The Restaurant Genius Behind Carbone, ZZ’s, Torrisi & More | Jeff Zalaznick

Jeff Zalaznick is co-founder of Major Food Group, the hospitality company behind Carbone, ZZ's, Torrisi, The Grill, and The Pool. He has opened 77 restaurants and bars and 76 are still operating and profitable. He is now building Major Food Group into a fully vertically integrated hospitality company spanning restaurants, private members' clubs, hotels, and branded residential towers. Zalaznick was obsessed with food from childhood, watching cooking shows on PBS while other kids watched cartoons and memorizing the Zagat guide. His first job out of college was as an investment banking analyst at J. P. Morgan, but he knew it wasn’t his dream. He walked out on his birthday, talked his way into any job at the newly opened Mandarin Oriental, built a restaurant website, and eventually partnered with restaurateur Joe Bastianich to get a front-row seat to the business. Watching Joe work, he realized: "I can do this, and I can do it my way." He quickly sold his companies and set out to open his own restaurant. The idea was Carbone — elevated Italian-American food built on a simple thesis: take something everyone already loves and make the best version of it ever done. He found his partners, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi, and opened Carbone in March of 2013. It’s now one of the most recognizable restaurant brands and sought-after reservations in the world. From there, they’d go on to launch Major Food Group, and the success has continued. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/jeff-zalaznick Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com/startups Chapters (00:00:00) Seventy-Seven Restaurants, Seventy-Six Still Winning (00:03:16) The First American Menu Written In English (00:04:41) JFK's Cream Of Asparagus (00:09:49) Fifty Years Of Smoke, Forty Million To Restore (00:13:32) One Text: "Four Seasons?" (00:16:17) Always Bet On Who Wants It Most (00:19:13) Kill Lunch To Own Dinner (00:24:00) The Only Thing That Matters Is If They Come Back (00:29:37) Going Viral Isn't The Same As Being Good (00:36:39) Watching Cooking Shows Instead Of Cartoons (00:41:47) The Men At The Top Were Miserable (00:43:21) Walking Into The Mandarin To Beg For Any Job (00:49:40) A Front-Row Seat To His Hero (00:53:06) Belief Comes Before Ability (00:55:35) Burning The Boats (00:57:31) Marry The Chef, Don't Hire Him (00:59:25) The Best Version Of Something You Already Love (01:03:56) The Hail Mary Call At Ten O'Clock (01:08:29) "A Piacere" — Whatever You Want (01:13:24) The Broken Neon Sign That Became An Icon (01:18:17) Go With Whatever Feels Natural (01:22:27) A Ten-Dollar Jar Of The Restaurant (01:24:15) Your Mediocrity Is My Opportunity (01:27:34) Netflix With A Restaurant (01:32:11) The Club Where The Food Comes First (01:37:07) Miami Was New Year's Eve Every Night (01:40:45) Carbone Miami In 100 Days (01:46:08) The Greatest Beach Club In America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  I want to start the conversation with one of the craziest stuff I've ever heard. You've started 77 restaurants and bars and 76 are still operating and profitable.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:12David Senra?

  Can you tell us about the one that we're sitting in right now?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  So right now, we're sitting in one of my favorites. This is the pool we're sitting in right now, which is probably the most historic restaurant in America. You know, it was originally opened in 1959, built in 1959 by the Seagram family. And at the time, these were the two most over-the-top luxurious restaurants ever built. And they were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, one who was the most famous architect of the time and one who was soon to become the most famous architect of his time. And this room we're sitting in today is one of the only interior landmarks in America. In fact, it's the only interior landmark restaurant in America,

• 0:58Speaker 01

  where we had to restore this entire room to what it was in 1959, when we took over about eight years ago. So what you have here is you have the most incredible restaurant history. And you know, we've been able to be the custodians of that history and take it into kind of the new next generation. But that pool behind us has been sitting here since, you know, 1959. And we've really just brought it back to life.

• 1:25David Senra?

  So tell me about what you had to do to restore it. Like what was, who owned it and like, how did you come into ownership of this? Because you knew about this place when you were, what, 13?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I grew up in New York City. If you grew up in New York City and you cared in any way, but like you, I was obsessed with restaurants and food and what I do today for a living since I was a child. You know, I was watching cooking shows when I was 10 on PBS, you know, before there was any cooking channels or anything like that. And I was, you know, aware of what was going on in, you know, in the big picture of New York restaurants. And if there was any restaurant that you would know of as like, "One day I want to go there," it was The Four Seasons, which is not related in any way to the hotel. The original Four Seasons was a restaurant, which is where we're sitting right now. This was called The Four Seasons. That was called The Grill Room. This was called The Pool Room, which is where we're sitting right now.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  And that was really the most kind of incredible aspirational restaurant that you would want to go to. That, you know, you would have a chance to go to maybe, you know, I had a chance to go there for a, I think I came here and actually sat in this corner for like my grandmother's 75th birthday or something like that. You know, this was a place that you would come for, you know, major special events. And in my case, you know, I mean, eh, or, you know, if you were one of the kings of New York, you would be having lunch in the grill every day. And that was really where Power Lunch was invented, right? So there's, there's a huge history of, you know, both what this restaurant means in terms of food,

• 3:01Speaker 01

  because it does have an incredible and interesting history in terms of food, being the first restaurant that ever had seasonal ingredients, the first American restaurant that ever wrote their menus in English, right, versus in French.

• 3:15David Senra?

  Wait, tell me about that.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  So this restaurant in 1959, before this, you know, place opened, anything that was fancy and expensive was French. And you would go to fancy French restaurants and the menu would be written in French. The Four Seasons was the first restaurant where that was written in English. And so this was the, really the first example of American fine dining. It was the first time that American as a cuisine was actually thought of and celebrated. So it didn't exist before then. There was no such thing, right? American was a hamburger and fries, right? It didn't exist in terms of the luxury fine dining world. And so this was revolutionary in that sense. And it was a guy named Joe Baum, who was a great restaurateur of his time,

• 3:59Speaker 01

  the best restaurateur of his time and someone who, you know, I've always looked up to. Um, and we've always studied his process, who, you know, came up with this creation and created this place. And it was also the first restaurant where the design. You know, was was equally at the time important to the actual restaurant. So the food was something that was new and spectacular. It introduced the ideas of seasonality. It introduced the ideas of foraging. It introduced the ideas of American cuisine. You know, the list goes on of how many things were created in this room.

• 4:37David Senra?

  The stuff that's still talked about today originated back then.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  This was the first place.

• 4:41David Senra?

  Okay.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  So, you know, when we took over, right? JFK had his birthday party here, you know, the famous birthday party before he went to the garden. Marilyn Monroe came out of the cake.

• 4:51David Senra?

  Okay.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  He ate asparagus soup up there. Okay, so so the story goes that.

• 4:56David Senra?

  Was Marilyn here?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Marilyn, it's it's unknown, but the, uh, no.

• 5:02David Senra?

  She's upstairs.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Right, she was, who knows? But, um, but, you know, I don't know if you saw in the kitchen, we have a quote from JFK. But the reason for that is because, you know, he famously loved this room and he famously had his big birthday where she jumped out of the cake in Madison Square Garden. He had the dinner here.

• 5:17David Senra?

  Okay.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And he was so busy walking around, talking to people, as you can imagine, you know, that he he didn't get a chance to eat. And so he actually went up to this, this room didn't exist up there. That was a storage room, right? And where they would, some people would hide and do whatever they needed to do. And we've now opened it up and made this beautiful lounge up there. But before that, when we took it over, it was just a storage room. Those doors were all closed. And famously, he kind of snuck in there and his favorite thing to eat was cream of asparagus soup. So he said to the kitchen, make me a cream of asparagus. I said, of course, Mr. President, whatever you want. And so he ate this cream of asparagus soup.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  So we actually had an ode to that dish on the menu that we still run, depending on, you know, the CD actually will come back now in spring, um, called Jack's Pie, which is a cream of asparagus pie that we make to, as an, to honor that, uh, that moment that happened here. But there's, there's so many moments that happened here that may be one of the most famous and public. But so many incredible moments happened in this building that. You have to understand that when I came in and, you know, we were able to take over this restaurant, it was, this was something that was beyond your wildest dreams. It was an institution that you never thought would change, right? Because it just, you couldn't

• 6:40Speaker 01

  even penetrate your brain that no matter how successful you had become in restaurants, like this, this was run by two guys that had been handed it down years ago, you know, after Joe Baum, et cetera, two, two of his guys that worked there took over, they handed it down to two other guys. Um, those two guys, unfortunately, they kind of ran it into the ground, right? They didn't reinvest any money in it. They basically were using it, you know, kind of as their own cash machine, you know, which was just not reinvesting. This is a giant facility that needs a lot of upkeep, a lot of cleaning, a lot of, you know, restoration at all times.

• 7:17David Senra?

  I don't think you discussed this publicly, but we talked about just the revenue from these two rooms alone would make, if, if this was the only business, it would make it a substantial sized business.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, listen, this, this business, because you have what is the pool, which is probably, you know, the most famous event space, um, in New York for the last, you know, half a century, right? And then you have the grill, which, you know, was most famously known, you know, not only for, for its architecture, for the fact that it was where Power Lunch was founded. So conversations like these all happened for the last 60 years in that room next door. And where you were placed in that room and where you sat in that room was all very significant to your status. And it was written about in the Post or where you sat, oh my God, they saw so and so in Siberia the other day, what happened? Maybe he's getting fired, whatever it might be. That was a-

• 8:12David Senra?

  What's Siberia?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Siberia was the second level up the stairs where you never wanted to be sat, or you were thrilled to get sat because you were just finally let in, right? You know what I mean? So you would work your way up and based on who you were and what you did, you know, you would, they would allocate the booths and the main tables. And then the second floor was always called Siberia. And that was always very public. It was always where people were seated and what was going on. And, you know, one of the things that we did when we came in here, which is given this new life, you know, we were- You know, first of all, the process to get this place was was a crazy process, right? So the plate, this building, which was, this is the Seagram Building. As I said, you know, the building's designed by Mies van der Rohe.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  These interiors were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. The Seagram family obviously built the building and, you know, paid for these restaurants to be built. Later, it was bought by A.B. Rosen. A.B. Rosen, um, you know, still owns it today. And he was so frustrated with the way that the guys who were here, even though they had been here for twenty plus years, um, these two, um, he was so frustrated with the way, as a great lover of the arts that he is and of architecture, he was so frustrated with the way that they were keeping it up, that he decided that he wanted to get rid of them. Because they wouldn't, he would come, the place was full of dust. It was, it had really been run down.

• 9:42David Senra?

