Recipe for a $40-Million Score
Read how a highbrow, charismatically challenged chef built a restaurant empire and cashed out big.
How a highbrow, charismatically challenged chef built a restaurant empire and cashed out big
In July 1997, entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson, who had made a fortune by creating and then selling the Comdex trade show, sent his private jet to ferry a few guests from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The occasion was the groundbreaking of his new venture, the Venetian hotel and casino. By erecting the billion-dollar Venetian alongside a huge convention center that he already owned in Las Vegas, Adelson was aiming to capture the lion's share of business visitors to the city, which is the #1 venue for conventions and trade shows in the country. In the plane he was importing some live bait: a few celebrated chefs who, he believed, could open restaurants that would lure businesspeople to the Venetian. "By the time we're built out, we're going to have 25 or 30 of the finest brand-name restaurants in the United States," he boasted to the audience at the lavish groundbreaking party.
Not so long ago, Adelson's phrase finest brand-name restaurants would have been an oxymoron. As late as the 1970s, the only branded restaurant chains were joints like Howard Johnson and Denny's. But over the past decade the best chefs haven't been content to build a single epicurean temple. "These guys are all finding ways to expand," says Paul Frumkin, senior editor at Nation's Restaurant News. "The quintessential fine-dining-restaurant operator used to be André Soltner at Lutèce, who never left his restaurant. Now if you've got one, go for three."
An old-fashioned chef like Soltner (who until his retirement, in 1995, was one of the most famous restaurateurs in New York City) was chained to his stove six days a week, 11 months of the year. The newfangled chefs create restaurants where their daily presence is not required -- and then if they are really successful, they demonstrate their entrepreneurial prowess by cashing out of the business. To achieve that goal, chef-entrepreneurs face a knotty strategic question: How can they, as craftspeople whose value seems to lie in their own hands, create a brand that transcends themselves?
On board Adelson's plane was America's premier brand-name chef, Wolfgang Puck, who more than anybody else had in the 1980s elevated the standing of his profession so that leading chefs, onetime scullions, had become stars and media celebrities. (Puck's wife and partner, Barbara Lazaroff, had literally elevated him at their first restaurant, Spago, by designing an open kitchen that served as an eye-catching stage for the chef's performance before diners.)
Building on that success, Puck had gone on to redefine what it meant to be a successful chef. First he and Lazaroff opened a number of white-tablecloth restaurants. Then they created the Wolfgang Puck Food Co., which is both a chain of more than 20 moderately priced restaurants and cafés, and a producer of a $40-million line of frozen and canned foods. Having scored with Spago Las Vegas at Caesars Palace, Puck had agreed to bring to the Venetian a version of his much acclaimed San Francisco restaurant, Postrio.
Also riding on the plane was Joachim Splichal (pronounced splee-SHAWL), who with his wife, Christine, owned what was arguably the best French restaurant in Los Angeles, Patina. The Venetian very much wanted Splichal to open another Patina in Las Vegas. He was resisting that notion. However, the Splichals also had a group of casual restaurants that offered a moderately priced (and less expensive to make) product. Those restaurants, which were branded "Pinot" -- as in Pinot Bistro, Pinot Blanc, Café Pinot, and so on -- were designed to be easy to replicate. Splichal was thinking of opening a Pinot in the Venetian.
Puck had led the way to Las Vegas, establishing a Spago there in 1992, when the city was a culinary desert known mostly for all-you-can-eat hotel buffets. Spago Las Vegas became his highest-grossing venue, and now everybody wanted to be there.
Puck's example loomed large as a model for how a chef-entrepreneur might build a brand and maximize its value. He had turned himself into a public personality with a name that sold his product. Puck is a born showman and a natural host. He is sociable and funny without being brassy, so whether he is schmoozing with customers at one of his restaurants or tossing vegetables on the grill during a regular appearance on Good Morning America, he is the ideal brand emissary.
Compared with Puck, Splichal is a recluse. When pulled out of his kitchen, he can seem like a snail plucked from its shell. "I'm not a promoter," he says. "I hide in the kitchen." Uncomfortable when he is chatting up strangers and too polite to ignore them and just greet old customers, he usually doesn't emerge at all from backstage at Patina. As for television, he is allergic to it, and cedes the field to Puck and to chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batali, who have scored on the Television Food Network. "If they call me for television, it's just not something I'm very interested in," Splichal says. "Those guys are pros at that. Any exposure helps, but I don't want to spend my life in front of the television cameras."
Only a small fraction of the people who have heard of Puck would recognize Splichal's name. And even Splichal's loyal customers at his jewel-in-the-crown Patina and his more casual California-French-style Pinot restaurants wouldn't cite the chef's personality as a reason for frequenting his establishments. Although he is witty and charming once you get to know him, most people never do. Splichal has the flattened nose and understated pugnacity of a prizefighter. His head is round, his beard is graying blond, and he looks out from behind tortoiseshell glasses. His speech has the guttural accent of his native Germany. He is not flashy, but he is solid. Overall, he has the gravity and density of a rolling boulder that is not easily budged off course. He also has an ambition that would not allow him to rest in one kitchen.
"When I met Joachim, he was driving a Porsche, and then he had a 325 BMW," Christine recalls. It was the early 1980s, and the high-flying young chef had already made a name for himself in Los Angeles, first at the Regency Club and then at the Seventh Street Bistro. He was doing so well that in 1984 a customer set him up with a minority stake in a restaurant of his own, Max au Triangle. "The food I had at Max au Triangle was as good as any French food I've had in America, ever," says Ruth Reichl, who was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and is now editor-in-chief of Gourmet. "I was truly astonished by it." But the financial management of Max was as terrible as the food was wonderful, and the restaurant tanked. "After Max, we had a Honda Civic that we shared," Christine says. "The day the check was due for the mortgage, we thought, 'Where is it coming from?' "
