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Business & Civic Awards:
BUSINESSPERSONS OF THE YEAR
Downtown's Entrepreneur Restaurateurs
From seemingly bottomless kettles of invention, savvy and culinary brilliance, these are the real engines of downtown revival
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Business New Haven
2/2/2004
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Despite significant hype to the contrary, the most powerful engine of downtown New Haven's economy is not biotechnology.
It is not health care, despite the presence of two large teaching hospitals and a major medical school.
It is not education, despite the proximity of the Great Blue Mother, Yale University.
It is not banking, boutiques, booteries or everything-costs-$1 stores.
What, then, is it?
It is Argentinean churascos in chimichurri sauce. It is penne a la vodka. It is pad kra pow (a Thai dish of mushroom, onion, chile, garlic and basil stir fry).
It is definitely pizza, and it is even cheeseburgers.
While downtown's much-heralded revival unfolds in fits and starts, one unmistakable harbinger of health is the dozens of entrepreneur restaurateurs who have voted for the Elm City with their wallets.
Their faith in the city is manifested in new vitality for otherwise somnambulant blocks in the city's center. It's manifested in scores of hungry suburbanites returning to the city they had previously shunned for fear of violence or - worse - failing to find a parking space.
And it's working. In a downtown that over the last several years has seemed to push many of the right buttons, the restaurant button may be the most right of them all. And for the people who have made downtown's restaurant renaissance happen, Business New Haven celebrates the Elm City's new breed of restaurateur/entrepreneurs, collectively, as its 2004 "Businesspersons of the Year."
At its annual Business & Civic Awards luncheon Feb. 25, Business New Haven will make a donation from the event proceeds to the Connecticut Food Bank in the restaurateurs' name.
Let's start with the risk element. The restaurant business is among the most precarious of industries, and many eateries have the half-life of a fruit fly. The conventional wisdom is that 90 percent of all new restaurants fail within their first year of operation. (Others dispute this, and in any event it is not possible to know how true that is with any real precision.)
What is known is that restaurant patrons are a singularly fickle bunch, and today's hot new bistro can become tomorrow's boarded-up storefront at blinding speed.
In much of downtown, restaurants had sparked revitalization. Take the block of Temple Street between Chapel and Crown - once one of downtown's most desirable addresses for street-level retail.
When the Omni-New Haven Hotel at Yale opened in 1995, is was widely thought that the vacant storefronts opposite the new hotel would be filled within a matter of months. But it didn't happen.
It wasn't until brothers Richard and Denis Guilfoyle from County Kilkenny, Ireland teamed up with partner Eamon Ryan to open the Playwright Restaurant & Pub in 2001 that the floodgates opened at last.
The Playwright's success was the spark that kindled the block's revival. Today the Playwright shares Temple Street with Lalibela (one of two Ethiopean restaurants downtown), Del Monaco (Italian cuisine), Sahara (a Mediterranean restaurant) and a gourmet grocery called the Marketa.
Further down the street on the same block is the Neat Lounge ("Martini & Wine au Go-Go"). Among other New England cities save Boston, none can boast that degree of diversity and concentration of eateries within such limited geography.
Scott C. Healy, executive director of the Town Green Special Services Districts, says that as near as her can calculate, some 24 restautants have opened downtown in the past 36 months, and that just one - Temple Street's Diva - closed its doors over that same period.
Over in the belatedly percolating Ninth Square neighborhood, entrepreneur Felix Proto sank "a couple hundred thousand dollars" into building out the 45-seat Nini's Bistro at 44 South Orange Street, across the street from another Ninth Square newcomer, Japanese restaurant Miso.
Proto's dream grew from his existing catering business, Grand Gourmet Caterers in Orange. He chose South Orange Street in part for its proximity to Yale, but also having negotiated a seven-year tax-relief package from the city.
Like all savvy businesspeople, Proto has his bets somewhat hedged. "The concept that we did - prix fixe [$29.95], BYOB [Nini's has no liquor license] - we did to keep it simple for us," he says, "so we could maintain our focus on the catering business - that's really the bread and butter that funds the restaurant.
Nini's opened last May for dinner Wednesday through Saturday evenings, serving what Proto describes as French-Italian fusion. He acknowledges that "Retail is still not doing well [in Ninth Square], but we looked at it from the standpoint of, if things got really bad, could we lock the door and just cater out of the facility? And the answer was yes. So it was kind of a no-brainer for us."
New Haven has long been known as a good restaurant town. Its pizza, for one thing, is world-renowned, and the Pepe's-vs.-Sally's debate is argued (to no satisfactory conclusion) far from the banks of the Quinnipiac. In days of yore, if New Haven had a culinary epicenter, it may well have been Wooster Street with its bedrock Italian eateries.
Today, though, the eating action has returned to the city center - although exactly why this should take place now is not the subject of universal agreement.
