How did an architectural draftsman and a director of product development in the fashion industry end up opening one of the most sought after restaurants in Harlem?
This is the story of Darryl and Melissa Burnette who envisioned creating a 12-seat, chef’s table restaurant designed to feel like you were having dinner in someone’s kitchen.
BRICK 1: DARRYL — ARCHITECTURE
DARRYL: I’m Darryl, a chef and part owner of Belle Harlem…. It’s a tiny 12 seat chef’s table here in Harlem. … Yesterday was our second year anniversary. Two years under our belt and right now we’re just trying to figure out how to expand the brand. How to keep things afloat. How to continue to make payroll.
HAL: What led you here?
DARRYL: It goes back to architecture. I was an architectural draftsman in Virginia and right about that time (in the 90’s) is when AutoCAD (a computer-aided design and drafting software) came online pretty heavy. So you had this automated computer drafting program that was basically … going to replace draftsmen. The art of… doing things by hand was going by the wayside.
I remember thinking, “Well,…here I am, it’s going to be a lot of time and education and schooling to get to become an architect and the computer is going to take a lot of that away.” And I thought what career should I study that I didn’t think was going to be affected by computers. And it led to cooking.
BRICK 1: MELISSA — WAITRESSING
HAL: Melissa, what about you?
MELISSA: Well, when Darryl and I first met I was a waitress and I was kind of enjoying the cash that I was making… At the time I was making $2 in change an hour. If my customers didn’t like me I didn’t pay the rent, so I had to pretty much figure out what people wanted from me right away and be able to adapt myself table by table, person by person, otherwise I was not going to be successful….. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was running my section, or my station or whatever like a small business.
BRICK 2: DARRYL — BACK TO SCHOOL: Retraining
HAL: Darryl, how did you get from architectural draftsman to food?
DARRYL: We were back home in Virginia and I was watching a Food Network show, and they were doing a segment on Marcus Samuelesson and I was like, wow, this is pretty interesting, I never really thought about getting into cooking so I thought, here is this black man who’s this young dude doing very very well for himself — three stars.
And I’m thinking you know what, the South maybe is not the best place for me, maybe I need to go to New York, somewhere bigger to have a better opportunity, and Melissa and I started talking about, what if we just gave it a shot and went to New York and the two of us together built enough confidence between the two of us, to go and give it a try and if we didn’t make it, we could always come back home.
HAL: At what age did you decide to go to culinary school?
DARRYL: I was in my twenties, right?
MELISSA: Right. We were, like twenty-somethings.
DARRYL: Yeah, like twenty eight or twenty nine. …Right after the show, I started doing a lot of research. The smartest thing to me I think was to go to culinary school to kind of give me a head start I guess….I looked into the Culinary Institute of America,… When I got there there were a lot of people from second careers, a lot of lawyers, a lot of architects, people who were very similar, people just doing second careers…. At the time I was there, there were like fifty master chefs in the country, and twenty five of them were on campus. If you weren’t full of yourself and stupid…These chefs would call the Waldorf or whatever and say hey I got someone for you. They helped out a lot too.
BRICK 2: MELISSA — BACK TO SCHOOL: Retraining
HAL: Melissa, how did you get from waitressing to fashion?
MELISSA: When I met Darryl, he encouraged me to go back to school. He said, “Yeah, you’re too smart to just be a waitress. You should really do something else.”…I ended up having a meeting with the dean of my college who happened to be in the fashion merchandising side and she said, “I would love to have you in my department … And that’s kind of what happened.
Then I saw an ad for a footwear product development production assistant at Ann Taylor….I interviewed with them …I reported to the head of production and the head of development and they both had about 20 years experience each and fell in love with me and wanted to teach me what they knew. ..I stayed there for three years …but the business was changing and their footwear business was getting smaller,… so I started looking for other work. I interviewed at Ralph Lauren and ended up getting a job there with a giant team and a lot of responsibility. And from there, through my contacts, I ended up getting jobs at Michael Kors, Banana Republic, Alexander Wang — places like that.
I always loved what I did, but I didn’t love where I was doing it….I wanted to come home and see my husband in the evening. I didn’t want to still be at the office hand painting something for a runway show.
