This essay, “Michael Symon: Are Restaurant Critics Always
Right?” appeared in Restaurant Hospitality 22 years ago, long before Michael
Symon became Celebrity Chef Michael Symon.
At the time, Symon was just another
cook trying to make a living. That changed. Shortly after leaving
Giovanni’s—the last restaurant Symon worked at working for someone else—he opened
Lola restaurant in Tremont, a trendy suburb of Cleveland.
Given the gap between this essay and the present, I thought
it might be helpful to precede this essay with my impressions (read, “suppositions and presumptions;
recollections and speculations”) of Michael Symon: who he is, what he does and
believes in; impressions based on conversations I’ve had with him over the
years as a friend (at one point, almost as family when my son, Jason, cooked
with him cheek by jowl at Cleveland rib joint, Geppetto’s, where, according to
some accounts, Symon landed his first job as a cook), but of late more like a
guy I bump into every once in a while, the bumps today occurring less often
because he spends most of his time away from home-base Cleveland (either in NYC
for Food Network activities or as co-host of Emmy award winner, “The Chew,” or
at chi-chi, high-ticket regional or national wine-and-dine events/fundraisers
where his celebrity-chef presence is in demand) than at any of his restaurants,
the management of them left in the capable hands of subordinates who appear to
know what they are doing.
During our conversations—often harmless, occasionally stimulating,
always entertaining punctuated by his irrepressible laugh—I would remind him he
was talking to a writer and would caution him (if caution was called for when,
for example, harmless chitchatting might morph into ill-considered
chitchatting) that I might decide to use the ill-considered stuff for this
Introduction, if I found any of it cynical or inflammatory or quotably juicy.
“You do know who you’re talking to,” I cautioned Symon. “Not
a problem,” he counter-cautioned.
Most chefs, celebrated as among the best and media-anointed
as such, once having planted their flag in a cozy and retail-friendly zone,
worry when a competitor of comparable merit has the gall to infiltrate their
space.
MRN Ltd., developers of a restaurant and entertainment strip
(not Vegas by a long shot) on E. 4th Street in downtown Cleveland, invites
Michael Symon to move his restaurant Lola from gentrified Tremont, but a few
miles away, and relocate it on the strip, itself in an area enjoying modest
gentrification. MRN partner, Ari Maron, believes the strip could use a classy,
upscale restaurant to anchor it and to provide a magnet for traffic. He’s
right. He thinks the combination of Michael Symon and Lola (shown left on E.
4th) is just the ticket. He’s right about that, too. Once up and running, 2006,
Iron Chef Michael Symon and Lola instantly become a hit, providing the
much-needed stimulus for the street, polishing its perception while at the same
time intensifying its potential and energy.
Michael loves that he is
instrumental in the street’s resurgence. Four years later a “competitor of comparable
merit,” Zack Bruell’s Chinato (right), at MRN’s invitation, moves in
catty-corner to Lola, becoming one more upscale restaurant Maron adds to the East 4th mix.
Says Bruell, “I think it makes sense and I’m pleased to be
part of the action.” That mix now includes, in addition to the half a dozen or
more requisite midscale to theme-related restaurants, Chinato, Lola and The Greenhouse Tavern (below left).
The latter had moved in a year before a few doors down from Lola on the same
side of the street. The chef at Greenhouse is Jonathon Sawyer, former chef de
cuisine, Lola, former exec chef at now-shuttered Parea (NYC), and, it follows,
a close friend of Symon’s. Even though
rumor-mongers (aka bloggers) blab that Symon disapproves of the Bruell incursion,
Symon welcomes it. Bruell tells me, “I’m not so sure what the fuss is all
about. Competition makes sense, don’t you think?”
Both Chinato and Greenhouse garner the media attention they
deserve. Local critics, food writers, and bloggers yelp about both. National?
Esquire magazine’s John Mariani includes Chinato in his annual report of the
“Best New Restaurants 2010.” And Sawyer? Food & Wine and Bon Appetit
magazines recognize him as one of the best—up and comer, best new, that sort of
thing (and that was long before writers
and a host of culinary etceteras named Sawyer Best Chef Great Lakes, 2015,
the James Beard Foundation). If media
whoops are criteria for measuring fame, Chinato’s pales when compared to
Greenhouse’s. Does it matter? Most local critics, food writers, and bloggers
will tell you that Bruell and Sawyer are among the best chefs in the city;
their restaurants two of the best.