  Yeah, you were telling me in the other room that the panels, which are like, what, gray or white?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are, so they're gray. But when we took them over, they were black, right? Because no one had ever cleaned them, so they had fifty years of cigarette and cigar smoke that had accumulated. And no one in fifty years had ever thought to go clean the tiles.

• 10:00David Senra?

  How much did you spend on restoring this place?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  We spent about forty plus million dollars.

• 10:07David Senra?

  That's incredible.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, we took, basically, this, this is a, you have the grill room and private rooms. You have the pool, you have the pool lounge. Downstairs, we have another restaurant called The Lobster Club. And we obviously rebuilt a beautiful first-class kitchen. The kitchen hadn't been redone since nineteen fifty-nine. So you couldn't run a super high-end restaurant to our standards without rebuilding the entire kitchen. And so we put in what may be the nicest kitchen in New York, if not one of them. Um, you know, not only to be able to do what we do, which is a combination of serving the best food to diners in an a la carte setting at the grill, but also to be able to put out what is, you know, I think second to none in terms of events, right?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So if you have a two-hundred-person dinner in the room we're sitting in here right now, when you get your Dover sole, it's gonna taste like the best Dover sole you've had is if you ordered it just sitting with you and me. Right? It's hot, it's perfect. The food here is what we are known for. No one is able to do large-scale events. The way that we are here, at the quality level we are here.

• 11:13David Senra?

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• 11:55David Senra?

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• 12:38David Senra?

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• 13:21David Senra?

  Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. So go back to how you got the opportunity to take this place over.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  We got the opportunity because... There was a rumor in page six that AB Rosen is gonna throw out the guys at the Four Seasons. Okay, I was sitting on a plane with my partner, Mario. We were reading the Post like we always would, right? You know, this is now 10 years ago. So we've got the Post, we're on the plane, and Mario, and he says to me like, "Do you see this?" And I said like, "Can't be possible." Like, you know what I mean? It was one of those things that couldn't, it was such an institution that you couldn't believe that this could be happening.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So I knew AB a little bit. Um, you know, we were friendly and we had, you know, I had his number on my phone, but we didn't talk all the time or anything. So I just, I said, "It's worth a shot," and I texted him, I said, texted him, you know, "Four Seasons?" Question mark. And he wrote me right back, like, "Let's discuss ASAP." So we were actually on our way back to New York. I literally went from the plane to his office, which was at the time across the street from where we are now. And I said like, "What's going on with this?" He's like, you know, "I'm getting rid of these guys. They've let the place go to shit." And, uh, you know, I'm gonna basically, he basically decided he was gonna run,

• 14:53Speaker 01

  because of the significance of this place, his own RFP process, like a city process. But he was doing it personally, which fits very much with his personality, which I loved. He was gonna run his own RFP process for different operators to come in. So we ended up in what was like, you know, this was for us at the time, a huge jump. So, you know, my company's only existed for 15 years, right? So this is now, we go back eight, nine years ago. So, you know, we didn't have half the amount of restaurants we have today. We had some great successes and we were definitely the up and coming group. What was your biggest success? Like, what were you most?

• 15:32David Senra?

  Well known for at the time that you're bidding on this place.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Carbone.

• 15:34David Senra?

  Carbone.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  So Carbone was our first real big success, right? You know, that was the, that was opened in two thousand thirteen. And that put us on the map on a large scale. And from there, we went on to open a variety of other restaurants that were all successful. And then this opportunity came about and so we were competing for this space. I mean, everyone want, this was every restaurateur's dream. So everyone we were competing against was, you know, he was, has been established for twenty plus years in the restaurant business. All the best people that existed in New York at that time. And at the end of the day, you know, we, we successfully convinced AB that we were the guys to go with.

• 16:16David Senra?

  How do you think you did that?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, AB was the, he was the perfect person to be in control of this because he understood. Me, he understood us, he understood what we did. He understood embedding on the kind of future of what restaurants could be versus going with the institution. Right? Because he was going to end up with another couple old guys that were doing, you know, things they had done before. And it was going to be something stale. And I think he appreciated our energy, you know, you know what I mean? And our energy and our thought process and the fact that, you know, our process already had been established, you know, as people who really cared about New York.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  You know, our company is deeply grounded in New York, deeply grounded in New York history. And we consider ourselves all students of, you know, New York history and New York restaurants. So this had a huge meaning to us and the appreciation of the history of this place. Combined with the best ideas and the best menu and the best food and whatever we put in front of him. He decided that he was going to partner with us to do this.

• 17:26David Senra?

  There's a couple of things like, this is obvious from speaking to you and I see this with anybody who gets to the top of the profession. You have this like crazy database like of your entire industry's history in your head that comes out in conversations and you tell these beautiful stories about it. But also it's like blatantly obvious that you're very passionate about this. Now we say like, passion is infectious. And I wonder, like, obviously, I think you expressed that to everybody you interact with. You definitely expressed it to this guy. You know Josh Kushner, right?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Very well.

• 17:52David Senra?

  He has a great quote that I always think about that I think is dead right. And he's just like, you know, if it comes down to picking the most experienced person or the smartest person or the person that wants it the most, you always bet on the person that wants it the most. I wonder if that was a situation here.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  There's no question about it. That was always our thing was that we were gonna win no matter what. And we went about things that way. And we still do to this day, which is, you know, rare in my business that people, you know, we literally did something like this last week. But, you know, what we would, you know, if they asked us to put in front of them X, Y, and Z, we put that with whipped cream and cherries on top in a hundred different variations for them to be like, holy shit. You know what I mean? Like, and I think that same thing resonated to your point. It resonated with, uh, with AB that we were gonna be the best possible group. We were gonna dismantle the most to us. And that, you know, we would be truly what we said we would be,

• 18:50Speaker 01

  which is custodians of what is the greatest restaurant space in New York. And the concepts that we developed here. And how, how would you bring this? The biggest thing that, the biggest, the biggest breakthrough that I had that I believe ended us up here was the biggest counterintuitive one, right? Which is always how it works, right? So everyone else, including potentially him at the time, it was such an institution that you never even contemplated that this room, The Grill, which is, you know, now one of our busiest restaurants, one of the busiest restaurants in New York as far as it pertains to fine dining, that it would ever be anything but this power lunch thing. It's been power lunch for 60 years. It's been power lunch since my parents were children.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Just to put in, okay, that's how long this has been power lunch. So what, the first thing that I said was, we're not serving lunch. We're only opening for dinner because the truth is that restaurants can't be successful serving lunch.

• 19:47David Senra?

  Why?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  No one drinks.

• 19:49David Senra?

  Cheers, by the way. Thanks for, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me here.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Thank you for being here.

• 19:53David Senra?

  Of course.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So you know, basically, what we did was, we said, we're not even gonna open for lunch. Cause we need to reestablish this as the place you wanna be for dinner. We already know that history has told us it's gonna be a great place for lunch. It's the center of, you know, midtown and it's obviously a very convenient room. And it's got provenance as the most powerful dining room to eat luncheon. We need to do that for dinner. And how do I do that for dinner? I don't open for lunch immediately, right? And I think that resonated with him greatly, right? Because I said, to do the types of numbers we're talking about, this needs to be a dinner restaurant, not a lunch restaurant. Lunch restaurants don't make money. And so that was a big rebranding of what we did here. We kept the name, The Grill, right?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  But renamed it that versus the Four Seasons, which obviously at this point in time had become quite confusing, given the rise of the hotel.

• 20:44David Senra?

  Yeah, that's important. It has nothing to do with it.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Right, it has nothing to do with it. While they were building the Four Seasons restaurant, you know, he was opening the original Four Seasons in Canada, you know, in Toronto. But I mean, nothing to do with one another. But huge confusion all the time. You know, people would say, meet me at the Four Seasons, people would show up here versus the bar that people used to hang out at in 57th Street. We rebranded it as The Grill. We made it a true dinner destination. We took the history and the heritage, which you'll see throughout all of our work of, you know, what it meant to be a quintessential American restaurant. How do we interpret that? We went back into the history books. We only serve dishes at this restaurant that you could have ordered. Obviously not the way we make them, but you could have ordered.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  We have seen them on a menu in our menu research in 1959. And we built a menu around that. And that turned out to be an incredible project and probably my favorite restaurant that we have because of all this incredible history. But it also informs and kind of tells a story about our process in general, which, you know, which always deals with, you know, huge amounts of research, you know, studying, reading, going into the New York Public Library archives when we were young and still doing this and pulling old menus and pulling. Old articles to learn about, you know, what was going on there, to read those articles,

• 22:10Speaker 01

  things that weren't even available, you know, online at the time or even at all. I don't know now, but to really find out what's at the core of this concept that we're doing. And what is the story that we're telling? Because I think the one thing that, you know, we've done, and that my biggest contribution to probably the restaurant business is that we made sure that from day one, that we had a very specific process, right? One was that, you know, food was paramount. The food had to be the best. That's the thesis of our company, Major Food Group. It's all food is number one.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  But not too far behind are two other things. One is that the restaurant has to tell a complete story. And if it doesn't tell a complete story, then it doesn't work. And right behind that is that it's got to be fun.

• 23:04David Senra?

  Before we get to fun, tell me how a restaurant tells a story.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  So a restaurant tells a story because we set a narrative. It's no different than we often compare it to making a movie. If we're right here in the place we're sitting, right? We're telling a story of, you know, American fine dining seen through our lens while paying homage to the time period the building was built in and all the history that had happened before it as we, you know, create a menu and a service style and uniforms and music and artwork and all the different things that go into creating hospitality spaces, but are often overlooked. We make sure that that entire story makes sense.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So, you know, whether it's the chair you're sitting in right now, like this chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1959. We had it remade by the same people.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Things that you might not even notice as a customer, but subconsciously, they have an effect on you and consciously, different things have different effects on different people. Some people may talk about how amazing their server was and how it was to interact with their captain. Some people may talk about the soundtrack that was playing. Some people may talk about the artwork that was on the walls. Most people hopefully are talking about how great the food was and how great a time they had. And in my business, the only thing that's even relevant is the most important thing, which is are they coming back? I always tell everyone that works for us, it's not a matter of if they come, because anywhere we would open, you know, everyone's going to come and try a new restaurant.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  All that matters is that a customer is going to come back. That's what you need to look at and measure. Because coming once is easy. You could open a restaurant tomorrow, you know, and everyone will come once, right? Anyone can do that, right? You know what I mean? But it's how will they come back? How often will they come back? Is it where they're going to choose to have special moments, special occasions?

• 25:05David Senra?

