[Music] [Music] I have proudly been a restaurant for 30 years and I have been in love with food in restaurants for my entire life which is a whole lot longer than 30 years I think I've had a front row seat watching some of the most remarkable changes to the way we eat the way we grow food the way we buy food the way we make reservations in restaurants the way we talk about restaurants and write about restaurants really the role that restaurants have played in our lives but no change whatsoever has floored me anymore than the one that we're going through right now which is something I never thought I would see in my entire lifetime and that is the convergence of fine dining and casual dining all at one they're getting married and it all started with soup you may know this already but the original restaurant the original concept of restaurant came from the French to restore and the whole notion of going to a restaurant started at restaurants which were called Buon because there was nothing more restorative there still is nothing more restorative than a good bowl of consumate bone broth now these buang were actually the first fast food because what enterprising owners of these buang knew is that they could use the parts of the animal that you couldn't otherwise eat and by laboring over it and making great soup for hours you could come into the restaurant the Buon and eat very very quickly and very very inexpensively the biggest disruptor in the entire food movement used to be the car and the car was the biggest disruptor until of course we got the iPhone but let's stay let's stay with the car for just a minute the car especially in France where restaurants were really taking flight represented mobility and it gave people the opportunity whether they were going to work or whether they were traveling to hit the road and by hitting the road they had an opportunity to explore other parts of their world for the first time so food had an opportunity for the first time to become not something just that you ate in order to live but the car was really the first opportunity where you got to live to eat Mish la which was of course the biggest tire producer in the world at that time realized that the best way to allow people to use more tires and therefore buy more tires was to create Maps I would say that the misham maps are not only some of the most beautiful pieces of art that we have in the world but what misham Maps did was to provide the mobility the opportunity to go somewhere to know where you were going and I would say that for the first time food in restaurants had Terre where you ate tasted like where you were for the first time and then of course Mish added one more aspect to it which was the rating system food had never been rated before for by offering ratings and telling motorists where they should eat and in fact where they should stay where they should sleep the night Mish also created an entire New Concept in eating which was aspiration and it was aspiration on the part of the restaurant who wanted to get a star or a second star if they had one it gave aspiration to The Growers in the community to hope that their products or their cheese uh or their Liv stock or their wine would be served in one of these great restaurants and it gave social aspiration to the people who were dining in these restaurants dining back in America the automobile signified something even more than mobility and that was freedom and it was fun by the time Americans hit the road the automobile had become so much less expensive that more and more people could afford to have it and what the automobile represented in America where we didn't have a review system and we didn't really aspire to the art of restoration was the ability to be social and to have the freedom to leave your home to find things that were more convenient less expensive and more fun this was a place that I got to grow up going to in St Louis Missouri called Fitz's I would say this is one of the many antecedents for a restaurant called Shake Shack today and these restaurants these roadside Burger stands and Shake stands and root beer float places popped up all over the country and they popped up as a result of the automobile the food was good but it was almost secondary to something even more important which was the parking lot the parking lot became your opportunity to bring your car and to show off your car and be with your friends you all saw Happy Days you know exactly what the parking lot was used for as much as restoration as part of the dining out experience became the reason that French people were going to restaurants and even Americans found restoration and being with other people this was the moment in our country the drive-thru window most often associated with fast food that began the Divergence of fine dining and casual dining this was the time when when Hospitality was not an issue quality was not an issue taking care of you was not an issue socializing was not an issue being together with other human beings was not only not the issue the whole point was to get in and out without having to speak to anybody now I had my own very very fortunate means of Freedom um my own PanAm jet actually not quite true but because my father was in the travel business and so until the age of 21 I was allowed to fly anywhere in the entire PanAm system for $44 round trip now what would you do if you could fly anywhere the PanAm FLW for $44 you would spend at least 22 trips as I did going back and forth to France and Italy and telling your college friends you were just going to New York for the weekend I spent a lot of time learning and the thing that I most loved about the time that I got to be in France and Italy all my learning came through tras and beos and what I loved more than anything was a sense of place if you went to Rome and there were 8,000 tras in the city of Rome and there was an 80% overlap of menu items this was not about invention or creativity the way we have it today there was no review system for the tras in Rome this was about the nuances about how one Mama cooked her carbonara versus another and how another Tratoria treated you as part of your community that made a big impact on me I came back home to America having done a stage in Bordeaux because the only way I could convince my own parents that it was okay to be in the restaurant business was to tell them that I was going to be a chef it wasn't cool to tell him I was going to be a restaurant and having live lived in the home of a chef in Bordeaux during my my three months in Bordeaux where the only jobs I had were opening oysters pulling feathers from birds and slicing shallots for the Minette I came back to New York and I found this Green Market I never even knew the Green Market existed in 1984 when I got back but here it was and it gave me an opportunity to find an amazing space right next to the green Market I met a man who told me I just walked into his 49-year-old vegetarian restaurant called brownies one day and I asked the cashier at the front if the owner was in I have no idea who I thought I was doing that and the owner came up