Bloomberg Businessweek USA - 09.03.2020

March 9, 2020

63

SO YOU WANT TO OPEN A RESTAURANT...

You’re almost there!

Some last advice.

Are you in New York? Ye s

What kind of

neighborhood are

you looking at?

No

Fancy

Up-and-

coming

Something

unorthodox

Something

plain

What kind of space

are you looking at?

Just try to avoid

something too

corporate. “I don’t

want to be in an

office building.

I hate all the

glass,” Starr says.

“You need walls

for character,

for lighting, for

ambiance.”

Does it already have

some character?

Starr’s secret

sauce to

creating a

vibe? “Lighting,

lighting,

lighting.”

“There are no cheats,” Starr says. “Just

throw everything you’ve got into your

openings.” And don’t be afraid of failure:

After all, more than half of restaurants close

after three years. “Some places have a life

span,” he says, “like your favorite dog.”

Now It’s Time to

Build Your Empire!

“I think about competing with Shake Shack,”

muses Starr. “Danny [Meyer] is McDonald’s.

I could be Burger King.”

Avoid, If Possible

Take a word of caution from one who’s been there, done

that, in the Big Apple: “All the regulations have made

it prohibitively expensive and impossible to do business,”

Starr says. His next spot opens in Philadelphia.

No

Ye s

Good plan! “For Le Diplomate in

Washington, people told me the

location was bad,” recalls Starr.

“The neighborhood was marginal

but developing. Now it’s there,

and it makes $19 million gross.”

That’s a good thing! “Trust the

designer,” Starr says. “Don’t force

something. If it’s quirky, that adds

to the vibe. Le Coucou was an odd

space but also spectacular.”

PHOTOGRAPHS: JEN MAY (STARR), ADRIAN GAUT (VERONIKA), DITTE ISAGER (LE COUCOU), STARR RESTAURANTS (BUDDAKAN, LE DIPLOMATE)

Try to stay away from pricey areas,

unless they’ve been written off

by the cool crowd. “I want to do

something on the Upper East Side,”

Starr says. “No one is going there.”

Ambiance, Starr says, is the

part of the business that 98% of

restaurants get wrong. It’s the

element of the experience that

“takes you away,” he says. “It’s

hard to do.” For Buddakan and

Morimoto, which opened in New

York in 2006, “I wanted it to be

like a shock and awe campaign. I

wanted jaws to drop.”