  This is key though, because we talked about this when you and I had dinner a few weeks ago. And what I admire is like, I'm obsessed with people to do things for a long period of time. Because like, anybody can succeed for a year, for five years. It's like you've been doing it for 15 years. You're at the top of your game. You're, I think your future success is going to be much greater than what's behind you. But you were even saying it's like, that's even more true in the restaurant business. Can you explain why?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I mean, listen, the restaurant business, especially in today's day and age, is, you know, it's a trendy business, right? And everyone wants to try something that's new, right? I mean, and everyone's excited to go to an opening. Everyone's excited to go to a place for the first time to say that they went here. But the big question is, after they've done that, after they've checked that off their list, after they've taken their Instagram photo to prove they went to this place and whatever else, which is, you know, we could talk is a whole other topic. But do they still want to come back, spend money with you, right? And feel good about the money that they spent when they left, right?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Because at the end of the day, that's what we're in the business of providing people with an incredible evening. Right? We're here to entertain you. We're here to delight you. We're here to feed you. And we're here for you really to walk out with a smile on your face. Feeling like, when's the next time I can come back? When's the next time I can get a reservation? I always say the perfect thing is someone that comes to the desk and makes a reservation on the way out for the next time they're gonna come. That's one of the many factors that makes this business so hard, especially in New York. There are so many restaurants. There are so many seemingly great restaurants that you're reading about every day that are opening. That you wanna try and you wanna go to this one, you wanna go to that one. So how do you become something that people are coming back to all the time?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  That becomes something that people, you know, identify with a place they wanna gather for business, for pleasure. And, you know, also for special occasions, but all the time, you know what I mean? And on a regular basis. And I think that, you know, we have a great blend of that, right? We have a great blend of, you know, the demand, you know, all of our regulars that are consistently coming back to many of our properties. You know, once a week or more. And people that have been trying to get in for months at a time and are there for their first time. And hopefully they can't wait to make their next reservation to come back. That's the critical piece. You'll, you'll, you know, they have a statistic, right? We've all heard it, you know, nine out of 10 restaurants close within the first year they're being open.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  That's like the famous rule of thumb. And many restaurants have a great first three months and then no one shows up again. But that, you know, that, that's, that's historically probably what has plagued the most restaurants throughout time.

• 27:48David Senra?

  Hearing you speak, this is, what comes to mind is this great quote that Steve Jobs said towards the end of his life. He says, "The older I get, the more I think that people's motivations on what they're doing matters." It's like becomes more important. Where you have this obsession when you're a 13-year-old kid about being obsessed with food. But now you have restaurants, maybe higher status, there's like celebrity restaurateurs, there's celebrity chefs. So I can't help but wonder if like the people that you see coming into this are doing it. You said, you know, for their motivations and why they're doing it are completely different than yours. Do you see that as well?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that. To your point, what we were talking about, right? My generation, myself and my partners, Richard Mario, like when we came in and started coming up with our own restaurants, right? You know what I mean? That was kind of the last generation of, you know, of people that were doing this solely based on blind passion for this business. It was the only thing that, you know, we could imagine doing. And, you know, it's the type of thing that, you know, if you love this business, it is, you know, by, you know, by math, like the hardest business you could go into.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  But if you love it and if you're passionate about it and you study it and you do the work that's necessary, which is critical, you have a chance of being successful and you have a chance of creating really special places that you're proud of and that you love sharing with people. And that's truly the essence of hospitality, right? You know, we love to bring people together and serve them great food and have, you know, make people happy and have them have a great time and leave with a big smile on their face. And we, that brings us great joy. I think that for better or worse, what's happened is that with the rise of social media, with the rise of, you know, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera,

• 29:49Speaker 01

  it did two things, right? You know, so two things happened. At first you had food TV going back 20 years, right? And I mean, that started the whole idea of celebrity chefs, celebrity restaurateurs, et cetera. Right? So now cooking became cool, right? And cooking was in the spotlight and people were watching Food Network. And then the internet started and you had, you know, websites and blogs and all these different food content. And then, you know, obviously now we're living in an extreme where you have viral, you know, food related content on all these platforms. And the thing is, is that now to have a line around the block, right? You don't necessarily have to be even making something that's that good. It just has to go viral, right?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  And that lasts a pretty finite period of time. There's very few examples of. This food that went viral that, you know, that went for years, right? It might go for six months, it might go for four months, it might go for a year. But it's very rare that that happens. And in that, the whole, all those things combined turn the restaurant business and restaurateurs into a much more glamorous business, right? When I came in, it was not a glamorous business. It was a business that people were like, why on earth would you go into that business? Right? Like, are you crazy? You know, you're gonna be broke, you're not gonna, it's nine out of 10 are gonna fail. You're not gonna have any chance of success. But they didn't know what's going on in my head or my partner's heads

• 31:16Speaker 01

  and what we believed and knew we could do from the beginning. Now that it has become more glamorous and you have all these other, not only people that wanna go into it, right? But you have another reason for customers to come. You have different entry points, you know what I mean? That didn't exist before. People see it as, you know, are saying, let me try to create something that's gonna go viral. Not something, let me create the best version of this product because I have a great passion for it. Here's the history of it and here's how we're gonna do it. And here's why it's gonna be the best version of that that's ever been done.

• 31:54David Senra?

  They don't even know the history.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  They don't know the history and the history for them does not matter because all that matters to them is how does it look on my Instagram? And how is it looking like and how is it gonna catch on, right? And that's just a totally different approach. That being said, you know, everyone always says, well, you have, do you not like that? No, I love it for me because the other side of that is that you have a much more educated consumer who's much more interested in spending their money on food and beverage than ever before. So we benefit greatly. Some people looked at it, I think, the wrong way. When that all, when that all started, you know, however many years ago, you know, restaurateurs would talk to each other, hospitality people would talk to each other.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  They'd say, they'd say, you know, oh, I mean, now everyone's a food critic. You know, like, oh, you know, how do we deal with this? Everyone's a food critic. And I'm like, this is fantastic. Like, you know what I mean? And everyone's like, why? I don't even have Instagram to this day. I don't even know what goes on on it. But what I know is that. If these people wanna come and wait in line and wait months for reservations to come to my restaurant, and sometimes only to just take a picture of a dish, that's an incredible shift of things. These are not cheap dishes, right? You know what I mean? So I'm not selling a bagel and a donut, you know what I mean? I'm selling expensive meals. And if that's gonna drive people's willingness, not only to spend on it, but also it does drive their awareness and their understanding of food.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Because naturally, if you're looking at food content all day, you understand it better than if you didn't, right? So we have a more informed customer, right?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Some of them are there for, you know, just to take the picture, but many of them are there for also to enjoy incredible experiences, because they've tried all these different ones, because they've become more engaged with food and beverage, and more comfortable with it being something you spend money on. And I think that's probably the biggest thing that happened during my career, was that right when I really started, and right when we opened kind of Carbone, and things started to explode for us, um, you know, food truly kind of joined the rest of culture as one of the significant things, right? So, you know, if you were growing up in New York, there were people who would talk about,

• 34:17Speaker 01

  you know, Broadway shows, and ballet, and dance, and sports, and, you know, restaurants became another form of cultural currency. It was something that if you were a cultured, sophisticated person, you need to know about restaurants. You need to talk about it. It became a topic of every, "Where'd you eat last night? What'd you have? Oh my God, I wanna try that." None of that really existed at the level that it did before, even when we started. And then that's just now been amplified to a level that is, you know, exponential and hard to even measure at this point, you know, when you add in all these new ways that people share their experiences.

• 34:57David Senra?

  I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it.

• 35:39David Senra?

  There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

• 36:09David Senra?

  Okay, I want to go to your unconventional path to break into the industry. This industry you were obsessed with since you were a kid.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:17David Senra?

  Let's go back to, I think, your, what, early twenties?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:20David Senra?

  Can you just tell us, like, what was going on in your life at this time? You even had a different job, if I remember correctly. And then you take a very unconventional and risky decision to quit your normal job.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:33David Senra?

  And talk about the path that you actually, how you got into restaurants.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  I was, you know, strangely obsessed with food and restaurants from a very young age. You know, I was, I was, you know, while other kids were watching cartoons, I was watching cooking shows. Okay? At that time, the only cooking show was available on PBS. It was a show called The Frugal Gourmet.

• 36:55David Senra?

  The Frugal Gourmet?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yes. There was, like, one cooking show that was on after school. That's what I'd be watching. So my whole life was always focused around food. You know, in high school, I went to cooking school. I took a semester that I went to cooking school. So it was always an incredible focus of mine. Now, at that time, I could never imagine that this thing that I loved to do so much, eating, cooking, drinking, bringing people together, having a great time, that's what I enjoyed to do. It's still what I enjoy to do today. It was hard for me to even really realize, because I liked doing it so much, that that could actually be what I would do with my life. Because at that time, it was a hobby. And that's how people looked at it.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  You know, oh, you love to cook? That's great. Okay, you know what I mean? Whatever it might be. My first job was at, out of college, was at JP Morgan as an investment banking analyst. And I worked there in the Technology, Media and Telecom Group. That experience very quickly made me realize, I don't care whether this is the high... I only took the job. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew that if I could get this job just on paper, it was the highest paying job out of college.

• 38:11David Senra?

  And very popular, higher status.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yes, but it was a very simple equation. It was like, I'm not sure what, you know, I don't know what, but if it is the highest paying job and I can get one, let me go do that.

• 38:21David Senra?

