This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 26, 2011 - The first time I asked St. Louis native and New York restaurateur Danny Meyer what he brought to the New York dining scene that gave him such success (11 restaurants and counting), he demurred. He suggested that the question was better asked of someone else. Meyer's humility is sincere, but the ways Meyer and his restaurants have changed the New York dining scene are large. Meyer opened Union Square Cafe, his first restaurant, in 1985 in the middle of a decade that celebrated glamour, excess and exclusivity in restaurants and clubs.
Meyer bucked that trend with Union Square Cafe. In 1993 on the eve of opening his second restaurant, Meyer told the New York Times: "I don't want to create a restaurant more known for its decor than its hospitality." His subsequent restaurants have all followed his maxim of serving excellent food without the pretense usually associated with world-class cuisine.
Meyer's combination of hospitality and quality has its roots as a child growing up in St. Louis. Meyer's father ran a travel business that gave Meyer the chance to travel the world. As Meyer's Union Square biography states: "Danny worked for his father as a tour guide in Rome during college, and then returned to the Eternal City to study international politics. He minored in the study of trattorias, spending at least as much time at the table as he did in the classroom."
He had a dog named Ratatouille, and he took high school dates to Giovanni's on the Hill. But he also has fond memories of Crown Candy Kitchen, Shakey's Pizza, and Fitz's root beer stand. These restaurants and the comfort food they served stuck with Meyer even as he traveled the world and landed in New York City.
The result of Meyer's personal history are restaurants such as Blue Smoke where patrons can feast on "Toasted Pork Ravioli 'St. Louis Style'" before chowing down on a pulled pork platter or Kansas City spareribs. This reporter particularly loves Shake Shack, Meyer's chain of hamburger and milk shake restaurants. Imagine the Ted Drewes experience (including the long lines), but with richer, smoother concretes. Add a Shake Shack hamburger (think Steak 'n Shake but juicier), and you've got a little taste of St. Louis in the middle of the Upper West Side.
Check out the Beacon's interview with Meyer while this reporter goes back to grab another burger:
Tell me about some of your food memories from growing up in St. Louis.
Meyer: From a food standpoint, what I remember most are places like Kreis' on Lindbergh and having the Monday night special, which is chicken and dumplings, sitting underneath the cuckoo clock and just having a great time. That experience gave me the idea when I opened Union Square Cafe many years later of having a weekly special every single night of the week. I remember going to places like Fitz's root beer stand and Steak 'n Shake and Crown Candy Kitchen and Straub's, having floats, and that helped give me the idea for Shake Shack. In later years, I went to Ted Drewes and that really cemented the idea for the concrete.
I remember some other experiences that were fantastic at the time, but in retrospect were a little less motivational in terms of my future. I did used to love to go to Shakey's Pizza and Imo's pizza, where I first learned about provel cheese. That is something I have not found an opportunity to replicate, not that I necessarily desire to. I also had some early experiences at Giovanni's on the Hill. I used to take my high school dates there and sign on my father's account and feel like a big shot. The restaurant could not have been nicer to me. Really at the end of the day it was the warmth of the welcome and a couple of singular St. Louis foods that stuck with me.
Your father and his travel business really influenced you. What was it like having dinner at the Meyer home?
Meyer: My father and my mother were very good cooks. I used to barbecue a lot with my father. His favorite dish to make in the kitchen was ratatouille -- we ended up naming a dog after the dish back when I was in second grade. My mother made really wonderful roast chicken, and she made the world's best Brunswick stew. Believe it or not, she also made the only pot roast I've ever loved in my life. Food was always an important part of our life. On the table was always a bottle of Beaujolais that my parents enjoyed. So wine was a very natural accompaniment to all the meals; and it became something I knew would become important to me once I got into the restaurant business.
How have your restaurants changed New York City's food culture?
Meyer: I'm not the best person to comment on what effect our restaurants may have had on New York. I do know that when we first opened in 1985, we were starting to see the emergence of the celebrity chef. It was right on the heels of the very exclusive, velvet rope night club scene where the more money a place charged and the more it tried to keep you out, the more people wanted to go there. And I know that Union Square Cafe was a rejection of all of that. It was instead saying, "Would good food and good wine taste any worse if it were priced fairly, if the welcome were warm, and the atmosphere welcoming?"
I think I've had a privilege, which is that, because of my late father's travel business, I was exposed at a very early age to some very good food in some major food capitals of the world. Because of growing up in St. Louis, I was privileged to experience genuine, warm hospitality. While I was growing up, wherever there was genuine, warm hospitality, there was not cutting-edge food. And wherever there was cutting-edge food, there was not the warm hospitality. So I think I was in a unique situation to marry those two things for New Yorkers. Maybe that is what one of my contributions has been.
Have you ever thought to yourself, "This will be my last restaurant. I've created enough?"
Meyer: One of the reasons people like our restaurants has very little to do with me and has everything to do with the quality of the people who work in our restaurants. And one of the reasons we have so many fantastic people is that they come to our restaurants as a career with the genuine hope that they are going to get to grow. So the only way to keep these amazing people motivated is periodically to grow. When someone gets promoted to help us open a brand-new restaurant, someone takes their position at the existing restaurant. So everybody in the organization gets to grow.
Where do ideas for new restaurants come from?
Meyer: They come from one of three places. Either there is a chef I'm dying to work with, and I just need to come with a good idea and good space to do it in. Or it's an amazing space and business opportunity, and I just need to come up with a good idea and a good chef. Or it's an idea that I have that I have to do. And then I have to come up with a good chef and good space. It's always one of those three things that leads the way.
That said, almost every single idea that we've ever done has come from a passion of mine. It's given me an opportunity to match what we know how to do, which is to serve people good food and drink, along with something I love anyway. For example, this past summer when we opened up Shake Shack and Blue Smoke outposts at Saratoga racetrack in upstate New York, it gave me a chance to work alongside an old St. Louis buddy of mine, Steve Dunker, who is the chairman of the New York State Racing Association. Blue Smoke and Jazz Standard gave me a chance to really learn more about two other topics: jazz and barbecue.
Alex Sciuto, a former intern at the Beacon, is now an intern at Talking Points Memo in New York.