February 1999: Danny Meyer: A Reluctant Expander

Danny Meyer: No more than four. Not for a while.

Danny Meyer pursues excellence. He covets and snuggles up to it. He knows what he doesn’t want. He doesn’t want another restaurant to add to the four his NYC-based Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) runs: to Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, add the just-opened Eleven Madison Park and Tabla. Meyer is USHG’s president. USHG has yet to open a flop. Meyer intends to keep it that way, yet the offers continue to pour in from all over. Everyone wants a piece of Danny Meyer.

Not right now. Time out.

You’ll find Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern (below) perennially atop every critic’s Top-Ten-Restaurants-in-New-York list; and among the Best Whatever in the country. His latest rollouts, Eleven Madison and Tabla, won acclaim from the city’s toughest restaurant critics, with Newsweek citing Tabla exemplary of a new wave of Indian cooking.

All USHG restaurants, says Meyer, “are variations on the same theme. They are American restaurants with different accents.”

Tabla? American?
 

“You’re right. But whoever said the only way to enjoy these dishes is within the context of an Indian restaurant?  Same with Union Square and our pasta dishes; Eleven Madison and our French flavors and French wines. Whoever said you must enjoy these dishes within the context of an Italian or a French restaurant? Gramercy Tavern lets you enjoy luxurious foods and tableware removed from the context of a stuffy restaurant. I take things I like and put a different frame around them—a more user-friendly, American frame.”

Success, to Meyer’s way of thinking, has as much to do with why he expands as to how. Once having decided to expand, he mixes and blends what he calls, “the technical components” (food, wine, service, décor, ambiance) that collectively transform the ordinary dining experience into one that’s incomparable.

“The leading competency in our organization is how we treat people,” Meyer says. “We’re unyielding in our desire for technical component excellence—that goes without saying.  But, how we treat our customers affects our success. Let’s say a customer has the same perfectly-cooked chicken in two competing restaurants. I believe it’s the restaurant in which he or she feels better while there that’s going to get more business.”

Meyer fine-tunes his restaurants until they reach levels of perfection that are nearly impossible to supersede, though he never stops trying. You breach what you reach may not be USHG protocol, but unless the effort’s there to do just that, you risk imperfection through complacency. 

“A restaurant is like a shark,” he says. “If it’s not always moving forward, it’s going to die.”

Combine this passion for excellence with the ever-volatile New York restaurant scene and you begin to understand why Meyer is, in his own words, “a reluctant expander.”

All he wished to do 13 years ago, at age 27, was to open a restaurant to see if he could do it. He opened Union Square Cafe and saw that he could.

As success materialized, Meyer began thinking of expansion as a means to test ideas and, perhaps most importantly, retain talented employees.

There was also this: In 1992, six years after opening Union Square Cafe, Tom Colicchio approached Meyer and said he wanted to open a restaurant with him. Colicchio had just closed his restaurant, Mondrian—a casualty of the 1991-92 recession. “That’s like Sandy Koufax coming to you and wanting to pitch on your team,” says Meyer. Voila: two years later, Gramercy Tavern with Colicchio as chef/partner.

“With Union Square,” says Meyer, “it was eight years of tinkering before I agreed to expand. Whatever we open must be as excellent within its niche as each restaurant that preceded it.”

Four years after Gramercy Tavern, Meyer opened Eleven Madison and Tabla, side-by-side in NYC’s MetLife Building, separated by an historic wall that Meyer wanted to tear down but was told he couldn’t.

Will there be others?

“I’ll tell you what I said earlier with an added proviso: ‘I’ll open another restaurant only when I believe a new concept will spawn a restaurant that will be as excellent as the restaurants that preceded it’ and—added proviso: that the previous restaurants will improve in the process,” Meyer’s cognitive hypothesis suggesting a reverse halo effect.

If you’re looking to add one more restaurant or two, it’s worth pondering Meyer’s proviso before you even think about doing that.

Meyer photo: Ellen Silverman; Gramercy Tavern photo: Maura McEvoy

Afterthoughts: Danny Meyer’s New Rules for Expansion...click here to read more>>

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