  You're how old at this time?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I'm 21 years old. I had never even opened an Excel spreadsheet. You know, I didn't go to business school, so I didn't know any of this. But, so I went to JP Morgan and they basically, you know, they basically teach you. It's like, it's like, it's an amazing thing. It's like a free business school. You go there for the first six months and they teach you how to do everything, which was actually, you know, very beneficial to me. But, um, but I very quickly realized when I was in the office, you know, I started to realize, you know, there was something a little bit different about, you know, every guy, all the other analysts around me be reading the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. I'm sitting there reading like Travel and Leisure Magazine and then like weird cooking magazines. And everyone's looking at me like, what's wrong with this guy? And I also realized the power of restaurants.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  There was two things that happened. One was, you know, because I was so obsessed, I would go out. This is before you could even, you know, you would use a Zagat guide to find the great restaurants in New York. And I had memorized the guide, right? So the guide was memorized. So like a game I used to play would be like, someone would open the guide and they'd name a restaurant in New York and I'd tell you the rating. It was 24, 26, 40, you know, it's not, it went up to 30. But, um, that was like, that was a fun game for me. Name a random restaurant, I'll tell you the rating. I had memorized this guy. And I had, you know, so I wanted to try all these great restaurants. That was the bible of New York restaurants. You know, twenty five years ago, that's how everyone figured out what restaurants they were gonna go to.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And basically, I found two things out. One was, you know, because I had this incredible passion and I na- it was natural for me. It was natural for me to be in restaurants. It was natural the way I felt when I went to restaurants. It was natural the way I got along with, you know, the people who worked in restaurants, which is its own culture, like, you know, the, whether it was the waiters, whether it was the chefs, whether it was the restaurateurs and the owners. These were the people I got along with, you know, like, we understood each other. So I would spend time, and all my time that I could outside of work, which was not that much of that time, but, you know, trying this place, trying that place, and spending all the money that I was making to go to try these restaurants,

• 40:30Speaker 01

  and, you know, try every single thing that I possibly could in the amount of time that I had. Two things happened. One was that I realized the power of restaurants because, you know, because I went to these places, because I, I had become friendly with a lot of restaurateurs at that time. You know, I realized that the greatest currency I had, you know, was that I could get, you know, my senior, you know, the managing directors that everyone was like afraid to talk to. Suddenly, I was helping them get dinner reservations. And they like thought I was the great, you know, it was, it was the craziest thing, you know, that I could get them into Nobu, or wherever it was at the time, like, they thought was the greatest thing that ever happened to them.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  So I started to see like, there's something here, like, you know, the, the, the currency of restaurants, and it had already started, you know what I mean, of people, these impossible tables and being able to access them, and what that meant to people, what they do, and, you know, to have those great experiences that were out there. I started to see that, and at the same time, I started to see, you know, when you look up to the top of your job, or wherever you're working, and you look at the guy who is the top guy, the guy making the most money, you know, and you're, the guy who you're obviously gonna try to be like, if this is what you're gonna do. These guys were miserable, right? And I was like, I cannot do this.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  I kind of realized very quickly that there were, A, this was not, I don't want to be like that guy. I want to be like that guy that I met last night in the restaurant. And on top of that, I'm never going to be the best at this. I can be the best. I don't know yet what it is, but as long as it's something that has food and people surrounding it, whether it be restaurants, hotels, or otherwise. So I walked out of my job on my birthday in my second year, which is a two-year program. So it was right before that was coming to a close. It was in August. And right at that point, I said, you know what? I've had enough of this.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  I gotta go do something around hospitality and food and beverage. And it was still so crazy of an idea to go into the restaurant business that I didn't even take that. I went to go work in a hotel, which seems a little less crazy, right? And I mean, like, so I walked from, from literally a few blocks from here. At the time, you know, you can, he puts it in perspective, the timing, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Columbus Circle had just opened, right? And the Mandarin Oriental was, at the time, when my travel and leisure I was reading, the most expensive hotel to ever open, right? And it was like the crown jewel of New York and, you know, everyone, it was a big deal

• 43:17Speaker 01

  because it opened with Columbus Circle and it was, it was, it was a big, big deal. So I walked into the hotel to, uh, to try to get a job, right? And so I went to the front desk and they were like, well, we don't give jobs here. You gotta go to like the service entrance in the back. And I was like, oh, okay. So how do I get there? I'll walk around the thing. So I walked around the thing. I ended up, you know, going in and saying, I'm looking for a, a job. And they're like, do you have an appointment? No, it was on my lunch break. And I said, no, but I'm in my suit. I'm from J P Morgan, you know, and, uh, and they said, well, you know, you gotta come back with an appointment. I said, well, you know, please just do me a favor. You can see the guy, the H R director, you know, it's one of those like half walls,

• 44:02Speaker 01

  you know, like the half walls, like a show, like where you could see the person in the office. Um, through the glass. So he was like in one of these classic like HR cubicles where you kind of see what was going on. And uh, and I said, could you, he was like that far away from me. So I was like, can you, could you just ask him? Um, you know, tell him that I'm here, that I'm an investment banker at JP Morgan. And that I will take any job in this hotel that he will give me. He thinks I'm out of my fucking mind. And I get up and I leave and I remember going, walking back to work. I remember calling someone and saying like, I don't think that went so well, but um, we'll see what happens. You know, cause he, he kind of was like, yeah, well, you know, we'll see. Nothing's available.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Let alone the next day, my phone rings. And um, it's the head of HR at Mandarin Oriental and he says, hey, you know, um, it was nice meeting you yesterday. We just had the head of guest relations quit. Do you want to take that job? I said, that'd be fantastic. He was great. Why can't you start? I said, in two weeks. He said, great. So I ended up leaving and going to work at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. What I got very lucky with was that in the man, at that time, at the Mandarin, guest relations, which means a lot of different things in different hotel, you could, best relations can be a synonym for concierge. Or it could mean VIP services, which is what it meant in this hotel. So

• 45:31Speaker 01

  it ended up being an ideal starting point for me because basically what I did as kind of what ended up leaving the VIP kind of concierge, the services, whatever you want to call it. Was that I, I handled all our most important guests. No matter what they were doing. So from rooms, the restaurants, to check in, to every single aspect of the hotel. So I got to very quickly learn what I, what I wanted to learn about. You know, how to run a hotel at the highest level and also the food and beverage outlets that were there that I got a chance to work in. So that was kind of my first foray into that. Now, my, my parents thought I was crazy.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  You know, they uh, you know, you're leaving the best job that it theoretically exists to go into what at that time, again, was not what it is today. It's not like this fancy fun business, right? You know, that, that people are, you, you see people as being big successes and it was like a place that, you know, you would, you, you could never make any money. I, I continued to do it and it led me to uh, At that point, I still hadn't fully decided I needed to open a restaurant. I knew I needed to be around food all the time. I knew I needed to be around people all the time. I loved dealing with customers. I love dealing with people. I love being around food. If I could check those boxes, I was very happy.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And so that led me at the time to, you know, do what I was, was to, I started a website.

• 47:02David Senra?

  This is a very unconventional path.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:04David Senra?

  So you go from employee at Manor Oriental to entrepreneur.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  For all my VIP guests at the Manor Oriental, I had been building, I built my own, using my JP Morgan skills. I built my own Excel database, right, of restaurants. And this database was so well JP Morgan style organized, right, that, you know, that basically, you know, it was all my restaurants that I liked. It was exactly what you want to eat when you went there. It was exactly what table you wanted. It had, you know, who you need to speak to at the door. It had every information because this was now, you know, they'd call me and say, I want to go here and here. I'd be great. I can, I'd be, I rose through the ranks there because I, I knew I could get everyone into these restaurants. Cause I made, I was always spending my time in all these restaurants.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  That database, then I, one day I was walking into my building late from, you know, we didn't get out of work at JD Morgan until two, three in the morning as, you know, you know. And I had an incredible doorman named Max. And I'm walking in, I'm talking, and he says, you know, like, he introduced me to this kid. This kid is a student at NYU and he's a programmer. So I say to him, I say, you know, I have this idea. This is all standing in the lobby at two o'clock in the morning. I said, I have this idea. I think I have this database already built in Excel. And there's nowhere to properly search online. This is before anything existed. You know, there's no website where you can search restaurants properly and have it, you know,

• 48:38Speaker 01

  rated and graded and et cetera, et cetera. And also that tells you what to eat there and what the signature dishes are and blah, blah, blah. All things that we easily access now. But I had this vision to create this content site all around restaurants that would allow people to use what I had built. You know, for themselves, right? So they could just say, I want an Italian restaurant downtown. And it would say, here are the three that are recommended. Here you should eat there, et cetera, et cetera. That became a site called Always Hungry that, uh, that I created, which was a content site. And that was really my door into the restaurant business as a whole, because now I was on the content creation side.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  So I got to be very close with the best chefs and best restaurateurs in the city, interviewing them, talking to them, doing things like this. You know what I mean? Before, you know, podcasts existed or anything of that nature, but we were having them take us through their process or through the restaurant, et cetera, et cetera. And what happened was after doing this for, you know, a little while, I started to realize, I understand this. Like it all made sense to me. I need to be doing this myself, not talking about the people that are doing it. It was that feeling of like, this is what I'm meant to be doing, not some internet thing. I really don't even understand the internet portion of, I'm just creating food content.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  That led me to starting another website called Dine Private with who, a guy named Joe Bastianich, who was one of the most famous restaurateurs at the time. He came to me because I was at the time, you know, this is 20 years, the food web guy. There wasn't anyone in my space. It wasn't like this, you know what I mean? Like I was the guy. So the biggest restaurateur, one of my, the guys that I looked up to, right? Came to me and said, you know, I have, I have an idea. I want to start, uh, you know, Open Table, which existed at the time, but for private dining rooms, right? Like this room? Like this room, right? But, but he had just opened a restaurant at the time called Del Posto.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  And he had like seven private dining rooms and he was having trouble booking them all the time. And his idea was like, well, what if we, you know, automated this so you could do it online?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  So I didn't really have that much interest in doing it, except for that I knew that it would give me an opportunity to spend time with Joe as his partner and do that, you know, on a daily or weekly basis.

• 51:06David Senra?

  So wait, you were gonna be co-founders together on this new project? He was one of the restaurateurs or chefs that you most admired?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  He was the biggest restaurateur of that moment. Okay, he was, you know, he was partners with Nair Batali, he was, he was, he was the big, you know, he was one of the, one of the, if not at that moment, the biggest restaurateur doing some of the biggest projects.

• 51:30David Senra?

  That was smart.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  And, and so, right, so I, I figured if I get to have a front row seat and, and not even beyond that, be his partner and start working with him and figuring out all these intricacies that we would have to figure out around restaurants, I can learn everything, you know what I mean? And, and so basically, that's why I ended up doing that project. And he never knew my motive was that, my motive was to become him, right? But...

• 52:01David Senra?

  He's the opposite of the guy you saw at JP Morgan. I don't want that miserable guy.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. I was like, I wanna be like that guy. I wanna be like Joe. So, um, so the opportunity to be his partner was, was something that I said, you know what, even though I don't wanna build another website, I'll do it. So we built it. The biggest thing that it gave to me was obviously that I, you know, I would literally meet him three times a week. We'd sit in Del Posto, we'd drink wine, we'd hang out, we'd talk, I'd watch how he did what he was doing, I'd watch, you know, the way that, you know, he was, uh, you know, we'd talk about restaurants, we'd talk about the intricacies of every last detail, many of which we needed to program into this thing that we were building.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  And that really, really put me in a place where I realized, I can do this, and I think I can do it my way, you know, and at that, you know.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  I can definitely do it as good, if not better, as what I see, you know, him and the other peers that we were working with.

• 53:06David Senra?

  But this is, this is really important. I want to pause here because like this is something that I see reappear over and over again in all these biographies of business entrepreneurs I read. And it drives me crazy because if you listen to normal people, they're like, oh, you know, you shouldn't, you should generate evidence first and then have confidence. It's like, no, you have it exactly backwards. Belief comes before ability. You're in your early twenties at this time?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  About 25.

• 53:28David Senra?

