Melman is no M.B.A. He built Lettuce with the blood smarts of a natural manager, a Chicago kid who once peddled ice cream and peanuts on the beaches of Lake Michigan and sold eggs door-to-door. He bombed at three colleges, which used to bother him some. "You know how I knew it bugged me?" he asks. "It was always important that the women I went out with be intelligent. So I think that was like filling up a vacuum of not being intelligent enough myself.'
During the 1960s, Melman worked in his dad's delicatessens. He managed various operations and in 1967 asked his father to make him a partner. His father, and his father's partner, turned him down. "Their comment to me at the time was they didn't think I was settled enough. They wanted to see me married."
We're talking big-time rejection here. "The minute they told me that, I lost interest in working there," Melman says. He quit his father's business and started thinking about opening his own restaurant. "There was nothing else I knew how to do," he says. "It wasn't that I had any great love of restaurants."
He set out to find an investor to help him start his own restaurant. He wanted something casual and hip that would appeal to his peers, his peers being hippies and protestors: in short, the Future Investment Bankers of America. In 1969, a friend introduced Melman to Jerry Orzoff, a well-off Chicago real-estate agent. At their first meeting, Melman and Orzoff did not exactly hit it off. "A jerk" is how Melman viewed Orzoff; "a punk" was Orzoff's opinion of Melman.
The two met again, at the urging of another friend who insisted Melman had the wrong idea about Orzoff. This time, through some quirk of human relations, Melman and Orzoff clicked. They became close friends, given to vigorous competition and practical jokes, the jokes continuing even after Orzoff's death, in 1981. Orzoff, an immaculate dresser, had often chided Melman on his lack of taste. Melman picked Jerry's burial clothes: a blue suit and brown socks. "I don't know that it's over," Melman says. "He might get me back."
Orzoff was Melman's guiding spirit; their relationship was the model for Lettuce's future structure, its reliance on partnerships. "There were two men in my life who made an impact," Melman says. "My father, when I was younger, but in my adulthood, nobody had a bigger impact than Jerry.'
With Orzoff's backing, Melman founded R. J. Grunts in 1971, a restaurant that looms large in the history of Chicago eateries. Grunts marked Melman as an innovator, although now, after years of imitation by other restaurateurs, the concept hardly seems novel. Melman designed the late-night menu for the pot-smoking crowd, with funky text that made sense only in a ganja cloud. The salad bar was lush, a 40-item spread that included caviar (and still does). Some nights, an astrologer and psychic visited tables. Servers wore street clothes, unusual for those days.
Melman and Orzoff founded a series of restaurants, including The Great Gritzbe's Flying Food Show. It had about a year left on its lease when Melman, in a rare failure of instincts, changed the name to Not So Great Gritzbe's and decorated the place with art of the indigestion school -- Tums and Alka-Seltzer posters. Customers laughed, all right, but they ate elsewhere. The place folded in six months. "Boy, that was stupid," Melman says. "It would have kept making money if I hadn't done that."
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Orzoff bequeathed to Melman two Mercedes-Benz sedans and his house in Beverly Hills. Melman kept the cars, but sold the house because he could not bear to live among so many memories. Now and then he wears something of Orzoff's, maybe a watch or a sports coat, to keep the man with him.
It was Orzoff who drew Melman more deeply into therapy as a means of spelunking his own soul. Orzoff was devoted to his therapist, Robert Mungerson, and encouraged Melman to see him -- not because Melman was mentally ill, but because he could learn something about himself. In August 1973, Mungerson was murdered, his killer never found. Orzoff and Melman helped each other through the shock.
Melman scouted a new therapist and, after interviewing several, chose David Roadhouse, who had been Mungerson's protégé. Roadhouse is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and before becoming a Buddhist had been ordained a Presbyterian minister. He aims at developing an individual's relationship with him or herself, believing this relationship "serves as a basis for anything else you do."
Clearly, Melman was strongly influenced by Roadhouse's approach, as was Lettuce. Melman believes therapy has helped him to understand himself and to trust his instincts about restaurants -- about food, mood, atmosphere -- and about the people Lettuce hires and trains.
In 1984, Melman founded the Jerry A. Orzoff Fund, designed to help any employee get started in therapy. Each restaurant sets aside $3,000 for the fund, which will pay half the cost of each approved session, up to $50 per session. A committee reviews the employee's request, sets the reimbursement rate, and determines the number of sessions for which Lettuce will pay. Each case is unique -- the fund, for example, completely reimbursed an employee who was raped and beaten. All conversations between employees and therapists are confidential. Officially, therapy is optional. "It's absolutely not necessary," says vice-president of human resources and training Loret Carbone. "It's not the road to the top.'
