The Zentrepreneur
Restaurateur Phil Suarez has built his successful business intuitively---perhaps proving that you can't succeed if you're bored.
Published October 2003
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEEntrepreneurs may be unpredictable, but they're not unclassifiable. A helpful taxonomy would divide them into two categories. On one hand, we've got the fixed-focus obsessives, those annoying successes who've always known they wanted to start an airline or build a better PC company.
Their counterparts float through business with far less definitude. They have a wide-angle view of things, processing and scanning all the time. Let's call them Zentrepreneurs, because they are willing, in a way, to let opportunity find them--in the same way that, as E.B. White once wrote, successful New Yorkers are those who are "willing to be lucky."
Phil Suarez, who is arguably the Baz Luhrmann of fine dining in America today, is a preeminent example of Zentrepreneurship. Each of his successes--first a long career in commercial TV production, and now, at 61, royal standing in the elite culinary world--was unplotted. An opportunity coalesced. A door cracked open. And Suarez was there to weave things together, not with any great rumble of predestination, but with a relaxed, disciplined, and appreciative approach to his good fortune.
That's been the case for Suarez ever since, as a street kid from Manhattan's Washington Heights, he got his first taste of the Other World. His first unplanned opportunity happened when ad legend George Lois needed a softball pitcher. Suarez had a friend at Lois's agency, and Lois hired Suarez because of his arm. Not knowing what else to do with him, Lois put him in TV production, a career move that stuck; eventually, he would ratchet up that opportunity into his partnership with video director Bob Giraldi. Which in turn led Suarez into the restaurant business.
This unlikely trajectory went through my mind when I met Suarez for lunch, because that morning The New York Times reviewed his newest venture, a dazzlingly untraditional Chinese restaurant named 66. Few are the moments as future-altering as the public judgment of a Times review, particularly for a restaurant, particularly in the rarefied world of Manhattan competitive dining. Some restaurateurs get bumped and bruised--Michael Chow of Mr. Chow's once sued publishers of a guide for a review that said his pancakes were as thick as thumbs--but Suarez and his partner, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, have consistently had the reviewers on their side.
Of course, the focus of the reviewers' praise is less Suarez than Vongerichten, who is universally acknowledged as a chef of outsize talent and is credited with changing the face of French cooking, opening it up to Asian influences, and liberating it from the ancien régime of butter and cream. Vongerichten is in every sense Suarez's meal ticket.
As Suarez is his. Since 1986 Suarez has been dazzling the restaurant world with his flawless timing and his instinctive algorithms for staging haute performances that blend high style and high substance. In one restaurant after another, he gives Vongerichten an extraordinary stage. Today, with nine such cuisine-as-theater prosceniums--and more on the way, including chic futures in China and Japan--it's fair to say that Suarez and Vongerichten present better food to more people than anyone else ever has. Their restaurants include Jean-Georges, at the Trump International Hotel in New York City; Vong, the Thai-French fusion explosion in New York, London, and Hong Kong; and Prime, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Prime grosses $14.5 million a year--making it the 10th highest-grossing restaurant in America--and it was recently clocked as having the highest per-check amount, about $75 per head, of any restaurant in the country. But here's my favorite way of quantifying Suarez's success: Lois Friedman, who has ultimate control over Suarez's reservation book, was recently named one of New York City's 50 most powerful people.
Suarez isn't one for glib philosophizing, and he certainly didn't follow a strict business plan as he expanded his empire. (He would never say it, but he would agree with the Zen proverb "The obstacle is the path.") When I pushed him on a business strategy, it seemed to come down to one word: stimulation. That works in two ways. Suarez and Vongerichten are constantly striving to give the public something new and unexpected. And that isn't just a marketing strategy; it comes from their passion. "We won't do something unless it interests us first," Suarez says.
This is a kind of business self-centeredness, but it makes perfect sense. You can't succeed if you are bored. So Vongerichten and Suarez find the culinary idea first, and then dig down to determine if there's a business logic inside it. That's valuable insight for business leaders, who are often told to focus on "market opportunity," the empty quadrant--a schematic and arid approach by comparison. Suarez and Vongerichten have married passion and profit, two dissonant ingredients that ruin many a dish. A Zen Buddhist text, writing of the Master, could be describing both Suarez and Vongerichten: "He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