  You have this obsession, you're in your early to mid twenties. This is a guy you most admire. You're like, actually, I can do that.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  It was natural to me, you know, the only thing I can equate it to when I talk to people, it's like, like, you know, it's like if you're an athlete and you were just naturally good at basketball and obviously now you've honed your craft to be one of the best. But I was good at this. I understood why they put this here. I understood why those guys are coming here on the service. I understood what was on my plate, how it was cooked, was it seared? Had they blanched? Had they done this? Had they done that? And I could tell you, there's a problem with this because of this, just by tasting it, right? Okay, here's what you got to redo with it. And part of it was all of the studying, right? All the years of eating, repetition, studying, cooking, et cetera, et cetera. And part of it was just natural talent. At the end of the day, like, you have to have a great palate,

• 54:20Speaker 01

  right? You know what I mean? Like, if you, if you don't have a great palate, it's going to be tough to taste food professionally, right? But, you know, part of it also just comes with a lot of studying, a lot of repetition, no different than anything else.

• 54:31David Senra?

  Well, if you're 25, you've already had this obsession at that point for half your life.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:34David Senra?

  And it's funny you use the word athlete because I hear, when you were speaking, this weird clip of Larry Bird, a young Larry Bird came to my mind because, you know, he played at this like small school. They said he's too slow. He's not, he doesn't have, like, he didn't play against tough competition. You're not going to make in the NBA. They're telling him after he got drafted to the NBA before he went. And so he had a lot of self-confidence, but he goes, wait a minute. So they used to have this thing called rookie camp where all the rookies would get and start playing together. And he's like, it took me, I was hearing all this stuff, like, I'm too slow, I have horrible competition. Took me, he goes, three days of rookie camp to realize, not only can I play in this league, I'm going to dominate in this league.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  That's very similar. So like what I went through was exactly that. It went from, I can be like these guys to. I'm gonna be able to dominate this world, right? You know what I mean? Like, and I was 100% confident in that idea. And I took that, we were, you know, I was able to sell off these two businesses that I had started. I took the very small amount of money that I made on those.

• 55:35David Senra?

  Oh, wait, so you burned the boats. You got, you

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:37David Senra?

  So you sold off your content, your website before you started your first?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically what happened was, I don't know why, you know, is that I had both businesses running. And at that point, I was like, I gotta go and open my own restaurant. This is, this is, this is what I'm meant to do. I was so locked in on this idea. And I gotta get out of these businesses. And, you know, one thing led to another. I spoke to a friend of mine who was in kind of the venture capital world. We sold Always Hungry, which was the content site to, in a matter of a few months, right? You know what I mean? We sold that and we sold Dime Private. So I was able to get out and then basically I hit the streets saying, I'm gonna find a restaurant space.

• 56:22David Senra?

  The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from. And today, that team includes people and agents. But most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business, like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. This is what HubSpot fixes. It connects AI to your real customer data. So when you ask AI to write an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago, it knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month. And that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready.

• 57:05David Senra?

  And when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch. It's the same platform that more than 300 startups who have grown to over $1 billion in valuation grew their businesses on. And now, HubSpot for Startups offers this service at up to a 90% discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups.

• 57:31David Senra?

  Did you think you were gonna be the chef at the time?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:34David Senra?

  Did you know who you were gonna partner with or no?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  No. So what happened was, I learned, watching Joe and other restaurateurs, the biggest reason why restaurants don't work out, if it's on the restaurateur owner's part, is because there's always been this classic tension between the restaurateur and the chef. It's been happening throughout history, right? It's a classic thing. The chef wants to make this food, the restaurateur wants to make more money, and they're fighting all the time about these things, and then eventually they break up. That's an age-old, that's like the stereotypical restaurant story. So I watched that happen a lot of times, right? While I was watching the industry so closely. I also realized that the best partnerships were when, you know,

• 58:18Speaker 01

  were when restaurateurs and great chefs were partners. That was still somewhat of a novel idea, right? You know what I mean? And so I, from day one, was looking for, who am I gonna be partners with? I'm not going to hire a chef. I'm going to look for people that have the same ambitions that I have, but most importantly, that can make the most incredible food in the world. And as I'm looking around for spaces, so, you know, everything has... So simultaneously, I decide that the restaurant I want to open, which is my favorite type of restaurant,

• 59:00Speaker 01

  was whatever my version in my head of Carbone was at that time.

• 59:05David Senra?

  Carbone's gonna be the first restaurant you would do?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  The idea of this elevated Italian-American restaurant was my big idea, right? Because what I saw was the following. And, you know, to me, everything made perfect sense, but other people didn't see it, right? I saw that I'm... Some of my favorite restaurants to go to, you know, Molino's, Colina Tella, Rayo's, etc., these are the best experiences. But like, at the end of the day, the food is not that good. And they were very expensive restaurants. And I would spend as much time, as many times I could go there, spend all my money, going to these places. That's how much I loved them. I loved the moves at the beginning of the meal. I loved what they put down.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  I loved the whole thing. And as a New Yorker, that's like the most classic style, you know, New York restaurant, like these, these kind of finer dining Italian restaurants. My idea was, what if I take this, but we take the entire thing to a different level. So instead of a veal chop being the shittiest veal you could buy pounded this thin, right? You know what I mean? It's gonna, why don't we buy the best veal you can buy, make it a beautiful chop and still make a veal parm out of it, but not pounded so just you're eating breadcrumbs? You know, these little ideas. What if I made a lobster fra diavola, but the lobster was perfectly cooked? Never had happened at that point in time. Never. Okay. It never had happened.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  You know, simple ideas like this, right? You know, what if you reinvented a Caesar salad, you know, but the lettuce was perfect baby gem lettuce and you use this ricotta salata instead of par- you know, what if you, what if you took these dishes and gave them the love and respect that people would give when they were cooking fancy French food in terms of ingredient sourcing, et cetera? And you applied that to Italian American food, right? And to this archetype that I was very much beloved by New York and beloved by me especially. And right around the same time, my two partners opened a small, you know, it was 10-seat Italian American restaurant on Mulberry Street.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  And it had started to gain some traction and it was, you know, I mean, people were talking about it and they served sandwiches during the day and they served a five dish prefix menu for $35 in the evening. And people would line up to go to the $35 prefix and it, and it had, so it caught my eye and, and at first I just had the sandwiches during the day and they were spectacular and they were very much in line with, you know, this philosophy that- I was looking for, they were doing elevated versions of chicken parm sandwiches and of chicken frenchaise sandwiches, all the same idea, but in sandwiches, right?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  And at night, they were doing reinvented versions of classic Italian-American dishes, right, with different influences and a little bit more avant-garde in that way, but, but it was still this elevated version of truly Italian-American cooking. And at this point, I'm a food expert, you know what I mean? I'm, I'm eating, you know, six meals a day at different restaurants. I'm tasting food again for these different, for, for a living at that point. And I go into that restaurant and another restaurateur I was friends with took me there, said, "You gotta try this place." I didn't have a restaurant or anything at that point. He knew me from my web stuff and we were friends and he took me to this, "You gotta

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  try this place." I was so blown away by the food and I was like, "This is crazy." You know what I mean? Like I, the hundreds of meals I've eaten this year, this is by far the best food I've had. And it happened to be the exact same philosophy and genre of things that I was thinking about and, and actually actively looking at spaces to do. So, you know, that night I went, you know, Richard and Mario were working at The Pass and we started talking. And they tell the story all the time that like, you know, all the guests would come over and start talking to them, but like, when we started talking, it was a little different because I knew what I was talking about, right? So the high-level food conversation, which has been the restaurant, been going on now

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  for 15 years together, but, um, so we had this great conversation. I was blown away by the meal. Uh, I got home that night and I told my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife, I said, "I think that I found the guys I want to partner with and I want to bring you back to the restaurant." I, I called because there was a, there was a line around the block. I called just doing what I would all, you know, you know, it was a hail Mary. I didn't really know them. Or know what was gonna happen, but I didn't wanna wait in line. So I called and I said, hey, it's Jeff Salazza, you know, I was hoping I could come in tonight for two people and they're like, the girl who picked up Nicole, who ended up working with us

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  for many years after said, uh, said, you know, uh, hold on one second. It was a leap of faith that they'd have any idea who I was. I wasn't a well-known person at this point, you know, I mean, in restaurants, I was, but, you know, it all comes full circle because Mario, my partner Mario Carbone, had worked at Del Posto where, which was Joe's restaurant and Joe and I, when we would meet all these times.

• 1:04:39David Senra?

  Is your partner on the?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  On Dine Private.

• 1:04:41David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  And we would meet all these times, we would sit in the dining room with Del Posto, like you and me are sitting now, and we would drink wine and hang out and we'd be working and laughing and talking and whatever it was, and he would see me sitting with Joe in the dining room. So he knew me and recognized me and we had said hi once or twice or whatever it was. And, um, so when I called, they said, you know, actually, we'd love to have you, but can you come in at 10?

• 1:05:07David Senra?

  Is this after you had the high-level conversation with them?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  We had just had a quick high-level conversation on my way out.

• 1:05:13David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Five minutes, 10 minutes.

• 1:05:14David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  And I only knew later, because we tell this story all the time, that they felt that, you know, I mean, I, I thought it was a great conversation.

• 1:05:21David Senra?

  They felt the same.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  And apparently they felt the same. They said, can you come in at 10 PM? I said, you know, sure, she said, you know, because Mario gets a service at 10 and he would love actually to talk to you about something.

• 1:05:34David Senra?

