Pastis
Lessons from a restaurateur
We recently read Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything. For those unfamiliar (as were we), in 2004 the New York Times credited McNally as the restaurateur who invented downtown; he founded longstanding NYC dining hot spots such as The Odeon, Balthazar, Cafe Luxembourg, Minetta Tavern, Pastis, and Nell’s.
We used to live in Manhattan. McNally’s restaurants are the sorts of places we’ve heard of but never been cool enough (or brave enough) to go to. These are the sorts of places where Anna Wintour might lunch with Nicole Kidman. They are the epitome of cool. They make us nervous.
Though far removed from our current day-to-day, we found McNally’s book fascinating. Take, for instance, the story of Pastis. Opened in 1999, Pastis is credited with gentrifying Manhattan’s now-trendy Meatpacking District. As Carrie Bradshaw explained in Sex and the City, Season 6 Episode 17, “There’s ten thousand restaurants in New York and everyone’s at Pastis.”
This wasn’t inevitable. One random night in the spring of 1998, McNally decided to walk home from a dinner party in the Meatpacking District. Along the way, he came to a six-way intersection that caught his eye as a potential restaurant location. Looking at the buildings, he found a desirable, two-story, vacant space.
The story of how McNally actually secured the lease for this iconic restaurant has surprising parallels to Chenmark’s preferred approach to relationship-building and deal-making. Many in our space approach business development as a purely transactional endeavour. We prefer to think of deals as a trust-building endeavour. In the world of small business, we work with a wide range of people, and we believe authenticity matters. It also mattered for McNally.
We’ve included a longer-than-usual passage from the book because we, like McNally, think the details are important. From the book:
“Unluckily, the building was owned by Bill Gottlieb, a landlord notorious for never renting his empty spaces. At the time, Gottlieb owned around a hundred properties in downtown Manhattan and was known as an eccentric. Though a billionaire, he dressed like a slob and carried all his important papers in a shopping bag. Gottlieb supposedly trusted no one and in his pockets carried all the keys to his many buildings.
Over the next week, I called Gottlieb’s office twice a day. The phone rang endlessly without being picked up by either a person or answering machine. This was strange because in those days all businesses had answering machines. (All except Bill Gottlieb’s, apparently). Impatient to meet him, I went to Gottlieb’s second-floor office on Hudson Street and waited for him to show up. His office was in such disarray that any attempt to add to the chaos would have only made it tidier… At its epicenter sat a tiny old woman whose head was so permanently buried in the company’s books I never saw her face the whole time I was there. The phone didn’t stop ringing. The doddery old woman made no attempt to answer it.
After a couple of hours, I heard someone wheezing as he slowly climbed the stairs outside. The door opened, and in shuffled Gottlieb, looking every inch a homeless man. He eyed me suspiciously, then turned on the old woman: ‘I told you not to let anyone in!’ The woman, I later discovered, was Gottlieb’s sister, Mollie Bender.
Gottlieb asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted to build a restaurant in one of his empty spaces. He didn’t respond. I said I had a lot of restaurant experience; I owned Balthazar. ‘I don’t care what you own!’ he screamed. ‘Can you cook?’
‘A little.”’
‘Cook me dinner at your place next Wednesday.’ The homeless man turned his back to me and laid into his sister again.
Gottlieb came for dinner the following week. At the time, I’d been divorced from Lynn six years and was renting my fourth-floor walk-up in SoHo. Fortunately, it was in the kind of run-down building Gottlieb would feel comfortable entering. He arrived wearing exactly the same clothes he’d been wearing a week earlier. I introduced him to Harry, Sophie, and Isabelle, all then under fourteen and living with me that week. Bill made no concessions to their age and treated them just as suspiciously as he did everyone else.
Sensing the last thing Gottlieb wanted was someone trying to impress him, I kept the dinner simple: penne with mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. Gottlieb devoured it like he hadn’t eaten since Christmas. For dessert, I’d made a rhubarb crumble, which he asked for – or rather demanded – the moment he finished his pasta. He must have liked it, because he wolfed it down in four bites and took seconds without asking. Meanwhile, my kids were still eating their pasta…. neither of us mentioned the Meatpacking space all night.
…For whatever reason, Gottlieb appeared curious about me and occasionally called out of the blue to invite me for coffee. Every time we met, the elephant in the room was his Meatpacking space, which neither of us ever referred to. Gottlieb must have gotten bored of me because after three months of meeting for coffee, he suddenly whipped out a sheet of paper for me to sign. It was a fifteen-year lease for the elephant in the room.
Exactly.
Have a great week,
Your Chenmark Team