and I said you wouldn't by any chance want to sell your restaurant would you I can't believe I did that and he said well as a matter of fact I'm getting kind of tired it's been 49 years let's have a talk brownies became Union Square Cafe as I thought about what I wanted to open in this restaurant what occurred to me more than anything in the world was could I create the restaurant that if only it existed would be my favorite restaurant in the world and here's where I took all of my inspiration my two biggest mentors in the entire industry were Andre sulner who at the time was the chef owner of Lutes in New York City and jeanclaude Vina who was the chef patron of tant in Paris a restaurant that held three Mission last Stars longer than just about any other what those two men had in common was a sense that if you wanted to be taken seriously as a restaurant it was simple you show up for every single service every single meal and the owner must always be present better still if you were Andre sulner you live up stairs from the restaurant if you want a vacation you close the restaurant for 2 weeks for the first 5 years of Union Square Cafe we closed every summer for two weeks just so we could get Union Square Cafe listed amongst all those other three star and four-star New York restaurants the other two big influences on me though remained Rome and San Francisco and what I found in San Francisco similarly to Rome fit my personality even more than these refined restaurant tour as much as I aspired to be one of them what I found in in those restaurants towns was a sense that if you use the best ingredients as simply as possible and just put them on the plate and created an atmosphere that was about caring for people almost as an extension of their home it was the happiest place on Earth that's what I wanted to do here was the big question though 10 years after Union Square Cafe opened in 1994 I finally gathered the courage have having convinced myself it was impossible to open a second fine dining restaurant it was Tom kikio Who convinced me it's time to do it but the other thing that convinced me was the notion that even though I had been told my entire life that you must absolutely have an owner on premise the entire time that what if you could have five owners in your restaurant at one time what if you could create a sense of shared ownership among the employees the customers the community itself your suppliers and your investors so that at every moment in time people would feel that they wanted good things to happen for your restaurants this was a sea change moment when not only could you have more than one fine dining restaurant but there were three chains in the 1970s and then the 1980s and then the 1990s who for the first time began to embrace some of the very same principles that had always been important only in the fine dining industry those of us who had always ued the chains and I would say that in the 70s Starbucks and then Whole Foods in the 80s Chipotle and the 9s began to embrace the same things caring about the people who work there caring about restoring people who ate there caring about the communities in which they did business caring deeply about their supply chain and yes making even more money for their investors as a result second Tipping Point which is one of the most fascinating moments one year one magical year that spanned 2003 to 2004 11 short years ago in the same way that those earlier chains had begun to embrace what fine dining had taught them fine dining started to embrace some of the things that chains had taught them and fine dining said it's okay to become chain I would say the first shot across the bow came from Joel Robeson one of the greatest three star Mission chefs in the history of Misha who came out of a many many year retirement to take the same level cooking that he had been serving for gazillions of Franks and he served it at a bar called atellier de Robeson now you may say that aell itself is an expensive restaurant but you have to acknowledge that he made his quality of cooking accessible to a multitude more people who ever could have afforded Joel robon I'd say the second shot came from a magnificent young cook in New York called David Shang and David took another approach he said what if I could take my favorite ethnic cooking which happens to be Asian and strip away all of the refinements expected in a three-star restaurant I'm not even going to give you backs on on the chairs but I'm going to make sure that what I put in that bowl is really good and atellier became an opportunity for New Yorkers to say this is different I can eat really well and it can be actually quite casual at the same time and that leads to Shake Shack which as you may know was an accident we did not intend to build a chain whatsoever we intended to have a hot dog cart to support an art project to bring more people to Madison Square Park which we were trying to help restore but people liked it and we started in 11 Madison Park and that's where all the food came from for Shake Shack so for the first time in my career we were sourcing the exact same allnatural beef that we would source for any of our fine dining restaurants no growth hormones no antibiotics and by stripping away all the things that you pay for when you come to a fine dining restaurant like reservationists and mates and hosts and waiters and waitresses and bartenders and chefs and Sue chefs and pastry chefs and florists and tablecloths and silverware you can get the exact same quality food much more accessible for many many more people and create the kind of systems around that good taste that allow it to be a chain for the first first time having diverged since that first Buon which then became fast food the world has now come back to a point we are now on the precipice of a whole new movement which is fine casual it's the marriage of fine dining and Casual all at once and isn't it ironic today that it all comes back to bullion the first fast food that ever existed but what did bullan do it restored you food will continue to change thanks to so many activists consumers journalists who have fueled the most remarkable Evolution we've seen in our lifetimes but now I want to tell you one thing that will never change because no matter where you eat at what price point or what the menu is whether it's fine dining or casual dining or F casual dining you need to be restored we human beings so crave being restored and restoring giving hospitality and receiving hospitality and it all goes back really to the first few moments after we reach born We crave those four gifts that we got and any dining experience any eating experience any Growing Experience that is absent of these four gifts will not succeed just make sure that when you do what you do in the world of food you give people eye contact cuz people want to be seen make sure you smile cuz people want to know you're happy to see them give them a hug because they want to know that the provision of pleasure is mutual and yes give them some pretty good food just like we got moments after being born thank [Applause] [Music] you