  Oh, great.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  And I said, that's crazy. I wanna talk to him about something. That's why I'm coming in. This is all real, not made up. I literally say, like, I remember hanging up being like, it's the craziest thing, uh, to my wife, Ally. I said, Ally, we gotta go at 10 because the thing I was telling you about. He wants to talk to me too, so we're gonna go to ten and I'm gonna go out with him after and we'll talk. And so we went for dinner and after service him and I went for drinks. And, you know, the rest is kinda history. I mean, we, we basically sat down at the Jane Hotel. I told him my idea, what I wanted to do, you know, what I wanted to do with, you know, Italian American food. And he immediately said, that's exactly what we wanna do.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  That's our dream. We were there till four or five in the morning, just talking about what we wanted to create. You know, we talked through, he had worked for Joe for a long time, so we talked through like, we don't wanna be, he, Joe only made Italian restaurants for the most part. We don't wanna just make Italian restaurants, we wanna make different types. And should this first thing work? You know, what's, my ambition is to be the biggest, greatest restaurant company in the world. And I, our, my ambition is to grow into hotels and into much bigger things, right? And, you know, and the entire hospitality experience. We talked about all these things in our first conversation, which has basically been the exact roadmap that we have followed up until today, right?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Was talked about in our first conversation. And we stayed there all night, talking, and it was like, you know, meeting your, uh, you know, soulmate kinda, you know, like you're, like if you're playing in a band, you guys start playing and then it just all starts working. I then met Rich, you know, the next day, and we decided to, you know, to partner up. And, you know, I, I quickly started working with them at Terese, which was the original restaurant, different than the one that it is now. From there, we started on our path to try to find the right space to do Carbone. And so that was probably in, you know, the summer of, they opened in January and that summer I joined them.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And we set our sights on creating what would be the greatest Italian American restaurant ever opened. And with no other ambit, the, the ambition was only to be the.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Greatest New York style Italian American restaurant that had ever opened. And to really truly reinvigorate this art form that we all had grown up with together in New York. That was slowly fading and being kind of left for dead. Right. You know what I mean? Like it will, no one was paying attention, right? In fine dining to spaghetti and meatballs, right? You know what I mean? Fine dining at that point in time had become this very, very, very serious. Tasting menu, the chef's always right. I'm gonna serve you these five dishes. That's all you can have tonight. It's the only thing that I'm making, no substitutions, no allergies.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  You know, you eat what I tell you and say, thank you. That was the general tone of restaurants and, and people loved it. That was the general tone was I'm gonna go in, if I want to eat a great meal. Uh, you know, a, a great fine dining meal. The only options as we were coming up, so we loved this Italian American thing. And we were also very blatantly and very collectively fighting against something that we also liked at one point in time. But we're at this point just sick of, which was this incredibly inhospitable robotic style of fine dining. Right? Okay. Which was, didn't make any sense when you started to break it down. The whole idea of hospitality, the whole idea of restaurants is taking care of your customers.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  When did it become that you come to my restaurant, I'm telling you exactly what you're eating. You can't have anything else. I don't care what your preferences or your allergies are. When did that become the way that people want to eat? It had its moment and we basically were ready to say like, we're done with that. And so when we came out with Carbone, which the Italian American restaurant has that spirit of abundance. And built into it, we celebrated to the maximum. That's why, you know, Carbone famously has, I made the menu, the biggest menu in Manhattan, right? Cause at that point, everyone was giving you these tiny little cards with like six ingredients listed on it. That everything had become so austere. So our menu was big, it was bold, there was 70 things on it.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  And on the very top of that menu, it said, appia cherry. Appia cherry means whatever you want, right? Because my whole thing and our whole thing was that. If we're so good, if someone asks for a piece of grilled chicken, why can we not make that for them really well? Like, what that means is like, we're not that good. Because I can only make you, if I, anyone, just so you understand, without even that much culinary training, could make you four or five dishes if they make the same exact dishes every single night, and probably get them to a point that is acceptable, right? Obviously, you need to be great for it to be great. But the whole difficulty of a restaurant is that you've got seventy different dishes. All that's gotta be prepared for. How much do you prepare? What ingredients came in?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Did they all come in right? You got all these different moves, you got hundreds of moving parts just to put out the menu that you're putting in front of people. That being said, that's your job. Like, you know what I mean? Your job is to do that at an incredibly high level if that's what you're putting in front of people. Now, if I have the ingredients, obviously, if you come in, you ask me to make you Chinese food, that's, that's, that's what I call food terrorism. That's, that's not, that's not, you know, that's like coming to, when people come to our Italian restaurant, so they want not, they, they, they love Italian food, but they were nothing with onions and garlic, which actually we now accommodate. But at the time, we thought that was the craziest thing. You're coming to an Italian, you can't eat onions and garlic. But, um, but they're outside of crazy requests. You know what I mean? Our opinion was, we're here to serve you. We can make you anything.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  You, of course, if you want that plain and not with sauce on it, we can do it. Of course, you want a pasta done a little bit of that pasta with this sauce. Of course, we can do that. What do you mean, we can't do that? And that was at that point in restaurants, that was a crazy thing. So we came in not only with this big bowl to Italian restaurant, you know, serving the best versions of Caesar salads and beef carpaccios and baked clams and, you know, obviously the spicy rigatoni vodka and, you know, different pastas and veal parm and all these different dishes done in a way that no one had ever been presented. A quality of product that no one had ever used for them. And that really resonated with people. And what really also resonated with people was that

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  We created the category, which is now thrown around in every conversation of experiential fine dining. Meaning that coming to Carbone because of the nature of what we created, because of the types of captains that I went out and hired, you know, they all were part of this movie. We were telling, to your point earlier about, we were telling a story. We were finding our voices in our creative process. We didn't realize what we were doing at the time that now guides everything that we do. But we were creating that story, right? This was 1959, you know, New York, Little Italy, you know, we were on Thompson Street, which had a great Italian-American history.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  We were in a restaurant called Rocco, which was the oldest exist, open when we took it over, Italian-American restaurant that was still open since 1929 in New York City. Uh, so we always loved history. That was the space we put the original Carbone in. We kept the original sign, which has obviously become an iconic thing.

• 1:13:22David Senra?

  Yeah, explain the sign part, because that was interesting, too.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  The sign is a crazy story. So this is, you know, this is my first, like, big lease I'm negotiating. I'm not, you know, it's our first big restaurant, but, um, you know, we found the space because, you know, I, I was one day standing there and a, and a guy I knew tapped me on the shoulder and he says, you know, I think I have a space. We've been looking for a space for Carbone for over a year.

• 1:13:45David Senra?

  Why was it taking so long?

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Because it needed to be the perfect space and we wouldn't settle for anything less. We had our restaurant, Terese Running. We decided we were going to build a sandwich place next door called Parm, which ended up being the first restaurant that I built from scratch. And that was more of a sandwich shop, you know, uh, small though, we're talking about like 18-seat restaurants. That happened to be, we had, we moved the sandwich concept down and moved it next door. We did that because we just, we, we, we were waiting patiently, developing the food, developing the concept, but we hadn't found the space and we weren't gonna, we, we, we knew it had to be a very specific type of space. And one day a guy came up to me and he said, you know, I think I have a space you might be interested in. And he said, you know, it's right around the corner. And I said, great, let's go right now.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  And he walks me down the block. We will turn the right on Thompson Street. And I see the sign. And as we're walking up the block, I look at him, I said, we'll take it.

• 1:14:43David Senra?

  Just from seeing the sign?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Just from seeing the sign. He goes, you haven't even seen what's inside. I said, it doesn't matter. I know this, this sign, I know this place. This is exactly what we're looking for. We go in, obviously the place is a mess. It hasn't been maintained in many years. There's some old Italian guy in the corner smoking cigarettes and like, you know, that's been there and not paying rent for six months or something. At that point, he's like, I'm dying to get rid of this guy, you know, I just, I don't know what, I don't know what to do. And I, he said, I said, well, give him till the end of the year, let him get the, you know, we should start January 1st. I was trying to be very friendly. And in the lease, right, I had put very specifically that I had this vision that this sign, you know, we had to do a whole bunch of construction inside and,

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  you know, change where the kitchen was and dining rooms and all this other stuff, but

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  it had the perfect bones. It had this incredible history. The building had an incredible, you know, history of, you know, New York and Italian, American stories. And this place was obviously a very storied place. It'd been there for close to a hundred years. And basically, we, uh, you know, put in the lease that we needed the sign. The sign had to stay. And so they put in, it didn't seem like a big ask. They put in the lease. And right before we were, uh, gonna execute it, I get a phone call that the owner wants a, a, wants $10,000 for the sign. To keep it there.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Now, it seems irrelevant at this point in time, but for us at that point in time, ten thousand dollars was like a big decision and conversation, right? So, you know, we had like a whole man, you know, we decided, you know, as the sign has to say, we finally, let's just pay him like it's worth it in the scheme of things. This sign is very important. Even though we gave him the money, you know, in kind of classic New York fashion, he was so angry that he was being removed, even though he hadn't paid rent in close to.

• 1:16:48David Senra?

  This is the guy.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  The guy who had been in the restaurant for the last forty years or whatever.

• 1:16:52David Senra?

  Yeah. He's not the one that's getting this ten thousand dollars though, right?

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  No, he's getting it.

• 1:16:56David Senra?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  He's saying, if you want me to leave the sign, I want to know. Okay, so we agree finally. And New Year's Eve was supposed to be his last night and we were taking over January first. And that night, it's a neon sign, if you've been to Carbone, right? So it's a, this old sign that, and it said, called Rocco, right? And says Rocco, wines and liquor, below it in green, and it had Rocco in red. And when I show up on January first, there's shattered glass from the sign is there, but all the neon had been shattered by him, you know, as like, to like, you know, like,

• 1:17:35David Senra?

  Like a fuck you on the way out.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  A fuck you on the way out. He shatters all the glass. At that moment, I look at the sign and I say, at first I'm, you know, pissed off, I'm yelling, I'm cursing, I'm calling the landlord, I'm doing a whole thing. And then after a few minutes, I'm like, I think this guy gave me the biggest gift he could have given me. We're going to keep this sign and instead we're going to put Carbone in neon on top of the Rocco sign, put back the wines and liquor. And that became what is probably the most iconic sign in fine dining restaurants in the world, which we now have obviously all over the world. But that, that sign was incidental, only because he broke all those lights, did it become the quintessential Carbone sign that it is.

• 1:18:17David Senra?

  We're like deep into this conversation just because I think like your lore and history is really, really fascinating and it's just so in line with like the rest of the people I talked to, the people. My own experience, people I read about, it's like this like true interest revealed early. And it's like so smart. And you kept using the word natural, which I think is really important that this just felt natural to you. And I think that's the biggest thing. It's like you want to get to the top of your profession. It's gonna be really hard fighting against your own innate like desires, stuff you're interested in. You should just go with whatever like is natural, even if it's low status or you didn't even see, you know, I'm sure when you started, you thought, okay, I can dominate this industry, but the size of the industry is gone. Has become the amount of opportunity that you've already experienced so far and that's in that's ahead of you too, is just probably beyond what you could have predicted right there back then. Can you give us like the state of the business now?

• 1:19:02David Senra?

  Like just describe when someone says, okay, what's major food group? Like what does it entail?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  So I would say at this point, major food group is a, you know, on its way to becoming a fully vertically integrated hospitality company. So, you know, we started as a kind of luxury fine dining restaurant group, which is what we, you know, for the majority of our careers, we've been. Uh, and then now we've started to add to that, you know, private members, clubs, which has been a huge business for us. Granted residential towers, like we're just finishing one in Miami right now called Villa.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Which will be a, you know, eighty unit, super high end condo building, right? That we're doing, that we've designed, we're doing all the amenities for all the food and beverage, all the apartments, you know, every detail, everything you touch, all the, everything that you feel in there. So we're doing brand residential, we're doing hotels and we're really kind of expanding the scope of what we're doing so that we can, you know, really so we can take care of you 24 hours a day.