BRICK 3: DARRYL — LEARNING THE CHOPS
HAL: What was your first job in the industry?
DARRYL: It was at Metrazur for Charlie Palmer. …I worked three different stations. I was extremely busy. The pay was not very good but you had to pay your dues to work for one of these celebrity chefs and they worked the shit out of you. I would be working on shucking the oysters, working the fryer, and the pizza oven all by myself during a busy busy shift. But it builds character…You get better at a skill; you get fast and organized at it.
BRICK 3: MELISSA — EXPANDING HORIZONS
HAL: Do you think that there is anything that you learned while you were pursuing this fashion career that has kind of come into play today? That helped you in the restaurant business?
MELISSA: Yeah. Probably the biggest one was the opportunity to travel internationally and work with a lot of people of different nationalities from different places. Because the career did afford me the opportunity to travel to Italy, Brazil, China. My last job, I was going to China four times a year and spending a lot of time in the south of China…International travel often by yourself teaches you how to be pretty self reliant and it boosts your confidence quite a bit….I think, also, it inspired mad conversations about food that would inspire Darryl to come up with something cool at Belle. For instance, he created some stupendous lobster bao (a steamed, soft bun) over the summer probably because I was talking about these amazing pork buns that I was eating in China.
But I think everything I ever needed to learn about business I leaned actually more as a waitress than I did in studying fashion or working in fashion. I applied those waitressing skills throughout my career.
BRICK 4: DARRYL — LEARNING HOW TO MANAGE STAFF AND THE VALUE OF MISTAKES
HAL: Was there any particular chef you look back on and say, what he or she taught me made a difference?
DARRYL: I think chef Andy D’Amico taught me a lot …. That was my first sous chef job at Nice Matin….He taught me a lot about speed…We would do three to four hundred people for brunch. He also taught me how to manage a little better.
A part of it, too, was …a little bit about failure….I’ll tell you a crazy story. It was the first time he was allowing me to butcher the filet mignon. This is something that taught me how to handle my employees…I was scared as shit… It was a big piece of meat, like half of a cow, and I had to break it down. So he tells me very seriously if you screw this up I’m going to kill you. And I knew how much filet mignon costs, so of course, what did I do? I messed it up. I’m like, OMG, he’s going to break my neck. Melissa is going to kill me; I’m going to get fired, blah blah blah. So what did I do? I took the waste and I hid it in the bottom of the trash can…. I wasted his product. Now as a chef, a business owner, I tell my guys if you screw something up, it’s fine, we’ll figure out something to do with it; we’ll make a sauce out of it; we’ll make crostini; we’ll make family food out of it. I don’t want you to be afraid to tell me that you messed up because then you’re hindering that relationship, that communication with your employees. If they’re not honest with you they could just be throwing your product away and you would never know about it.
BRICK 5: GOING OUT ON THEIR OWN
DARRYL: My goal was to have my own restaurant at 34…and it hadn’t happened…. It was another 10 years before it actually happened…Because right before that,…I was the executive chef at Bergdorf Goodman restaurant…I was there for about four, four and a half years, and I just had enough and I walked out…I took the summer off and had the opportunity to find myself…and I was walking the dog and I saw this space… and I called Melissa and told her how cheap the rent was and she said sign the lease. We actually paid rent for a year before we were able to get open
MELISSA: And we had to find a lot more money than we ever thought possible, but my career afforded us the chance to do that…I had worked my way up to director level, and we didn’t want an investor…because what would be the point of Darryl doing his own thing if he had another boss to answer to, you know what I mean?
BRICK 6: REALIZING THE VISION
HAL: You opened a restaurant and one of the things you have to consider is what the feel of the place is like. What it’s going to look like? Did any bricks you laid from your architectural or fashion experience help in creating a space.
DARRYL: Yeah, that was a big thing, too, having the background in architecture and then going in to these kitchens, these tiny, makeshift kitchens that were horribly thought out. That was something that really really helped us because we were able to think outside of the box… When I worked for Jean George at Spice Market, he had this huge kitchen and you just realize, “Well, whether I’m in a tiny kitchen, or a huge kitchen, I can only utilize the space that is in front of me…
MELISSA: I’m also very picky about finishes and the way things look having worked in the fashion industry for many years, so I think if you’ve got those sorts of creative skills that’s another thing you can apply to save working with the design team because … if they were way out of budget, or something wasn’t going to work for us at all, we could easily nip it in the bud….As crazy as it might’ve been to open a restaurant in New York…we figured out how to do it on a shoestring so that if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be financially devastated.