Today, Chinato, Greenhouse, and Lola, open for lunch Monday
through Friday, for dinner every day of the week, except Sunday, are very busy.
What of Symon, Sawyer, and Bruell? The fuss now unfussy if ever it was fussy,
they are happy as clams; as are the strip’s owners.
Before we leave the petty flaps along E. 4th,
November 2015 will find Symon opening a barbecue joint, Mabel’s BBQ, claiming a
space between Lola and Greenhouse.
Michael Symon is no longer an angry young man, the memories
of his cooking days at Giovanni’s (the subject of the essay that follows) and
subsequent occasional outbursts ancient history. Now, many years after this
essay was published, he occupies an enviable niche in that rarefied air
reserved exclusively for chefs who have attained celebrity status. Now, he is a
very rich man with a multi-million-dollar townhome in New York as proof. Now, he
runs a very successful restaurant company, Michael Symon Restaurants.
He appears on The Food Network (he’s a TFN-dubbed “Iron
Chef,”); has just launched on The Food Network a new show, “Burgers, Brew, and
‘Que”; and, alongside Mario Batali, Carla Hall, Clinton Kelly, and Daphne
Oz co-hosts ABC’s food and lifestyle
show, “The Chew,” winner in 2015 of an Emmy for “Outstanding Informative
Talk Show Host(s)” of a daytime TV
show. Contenders for the award? Dr.
Mehmet Oz and Steve Harvey. Michael Symon keeps good company.
One more thing: Symon has written cookbooks, two of them, “5
and 5” and “Carnivore,” sat atop the NY Times best-seller lists for several
weeks. Admittedly, a chef publishing a cookbook is far removed from the
publish-or-perish prerequisite demanded of college professors chasing tenure.
Nevertheless, similarities exist: celebrity-chefs—just as college profs are under pressure to
preserve and protect their status and prove to the administration and students
that they are who they say they are—publish cookbooks to reassure an adoring
public they really know what they’re doing and talking about (to say nothing of
adding one more revenue stream to their top and bottom lines).
Symon no longer gets hot under the collar as he once did
(“What does she know about food?”—a quote from the essay) when he reads or is
informed of nasty comments, reviews, evaluations, outbursts, reports,
criticisms, blogs of him or his restaurants. He is above all that. What does
she or they know about food, indeed.
There are 20 and counting (the aforementioned soon-to-open
barbecue joint will boost that number to 21 with more, we suspect, in the
works) Michael Symon Restaurants (MSR) to include three wildly successful
restaurants (two in Cleveland: Lola, Lolita; one—a management contract—in
Detroit: Roast at The Westin Book Cadillac Hotel), a burgeoning chain of
always-packed burger joints—The B Spot, the latest opening in Indianapolis, an
indication that MSR has plans (so I think) to methodically take its brand on the
road, away from the chains’ Ohio-based comfort zone, the intent, one has to
assume, to cautiously test the waters for further incursions West; the revival of a failed prototype, Bar Symon,
in the Pittsburgh and Dulles Airports, and a hint that Vegas may be calling.
“The Vegas offers are there,” Symon told me recently, “but so far the
incentives remain unattractive.” Unattractive though they may be, what is one
to make of dining-out in Vegas if one of its top-tier hotels does not contain a
restaurant operated by the presumptive successor to Wolfgang and Emeril. Mark
my word, one of these days, Michael Symon will open a restaurant in Las Vegas.
My bet is that it will be a very upscale version of Lola.
