star: Critics want ceaseless innovation from a chef, but they also reward something closer to asceticism. The solitary genius, presiding over the counter with seven seats. It’s a more appealing story than the chef who can open seven restaurants in a year.
Vongerichten’s dilemma is that the drive that made Lafayette and Jean-Georges great is the same one that made it impossible to stop with just one or two restaurants. It’s the desire to say yes to everything, to solve every problem, to make everybody happy. “I went into this business,” he said, “because I love to pamper and tend to people.” If you had the ability to do that in 18 cities on four continents, rather than in one restaurant on Central Park, wouldn’t you?
It was dark now, and the lights shining on the Brooklyn Bridge reflected off the water. Brainin stepped back and admired the line at work. It never ceased to amaze him, he said, watching a kitchen come together. Three weeks ago, they could barely serve 20 meals without panicking. Now they were doing 140. “Opening a restaurant is like having a baby,” he said. “It’s a strenuous, arduous, complicated process. You’ve got to be sure that the baby can breathe on its own and eat on its own and walk on its own and grow on its own.” He would keep coming to the Fulton every night for a month. “After that I will be here at least once a week, you know, forever.”
With that, he turned back to the kitchen, where Poses and Vongerichten were conferring over a dish. If it wasn’t already perfect, it was a gram or two away at most.