• 1:20:07David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  You know, I think that, you know, we get right now.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Our approach to hospitality, you know, has proven to be one that's incredibly, uh, successful and beloved. And, you know, I always say that, you know, our process is not.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  That difficult. We just create places that we want to go to. Right? I mean, that's been our entire ethos is we build places where we want to go. That's it. And if we don't want to go there, we don't want to build it. Whether that be a restaurant or a private club or hotel, like we know how to do it. And we know how we would want it done. And we create those environments. So, you know, being able to apply, you can apply that idea. The most difficult part of any property, any hospitality property is the food and beverage. It's the most complex, no matter what. But what's happened over the last, you know, decade plus is that everyone has come to realize that.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, people building hotels, people building buildings, people building, you know, much larger format things realize that the food and beverage is actually the most difficult. And theoretically, at this point, the most important part of it. So that's been our way into spreading our wings to say, we don't want to just take care of you, you know, for the three hours you're sitting in our restaurant. We want to take care of you from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed. You know, and the way that we do that is our style of hospitality. We're going to do that the way we would want it done. And we're going to apply the same philosophies that we do to everything else in restaurants

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  to the greater hospitality landscape. So that's really what we're focused on today as we grow into not just being a food and beverage classic restaurant company, but also adding all these different arms that come with it. And, you know, then you have other verticals that are not related to, you know, you know, you have luxury hospitality and everything that we're building in that. For example, you know, we've taken the Carbone brand. It's become such an incredible lifestyle brand. You know, that we've applied that and we now sell Carbone Tomato Sauce.

• 1:22:27David Senra?

  I don't think people understand these products, now you're essentially selling products, right? They can scale to insane, like insanely large degree.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Carbone Tomato Sauce, you know, for example, which is sold in thousands of doors across America, right? More than you could ever penetrate with a restaurant. Only so many people can come to a restaurant in a day or a month or a year, right? So, you know, Carbone Sauce has become an enormous business for us, which is growing at a pace we never even expected, you know? And it's really put us at the top of kind of the premium sauce category. And it actually has worked incredibly harmoniously, where even though that's a product that you sell, that you buy in the store, you know, and costs less than $10, right? It's a little piece of what people see and aspire to, you know, at the restaurant.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  And they don't contradict each other, right? One is, at the end of the day, they're both standing for the same thing, which is being the best expression of something that you're familiar with, right? When I say that, I mean that, you know, Carbone, everyone's had jarred tomato sauce, right? Whether it be ragu or whatever it might be. We make the best one. It's not gonna be something you've never had before, it's gonna be the best version. That's our entire thesis around restaurants, right, and food. If you look at our menus, very rarely am I gonna serve you something that's the first time you've ever had these foods or this dish. Our goal is just to make you the best version that you've ever had,

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  which is that, again, that same philosophy goes throughout everything that we do. You know, whether it be how we build a building or how we make a jar of tomato sauce. All the same process.

• 1:24:15David Senra?

  I recorded an episode for the show here in New York with James Dyson, who's my personal hero. Just because he's like a completely, probably the most determined, stubborn, like, and determined person I've ever met or I've ever like read about. He like struggled basically a decade and a half of just failing after failing after failing. Did 5127 prototypes before he got it right, his vacuum cleaner. And that was his whole point. He's like, I don't have to invent markets. I can just look at the market, find a product that can be improved and then just relentlessly re-engineer and optimize it. And the end result, because he hasn't interrupted the compounding for 45 years, he owns 100% of a business. It's like one of the most valuable privately held businesses by a single person in the world. And it's just like, that vacuum cleaner sucks. Everybody uses vacuum cleaners. I'll just make a better one. That hair dryer sucks.

• 1:24:59David Senra?

  Yeah, does it over and over again.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  That's our whole thesis. I mean, that's really our whole thesis.

• 1:25:04David Senra?

  It's almost like, I think I said on that episode, it's like, he identified like, your mediocrity is my opportunity.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  That's really the thing in, in our belief about food and hospitality. Again, it's that everything has been done in one way or the other. Has it been done the right way is a better question, right? So there's always something to look at in our businesses and take something that generally people already like and make a much better version of it, right? You use the vacuum cleaner. Things that people already are eating. People have been eating spicy rigatoni vodka, you know, with vodka sauce since way before you and I were born, right? But why does this one so much better than all the other ones? It's a very simple thing, but it's something that a lot of work and thought goes into.

• 1:25:54David Senra?

  So I want to go back. You guys had this, remember this conversation with your partner, the first night you stayed up till four or five in the morning, talking about, we're going to do, you know, carbon first, but we want to do other things. What was the first thing that you did that was not a normal restaurant?

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  The real first divergence, you know, was getting involved with hotels, which we did in Boston at the Newberry, which was really our first foray into hotels.

• 1:26:19David Senra?

  What'd you do there?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  We created and opened the entire concept. So we became partners in the concept and we were brought in to basically do everything from design to, you know, execution to branding, et cetera.

• 1:26:36David Senra?

  Were you guys a partner with the hotelier?

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Yes, so the hotel group brought us, that was building it, brought us in. To help with their, they needed, wanted our assistance with luxury execution.

• 1:26:50David Senra?

  But you own a piece of the entire?

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  We own a piece of the brand.

• 1:26:54David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  And we have restaurants and we have bars and we have all this stuff inside the hotel. But, um, but we really brought in to design the experience. And that was, that was years ago. And then the, I'd say the biggest step that we've recently taken in the last few years has been, you know, private members clubs. We started with Zizi's in Miami where you and I had dinner.

• 1:27:15David Senra?

  It's my favorite restaurant in Miami.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. And, uh, and then we opened a much bigger one here in New York, um, you know, which has two, it's in the entrance to Hudson Yards. It's got two restaurants, three bars. It's a much larger thing.

• 1:27:28David Senra?

  Why make it a members club, a private members club as opposed to just another restaurant? Why'd you decide to do that?

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Private members clubs are fantastic because it's, I, you know, as I love win wins, right? So a private members club is a win for the business and for the customer, right? Because for the business, it's a much better business, right? So all the things that make the restaurant business the hardest business, right? Somewhat good, if you know what you're doing, somewhat go away when you add a subscription model to it. Now you're Netflix with a restaurant, right? You have people paying annual dues and monthly dues every single year. It automatically renews. You know, you have, if you do your job, well, you have very little attrition and you've got it.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  You know that every year X amount of dollars of subscription revenue is coming in. So you start to look at it, it's a very different business in the restaurant business where you have virtually no visibility, right? I mean, if it starts to hail one day, that's not going to be a good day in the restaurant. If, you know what I mean? If it's pouring rain, that's going to be a different, you know? The restaurant business has a hundred different variables that are going to affect, right? It's, it's spring break and everyone's away, so the week's quiet. I mean, there's a hundred different things. Sure, at our level, you, you know them and you can predict them to some extent, right? But you're putting on a show, a new show every night where the variables are always changing and you gotta do it the same exact way you did it the night before. That's why it's the hardest business in the world.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Everything's got to flow perfectly so you're full every night and nothing is preventing people from getting to your restaurant. A private club, right? You know, again, you now have a subscription model below it. So that's that's now fixed, right? And it changes the whole nature of what you're that's on the business side. That's why everyone's trying to go into private clubs because it's a much better business, right? But the other side of it is is that that wouldn't be the only reason we could do something like that. The other reason is that at the end of the day, it's what customers want in a luxury sector. Because you can apply a much higher level of personalization.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  You can apply a much higher level of, you know, kind of knowing your customer. And not just anticipating what they want, knowing what they want, right? So here, you know, our job as restaurants is do I anticipate what guest wants? Private clubs, you don't need to anticipate. You literally have them fill out a form of what they want, right? So, okay, okay, so you know what they're what kind of water they drink. You know what their drink of choice is. You know where they like to go. You know their favorite dishes. You know their diet. Yes, you know that in a restaurant, but you sometimes you got to talk about at the table. Everything is more natural, more fluid. It allows for a much higher level of service. And the interesting thing we've done in private clubs is that

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  you've seen now that private members' clubs have started to become much more popular. They always were big in London.

• 1:30:29David Senra?

  I was gonna say, you have to know the history of this, like where.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  So private members' clubs were always big in London, right? So even for, you know, for any of us that have traveled to London, you know, generally, you know, the majority of places you'd be going or being taken for business would be private members' clubs, right? That was the culture in London. Everything was a private club. That's what it was. Still is to some extent.

• 1:30:56David Senra?

  When is it come to the States?

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  And so about, let's say, five, six, seven years ago. You know, forget about Soul House, because that was always something a little different.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  The super luxury, super exclusive private clubs, right, you know what I mean? Which were prevalent in London. The idea started to percolate into New York and kind of right around the same time. You know, you had a few different private clubs open. The difference, you know, that with ours was that, you know, what I, what I saw and what I knew from London, from being at all these places in London. Was that the thing about private clubs were that it was all about being there. The food was never any good, right? So you go there for dinner, but really you just wanted to go there to have a drink and kind of see what was going on. You never sought out to go there for dinner.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Aside from that, it was a cool place and it was cool to take your friends to your membership club for dinner.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  What we did was that we applied our expertise, which is kind of, I think, set us apart in that space, which I take a lot of pride in. Which is we're, you know, we're very, very much focused on food and beverage. Our club, Zizi's, the food comes first, right? It's a great place to hang out, it's a great place to sit and have drinks. Of course, you're going to build a beautiful place that people can sit and congregate and that's a given. And there's lots of now examples in New York. But we actually have a point of view, you know, which is that, you know, for example, Zizi's in New York, right? We have two restaurants. We have an Italian, a private Carbone that has, you know, about thirty, forty percent dishes that are only available there.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  We have our Zizi's classic Japanese restaurant. We have bars that all have their own snacks and whatever else. We also the first people to ever have a culinary concierge. So, you know, to double down on that idea, if you're a member of Zizi's, you can call forty-eight hours in advance. You can call your concierge and you can say, you know, I have investors coming into town from. Egypt, you know, can you make me an Egyptian feast? You know, for my dinner, it's gonna be six of us. And we have a team of chefs who put together whatever you call and ask for. It could be, you know, a theme, an Egyptian feast. It could be, hey, I want you to make, uh, it's my mother's birthday.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Here's her three favorite dishes that she had, or here are her three fame. My favorite three recipes of hers, can you remake them for this dinner? You know, people do that kind of stuff a lot. People recreate their, you know, favorite birthday meals or anniversary meal. People go, you know, and we, people, you know, we get everything from people wanting to do, hey, can you make me 10 courses of just beautiful caviar dishes? To I want chicken nuggets and Big Macs done at the highest level. You know what I mean? And so, so we'll do anything. We'll make you anything you want and do it very thoughtfully. But again, it's all about indulging and indulging in kind of food, beverage, and excellence around that topic.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Everything else is just a meditating around that. At the end of the day, I always tell people, even friends, you, you don't, if you're not focused on eating and drinking, there's no point in being a part of our club, which is very different than most clubs because you join just to kind of go hang out there and have a drink that's okay.