Some restaurateurs cite the improving image the city as a whole enjoys. "The perception from ten years ago of New Haven as an unsafe place to visit has kind of evaporated," says Matthew Mandelbaum of Scoozzi Trattoria & Wine Bar, whose age (17) qualifies it as ancient among downtown eateries.
Mandelbaum believes that "The increased restaurant traffic has been good for everybody - as long as the restaurant has been sound. Roomba opened up to a lot of accolades, and I think that [reflected] just more people dining in New Haven.
"And because we have one of the best locations in the city [on Chapel Street between High and York, nearly next door to the Yale Repertory Theatre], we've done well with the rising tide.
That's the glass-half-full perspective. Other restaurateurs worry that downtown may be approaching the restaurant saturation point, beyond which the eateries outnumber the eaters.
"I'm surprised at how many restaurants there are downtown," says Marc Woll, a Culinary Institute of America grad who opened Gastronomique on High Street in October 2002. Too many restaurants? "I think we're getting close to it," Woll says. "But as long as each restaurant is different, there should be a clientele to suit it."
Adds Town Green's Healy: "We may eventually hit oversaturation of the restaurant market, but for now, the strong competition keeps restaurateurs on their toes, which means very good things for the average diner looking for a fun night on the town in New Haven."
Even as new restaurants struggle for attention, Woll says the key to winning the war is to build customer loyalty over time.
"If you're close to downtown you can pull a majority of people who will try you, but only the most consistent restaurants will last," he says.
On the same block of High Street as Woll, across from the Yale Center for British Art, is Ibiza, née Café Pika Tapas. A native of Galicia in Spain, Ignacio Blanco opened Meson Galicia in Norwalk in 1984.
Nine years later he came to New Haven, he says, "Because I love New Haven. It's very lively and it has the most beautiful downtown in Connecticut. It feels to me almost like Europe."
What makes the Elm City such a good restaurant town? "People here are very sophisticated," Blanco says. And although his first restaurant in Norwalk's SoNo district remains a popular and critical success (indeed, last June Wine Spectator called Meson Galicia and Ibiza "two of the best Spanish restaurants in the United States"), Blanco considers the Elm City a far better dining market. "I would rate New Haven 100 times better for a restaurant than Norwalk," he says.
Perhaps no single factor suffices to explain downtown's restaurant renaissance. Certainly perceptions about the Elm City's center have brightened over the past decade.
The trade likewise has benefited from a strong influx of new downtown residents as the number of upscale residentially projects coming on line continues to grow. And New Haven's reputation for fine dining, which never completely faded even during the dark days of the 1970s and '80s, is not only intact, but perhaps more robust than ever.
All those factors play some part, but Town Green's Healy touches upon another possible contributor to the boon: Consumers in these parts simply dine out more than their counterparts elsewhere.
"The success rate is much higher for restaurants in downtown New Haven than it is in most places in America," says Healy. "I wish I could explain why, but a part of it may be due to the fact that, according to certain surveys, greater New Haveners dine out more frequently than people in other regions."
Donna Curran opened Zinc at 964 Chapel Street in September 1999, and says her sleek American bistro just concluded "our most successful year yet" in 2003.
Earlier in her career Curran started and operated the restaurant and catering business at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. After scouting any number of sites, she settled on her Chapel Street space between Temple and College, which she calls "the best location in town. It's midway between Yale and city, and we really wanted to identify ourselves with the city and not just be part of the Yale campus."
Nevertheless, Yale's presence is a huge factor in the success of many downtown eateries, whose owners cite patronage by Yale faculty, administrators, visitors and even students as important elements of their clientele.
"There are about 130 restaurants downtown," says Curran. "You'd be hard-pressed to find another city between Boston and New York with anywhere near that number of [downtown] restaurants. It's definitely a restaurant city."
The link between downtown restaurants and downtown residents is key. Of her dinner customers, Curran says, "It varies. Mid-week we get some Yale departments; we do a lot of pharmaceutical dinners here. Oddly enough, though, what we've seen over the past few months that we have become kind of a neighborhood place. It used to be when we first opened that a snowstorm would shut us down. Today we find that people walk to Zinc for dinner. It's a different city than it was."
What's next - growing numbers of new center-city eateries or a building pause as the existing restaurants build their base of customers for the long haul?
Even restaurants with successful track records know they must keep abreast of their customers' tastes and habits if they are to remain competitive.
"We opened [in 1987] as primarily a pasta restaurant," notes Scoozzi's Mandelbaum. "That has changed. The restaurant press and even the mainstream press write about how everybody is trying to avoid carbohydrates these days with the success of the Atkins diet and other things. So that's on our minds when we look at our menu."
So restaurateurs know they must remain alert to changing dietary preferences.
Another remarkable element of New Haven's dining scene is its international flavor - with Asian, Iberian, Middle Eastern, Caribbean and nearly every other cuisine imaginable available to hungry diners within just a few blocks. Will the proliferation ebb, or will the rising tide truly lift all boats?
"How much is too much?" asks Zinc's Curran. "Competition is good because it drives up quality. But if it stopped now, that would be fine with me."
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