It is tempting, in light of Michael’s growth and successes,
to draw comparisons between MSR, and that of New Yorker Danny Meyer’s Union
Square Hospitality Group (USHG); and, in doing so (although the personalities
of the two businessmen are poles apart), hint that there very well could be, as
there already has been for USHG, an IPO in MSR’s future. Consider. USHG has two
phenomenally successful and award-winning restaurants in New York: Union Square
Café and Gramercy Tavern (there are a bunch of others, but those are the ones
New Yorkers think of first and the media remember best). Michael has two in
Cleveland: Lola (an award-winner) and Lolita. USHG manages two chains, Blue
Smoke, a barbecue restaurant, and Shake Shack, a stock-market-listed burger
chain, the result of an IPO launched nearly a year ago. MSR manages one chain,
The B-Spot; and the possibility of one more, the Bar Symon restaurants up and
running in two airports; and, with the opening this year of Mabel’s BBQ, it
appears, depending on its success, that it will become a prototype for yet
another chain, albeit a regional one (you do not take a homegrown
concept—especially one homegrown in Cleveland—and expect it to compete with the
likes of traditional ‘ques one finds innumerably in places such as Memphis,
North Carolina, Kansas City, or Austin). Is there an IPO in MSR’s future? You
tell me.
Today there is about Symon, as there wasn’t early on, a free
and easy manner—a professional air, so to speak—about his celebrity, a result
of national exposure, mostly via The Food Network and The Chew. He is a restaurateur
of exceptional talent, comfortable, confident and cool in his skin.
Before all of this hard-earned and much-deserved validation
and praise from media, customers, and groupies, he admitted to me years ago he
would occasionally wonder about his credibility and the ambiguity of it. “Isn’t
that always the case?” he said. “No matter how sure you are of yourself and
your skills, there is always the worry you are never as good as people say you
are.” (Or, as I’ve often wondered about myself, “How soon before I am unmasked
as a fraud?”) There is none of that now; however now, with business obligations
and philanthropic commitments exponentially greater than they were even 10
years ago, you have to wonder if he still has doubts. He is, in spite of everything,
part Greek, worry-bead baggage and all.
With validation there has emerged a subtle shift in Symon’s
outlook and manner: a guarded, yet grounded, self-confidence. He is sure of
himself, but you will never catch him bragging about it. For example, he admits
to me that, yes, there are and always will be anti-Symons out there, but,
rather than react defensively (offhandedly: “what does she [they] know about
food?”), he admits they exist and, as such, are entitled to say, write or blog
whatever they want to say, write or blog. He does not dwell on it (as he used
to), will not break it down (“a waste of time,” he says). For good reason. Most
of the anti-Symonisings are unpolished: pitiful, pathetic, spiteful; most borne
of jealousy or a superficial sense of superiority; or a venting of pent-up
anger or antagonism based on God only knows what. Not much is objective,
comprehensive, polished. Recently, I called him a “superstar” and he cringed.
“I’m just the same guy you met years ago at Geppettos who just loves to cook.”
And eat? “Something like that,” he said. He has never been a pain-in-the-ass to
anyone. You cannot say that about his detractors.
June 1993: Michael
Symon. Are Restaurant Critics Always Right?
Cleveland,
Ohio. Before Giovanni’s, Michael
Symon was a line-cook at Piccolo Mondo, downtown. Just up the street and around
the corner from Piccolo, Marlin Kaplan was chef at the newly-opened Cleveland
Sfuzzi. Symon has since moved on to Giovanni’s. Kaplan left Sfuzzi a few months
back. He’s thinking of opening his own restaurant. While Symon and Kaplan were
within a scone’s throw of each other, they struck up a relationship that
blossomed into an extraordinary friendship.
Kaplan came to Sfuzzi from New York City where he had been
in advertising, but where he tired of it quickly, so when Sfuzzi founder and
restaurateur, Robert Colombo, heard about Kaplan and his interest in food and
all about his remarkable cooking skills (all intuitive), he invited him to come
to Cleveland and work the new Sfuzzi there. Kaplan didn’t think twice. Kaplan’s
combination of cooking and marketing skills fascinated Colombo; the invitation
surprised and flattered Kaplan. Kaplan knew how to cook; he knew how to market,
promote, and public relate. It didn’t matter what discipline: what worked for
Sony—one of Kaplan’s clients in NYC—would also work for Sfuzzi. Colombo got a
two-fer.
At Sfuzzi, Kaplan marketed
foodservice, he promoted the kitchen, he worked the menu, complementing the
untouchable corporate core with daily specials (Colombo didn’t seem to mind),
and he walked the room (“touching tables” is how he put it) talking to
customers to find out what they liked, what they didn’t. The glow of his
charisma radiated throughout Sfuzzi, infecting everything and everybody from recipes
to customers to employees. If you knew Kaplan and you were at Sfuzzi and he
didn’t stop at your table to talk to you, you thought maybe you had done
something to offend him.