• 1:34:23David Senra?

  I just like it because the food's great.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  That's the idea.

• 1:34:25David Senra?

  I also like it's way quieter in there.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the nice thing. But the food is just. You control the crowd and it's all about the food. And that's what keeps people interested.

• 1:34:33David Senra?

  You personally hang out there more. I feel like you gravitate towards that spot more than any of the other ones.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely spend the most time there. I mean, in Miami, it's my de facto office. I love being there because it's got, A, it's got the, you know, I love the food. And I think it's, you know, it's the best, best environment for me to spend time in and be able to meet with people and have the right people around me.

• 1:34:57David Senra?

  As you move forward, are you gonna try to expand the members' club more than the traditional restaurants?

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Listen, traditional restaurants for us is an ever-growing thing, right? And without, you know, just based on things that come to us. You know, we don't, we don't say, okay, we're gonna open 10 restaurants this year.

• 1:35:16David Senra?

  So how do you future planning? Let's actually talk about that.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  We look at, you know, because of the nature of our business, you know, We're generally dealing with so much incoming opportunity. Our general process is sorting through, you know, what could be interesting and what's not interesting at all.

• 1:35:36David Senra?

  Who's pitching you and what are they pitching you?

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Everyone you could imagine under the sun. Generally, people that are building new cities, new developments, new neighborhoods, whatever it might be, new stadiums, you know, whatever it might be. Where food and beverage plays an integral role and hospitality plays an integral role. And so that's all around the world, right? So globally, so, you know, we're constantly looking at different opportunities and geographies that make sense to us. You know, I always say it's for me, it's not such a, you know, hard equation, right? If you, if you tell me, is this an interesting city to open a restaurant in? All I say is, you know, find me two or three restaurants doing $20 million or more. And then it's an interesting city.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  There's not that many cities in the world that have restaurants doing 20 plus million dollars a year. Find dining restaurants. And when you can find those places, you, you already know that you can come in there with a great expensive concept that if you do your job well, you can blow away the competition in those markets because the business is there.

• 1:36:43David Senra?

  You start in New York, maybe the most difficult place in the world to start a restaurant. But then you came down. I think this was accidental. Your, your accidental discovery that Miami was like this wide open market where people love to go out, they love to spend money. They want great food. There's, and you essentially found a market with almost no competition. Is that the way you would describe the way you spotted this opportunity?

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Miami was, was one of the great surprises of my life. You know, in the sense that, you know, I ended up there the day before, you know, COVID began. Ended up getting kind of stuck there. What I started to realize, you know, as a New Yorker, when you would historically have gone to Miami, you know, you'd go for like. The weekend with your family, you'd go for a night to party and come back. You know what I mean? Like, it was really a place that you'd go for a couple nights and then, you know, go have a good time, come back. And what I realized after living there for, you know, the kind of first six months that I was there was not only is this an incredible place to live, just in general, you know what I mean?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Like, the entire place is a very special place. That's not at all what you experience when you come in for your quick, like, come to our Basel, a party for three days, or come to, you know, this kind of, you know, thing to hang out for a couple of days. It's this incredible place with incredible people. And also with what you saw that happened during that time, with this incredible drive that was not related to, you know, party affiliation or anything political, you know? There was a drive, where there was a drive between all the people that I would meet in Miami

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  as the momentum towards Miami started to make Miami the best city in the world. And nothing, no matter who you were, right? Which I had never experienced, because there's so much pushback on one side or the other, right, in New York about everything, right? Everyone's got, if you've got a good idea, someone's got a reason why you shouldn't build that. You know, there's always a, there's always a push and pull on everything. And it's very hard to make a lot of, a lot of progress quickly on things, whether it's following plans to get a restaurant done, or building an entire neighborhood, whatever it is, or moving a tree. You know, try to move a tree in New York, your grandchildren will still be trying to move the tree. You wanted to move a tree in Miami, they move it the next day if you're doing something great.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  They were running, and that's why Miami exploded the way it did, is that, of course, it came from the leadership that was there. But what was amazing to me was that the entire city, everyone you'd meet, right? Was all, everyone would work, it was working towards the same goal, which was basically like- We've been waiting. We have the best city in America, right? You know what I mean? We've been waiting for people like you to show up and do your thing here. We're ready for more sophisticated products. We're ready to not only have restaurants that are in nightclubs. We're ready for all of this stuff to happen. And so I felt that in such a positive, amazing way.

• 1:39:59David Senra?

  How many times did you have to go out to eat to realize, oh, I'm gonna clean up here?

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Not that many, right? You know what I mean? There was only a few places that people went. So within a few months, you know, I basically said, you know, I called my partners and then I said, listen, I'm gonna, the opportunity here is the biggest I've ever seen. You know, on top of that, it was in the middle, and it was New Year's Eve every single night. So every single night I didn't have a restaurant open. I was like, how do I not have a restaurant? Because everyone was there out every night. It was the only place that was open. So I very quickly, you know, found a space. I turned around the Carbone on Collins Street and in a hundred days from taking the lease, got it open.

• 1:40:45David Senra?

  Wait, the one that's south of Fifth?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:47David Senra?

  You did that in a hundred days?

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  A hundred days from the day I signed the lease to the day we opened. And which was, you know, one of the great restaurant feats of all time.

• 1:40:57David Senra?

  Is that one of your highest grossing restaurants?

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, I mean, that's an amazing story. I mean, I basically found a restaurant that had closed down during COVID because they were afraid about what was gonna happen. It was sitting there relatively new and, you know, relatively unknown, you know, in the sense that I knew that I could come in. It was in a perfect location. Everyone says, how did you find this location? And I say, well, a hundred yards in each direction, exactly, basically, from this restaurant are two of the highest grossing restaurants in America. Joe's Stone Crab and Prime 112, since I've been a kid, okay? These are two of the highest grossing restaurants in America. Every time that list comes out, here are two of them. We're directly in between the two of them. That's all the math I'm doing.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  They're like, oh, well, what about the thing across the street? I'm like, I don't care about the thing across the street. You got the two highest grossing restaurants in America on either side of me. How bad can this be? You know what I mean? Like, this is gonna, of course, it's gonna be a great location. So I basically told them.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  You can change. I knew they couldn't do that much in that amount of time, right? So I was able to say things I don't normally say. It's like, I like, you know, I had like an Ocean's Eleven style. I flew, everyone was all over the country and we flew them in from all over the, you know, all my guys, all my guys that, you know, my, you know, we all flew in, everyone flew in to meet me. Mario came down and he ended up moving down there as well. And basically I said, you guys can do whatever you want here. And I had my designer there, he flew in from San Francisco, Ken Folke. And I said, here's the thing, you can spend as much money as you absolutely want, but there's two conditions. Nothing can be moved.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  So if there's a light, it can be a different light, but it has to stay there. If there's an outlet, there's an outlet, it has to stay there. The kitchen does not change, right? The bar that's there, you can do whatever you want to it, but it cannot move. Nothing can move. Bathroom's there, cannot move, do whatever you want inside. But here's the other catch, you have 90 days to do it. So go, feel free, it's the middle of COVID, to spend as much as you can possibly spend to make this look and feel like the most incredible Carbone in the world. But you cannot move a single thing, because I know from doing this many, many times, once you, that's what takes forever, right? You know, it doesn't take that forever to put up new curtains and paint and make it sound. But Ken and our team did an incredible job.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  It was ready in 90 days, we didn't move a thing. And it was a brand new restaurant that opened and we didn't even change the floor plan. The floor plan was the same as the restaurant before it. And that restaurant with the same floor plan was doing about, you know, call it $7 million in revenue. And when we opened Carbone with the same exact seats, right? I mean, that restaurant does over $30 million in revenue. So that is the smartest way to build restaurants, right? Because people invest so much money.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  In building restaurants, right? Even here where we're sitting, right? We did spend a lot of money, but relatively to build this, right? From scratch would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars today. In a way, you know, the greatest thing is when you can find something that already has the bones. Because where people get stuck all the time is you invest so much money into build outs that you can never catch up. When we came to Miami, we were able to open, you know, there was so much opportunity. There was no one doing what we were doing. There was no great experiential fine dining. There was no real fine dining to begin with. And certainly there was also a culture there that the customers were ready for it.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  But there was no one there to train the staff. So everyone would come to me and say, you know, like, how are you going to open all these restaurants in Miami? There's no, the service there is horrible. And it's the first, everyone would say that. And I was like, I don't think the service, I think there's no one here teaching people how to do the service. Right? And that's what we found. We had a lot of people that moved down from New York. I gave kind of a, this, you know, town hall meeting where I invited any of our employees that were, you know, in New York furloughed or not working to come down to Miami and that I'd have a job for them there. We had a lot of our, from, you know, from busboys to C-level executives moved down to Miami. And they're all still there.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  They're all incredibly happy and they brought the New York sensibility. You know, we brought our training and have found incredible people in Miami. They just needed someone to teach them. And, you know, that's how we were able to open, you know? We've opened seven, eight restaurants in the last few years in Miami and about, you know, 12 total in South Florida and a private club. And we're about to finish our residential condo building. We take over the largest beach parcel in America, you know, the three acres on the beach on Miami Beach. What are you going to build there? Imagine the greatest beach club you've ever been to, right? I think European style beach clubs with the most incredible food, you know, our take on that.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Again, going back to your kind of classic, you know, you've seen it before, but we're just going to do it a lot better. You know, on the kind of beach club and restaurant side, the site is huge. So we'll have. It'll have an addition, you know, have another restaurant. It'll have private, you know, private rooms. It will have a spa. It will have incredible pools and beach. I mean, it's three acres on a beach. There's no property like that in America. So it it'll be a a giant campus of kind of indulgence and fun and great food. Done in a way that in a level that has not been done before. And with some, you know, lots of different, you'll have your main kind of beach club restaurant, but you also have dinner restaurants. You'll have a Sedell's on the beach for breakfast.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  You'll have all these different elements to it, which are are very exciting. But that's so that's an that's our next big project there.

• 1:47:11David Senra?

  Jeff, this has been awesome. Way before I've gotten to know you, which has been an absolute pleasure. Uh, you've made my favorite products in terms of the restaurant space. And now that at the more time I spend talking to you, the more it makes sense that it all flows from this obsession and this desire you had to just be really truly excellent at what you do. So I really appreciate you taking the time. This is awesome, man.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  Thank you. Great to see you.

• 1:47:32David Senra?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.