DARRYL: How can I maximize the space; what’s the most efficient use of that space possible? For me,…if I have to cook in a restaurant situation, this is the way I most prefer to do it. People always say, “Would you wanna expand?” I’m like, “Hell no. No, no, no, no. We like how small it is.” Because it’s not like work.
MELISSA: It’s like having a dinner party.
DARRYL: It’s like having a dinner party in a restaurant that looks like a kitchen in someone’s home.
BRICK 7: DARRYL — PERSEVERANCE
DARRYL: I’ve always been either the only black guy or one of the only black people in the room — whether it’s the classroom or chess club… Having to be the only black guy in the architecture company, the only black guy in the firm, it always taught me that I was going to always have to push harder. Even if I was the best, I was never going to be acknowledged as the best or whatever.
When I worked at that auto parts store in Virginia,…I was the only black guy in the drafting department of the corporate area. And the director of the department pulled me aside one day and told me — because he knew that I was going through a lot of shit from a lot of the guys — and he pulled me aside, this older white gentleman, and said, “Listen, you’re going to have to go around into the ditch in order to get to where you need to go because it’s not going to be a straight line for you. You might have to … it might take you five years to get where you should be.” Because he knew that the chips were stacked against me… So I think learning that made me realize that even coming here and working in the city as executive chef at Bergdorf Goodman’s, it was the same thing. I would have customers request to see the chef and say hello to the chef and ‘thank you for such a great meal’ and I’d come out with my nice beautiful chef’s coat on and they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, we’re waiting to see the chef.” And I’m like, “That would happen to be me.” So it was the same shit. Just a different location. But it teaches you that you can’t quit. You just have to keep on pushing through and keep on pushing through and eventually, it might take you longer to take you where you need to be but … it’s just not going to be a straight line.
Even with Belle now…I’ve learned it’s kind of the bigotry of low expectations. When someone comes in and it’s like, “Oh, you’re the chef? You own this place?” Which has happened so many times. And … you just let it roll off and keep pushing through and showing like, “Yeah, not only am I the chef, I’m the owner, I’m the dishwasher, I just fixed the ceiling. If something breaks I got to take care of that.”
BRICK 8: DARRYL — PERFECTING THE CRAFT
DARRYL: I think I’m still learning how to cook…I learned the foundations, but now it’s about getting the flavors right; creating the experience, I think that’s a whole lot of it too. For me it’s like if it doesn’t taste good to me or that I don’t find the flavors interesting or something it, I think it’s having confidence in my own pallet. If I think this is pretty good, it’s probably okay. So far it’s been okay.
BRICK 1 REVISITED
HAL: What effect did meeting each other have on your careers?
MELISSA: I mean, obviously, it 100% changed my path. He motivated me to do something besides wait tables. You know what I mean? And I think we’ve been partners in every sense of the word ever since We’ve been together for 24 years… We know each other’s strengths. We know each other’s weaknesses and we push each other in the right direction. It’s a whole lot easier to have a partner, a best friend by your side. I don’t know if we would’ve taken the paths that we did if we’d been without each other. I’m not sure.
DARRYL: Yeah, I’m almost sure I wouldn’t have. I’d probably still be in southwest Virginia.
HAL: One final question. Any words of wisdom for people who are going to read this blog?
MELISSA: I’d say follow your heart…follow your dreams. Even… if you don’t succeed, you’ll figure out what you’re made of and have the ability to move on to the next thing.
DARRYL: You’ve just got to keep … like you said, laying different bricks.
Want to eat at Belle Harlem? Of course you do. Book your reservation and check out their dinner menu online, and in the meantime you can follow along with Darryl and Melissa on Instagram.
“10 Bricks” is a series of interviews with people who have had interesting careers and lives, bucking the conventional wisdom of following a single, linear career path.
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Design and illustration by Martine Lindstrøm.