Waiters, who usually kept their
distance from the back (it’s in their DNA not to fraternize with kitchen help),
were eager to tell Marlin what they thought of the food, the way it was
prepared and plated.
Kaplan organized dinners with his
fellow chefs, unheard of in Cleveland (or any other city, for that matter).
There, they talked about agonies and ecstasies; they exchanged thoughts,
divulged successes, analyzed failures, revealed secrets, even though—as regards
the latter—any chef who’s been in this business, even for a short while, knows
there aren’t any. They got to know one another, to seek help in times of
crises. Once, when the kitchen at The Grill just around the corner at The Ritz Carlton ran out of veal, the
chef there called Kaplan. He gave him Sfuzzi veal. Kaplan got back Ritz veal a
few days later.
Symon now is at Giovanni’s; been
there four months. The best and oldest Italian restaurant in the city, with its
elegantly upholstered chairs and booths and menu prices to match, is ripe for a
review:
new chef, new menu,
subtle design changes. Inquiring minds want to know: what has owner Carl Quagliata done? The local a.m.
daily dispatches its restaurant critic to find out.
“I didn’t like what she wrote,”
Symon tells me. “I was angry. Devastated. Yes, there were positives in it, but,
for the most part, it was a negative review.”
The day it came out, Kaplan wasted
no time calling Symon. “You called Symon?” I asked Kaplan.
“Sure, why not? I’ve got to let him
know how I feel,” Kaplan says. “It’s called a support mechanism. I don’t want
him wondering what the hell hit him. Yes, we compete. But we also have to work
with each other at times. No one needs to be publicly embarrassed: that’s the
hardest part to overcome. I don’t care how tough your skin is. I felt I had to
soften the blow. You bet: he’s a friend. He’s also a chef. In an effort to
excuse or rationalize the criticism, he was thinking, ‘What does she know about
food?’ I had to make him understand that ‘what-does-she-know-about-food?’ isn’t
the point. The point is: once the review is out, what does he plan to do about
it? I told him I felt bad about the public tongue-lashing, but there were two
sides to the review.”
Sentence by sentence, Kaplan and
Symon reviewed the review, dissected it word by word. “Most important,” Kaplan
told Symon, “was that she liked his creativity and I told Michael that as a
chef you cannot ask for anything more than that. In effect, she’s saying that
Michael has good ideas, but in her criticism of the product, she’s telling him
that somewhere his execution was faulty. Bottom line? She called him on the job
he did. Actually, she called him on the job the kitchen did. I told Michael he
should be angry at the cooks for letting him down, even though the ultimate
responsibility was his. What I told him was that the ultimate responsibility
was the owner’s. He should have spotted the mistakes long before the reviewer
did. Michael disagreed. Anyway, I told him to sit down with his cooks, show
them the review, and say, ‘This isn’t just me being reviewed, it's all of
you.’”
That’s what Symon did. Every
embarrassment was examined, every criticism nitpicked. It wasn’t, “What does
she know about food; what doesn’t she know about food?” It was, “OK, if this
happened, what can we do to fix it?” Distraught at first, Symon reassessed his
review of the review—the call from Kaplan helped immeasurably—and used it as a
tool to motivate the kitchen.
“The call was important,” Symon
says. “I’m not sure whether I would have handled the situation the same way had
it not been for Marlin’s call. I’m not sure I would have handled it at all.”
“I come from advertising,” Kaplan
says. “I’ve had to handle p.r. for clients that have been slammed in the press.
Crisis management it’s called: you move quickly to defuse the trouble. If it’s
a setback, you reestablish influence.
“I know what it’s like to be
publicly undressed. It’s painful. For all of the times you get great reviews
and people love you and you think nothing can go wrong, the one time you get
hit and hit bad, all you want to do is crawl under a rock. You think people are
never going to come into your restaurant again. Michael put his heart and soul
into Giovanni’s. I know how he felt when that review came out. It was second
nature for me to call him and to talk to him about it.”
