The Suarez-Vongerichten partnership also works, it seems, because it has a soft set of boundaries. Each partner has legacy restaurants that predate the relationship, and that's not a source of tension. There is a calm acceptance, rather than a forced all-or-nothingness, to their structure. Vongerichten has Market in Paris and Dune in the Bahamas, and Suarez operates Patria and Gigino in New York City. Vongerichten's cookbooks are outside their partnership, as is some of Suarez's consulting. He is advising the developers of the AOL Time Warner building on the food and beverage side, and the building promises to be a veritable theme park of the country's best restaurants, including a New York rendition of the French Laundry, Thomas Keller's revered Napa Valley restaurant, and a restaurant from Charlie Trotter, whose self-named establishment in Chicago is also a foodie Lourdes. Suarez and Vongerichten will have a restaurant there, too, a steak house modeled on Prime.
A week after the two-star review, I met Suarez at his light-filled office in downtown New York. Considering the far-flung nature of his operation, it's a small place, suitably warehousey. There were menus, blueprints everywhere, and in one section, Gray Kunz was busily menu-tweaking. I felt like I was in a food Los Alamos. Suarez talked excitedly about his restaurants in development, including the Spice Market, which will feature the street food of Asia in an environment created by the French architect Jacques Garcia. It will be "a little Somerset Maugham and Kipling, with great alcoves, vaulted ceilings," Suarez said. He showed me photos of some of the architectural elements that will be used, antiques salvaged after an earthquake in India.
Suarez and Vongerichten are also developing two Far East restaurants, both of which are scheduled to open later this year. The Tokyo project started as a joint venture with a Japanese company that ran a chain of cream-puff stores. But the deal fell through, and Suarez is now meeting with potential new partners. In Shanghai, they are partnering with Handle Lee, CEO of Shanghai GT Courtyard Cultural Investments. They are developing a classic 1920s building in the Bund district, with Michael Graves as the celebrity architect. In both places, Suarez persuaded the landlord to pay for the build-out. ("He's a great dealmaker for us," Vongerichten says proudly.) Suarez knows he has the upper hand because a Vongerichten restaurant provides an incalculable image-lift to a property.
The visibility of Suarez and Vongerichten does have its downside. The August issue of Vanity Fair contained what can best be described as a culinary carpet-bombing of 66. A screed by the British critic A.A. Gill demolished the place: food, architecture, service, the entire ecosystem. (He called the shrimp-and-foie-gras dumplings "fishy liver-filled condoms.") The piece started quite a stir in the little ramekin of Manhattan fine dining.
When I spoke to Suarez about this, he floated serenely above the fray. "It's done, and I'm a big boy. But to go after Jean-Georges's food, hey, at its worst, it's better than most. It's not a restaurant review, it's comedy. So I can't even be mad."
Even though he has six projects on the drawing board, Suarez is looking beyond. He wants to get into the lodging business using the Jean-Georges brand. "It's an obvious progression in our business plan," he says. "It's time for us to get involved in the hospitality world, creating a chain of boutique hotels that we can have our stamp on. We believe we are capable of doing the whole package. We've learned from Trump, from the Bellagio, from the Barkley, the Mandarin. And Jean-Georges's whole background has been hotels."
As for selling the entire operation one day, Suarez has a plan for that, too. He thinks he can take one of its concepts, say, Prime, and open branches all over the country, then sell that entity. "We'll own 14 or 15 restaurants with different formulas," he says. "Imagine if we had one formula." Suarez recognizes that a standardized, scalable restaurant is more saleable than a collection of quirky, individualistic culinary marvels.
"People look at me and say, 'Phil, you should calm down," he says, not calming down at all. "And I say, 'Why, that's the fun, that's what keeps me going.' You're making something happen, you're producing, which is what I love doing."
It's a clear path for a guy who didn't always have one. George Lois reminisced to me about a conversation he had with his wife, his mother-in-law, and Suarez. "My mother-in-law naively asked, 'Phil, what do you do?' It was a time when he was still drifting, and he said, 'Well, I haven't found my forte yet."
Ask the hundreds of people begging for a reservation for eight o'clock on Saturday night at one of Suarez's restaurants, and they'll tell you he's found it.
