Chris: I’d love to hear a little bit about the upbringing of Steve, and what home life was like, and then how you landed where you did.
Steve: I’m the middle child.
Chris: Me too.
Steve: I think it shows. [laughs] I grew up in Miami. When I was 15, my parents told us we were moving to Detroit, to suburban Detroit, so that was a big moment in my life. That brought out a lot more middle child in me.
Chris: You’re in the middle of high school, and you move to Detroit.
Steve: Yes.
Chris: That’s rough.
Steve:It was not fun [laughs] but I don’t know. My dad is a Rabbi. My whole family was very involved in Jewish life. My brother became a Rabbi and my sister is in Jewish education. I was the black sheep of the family in that sense, not super into it. Not anti, but when you grow up the child of clergy, you’re not one foot in, it’s all in. That was also a big element in my childhood, so jumping ahead, what we do with food as far as it’s Jewish themes, is the way that I’ve chosen to identify with my background.
My parents both were great cooks. My mom and Dad both worked full-time, but my mom still cooked dinner every single night. We never went out. Very rarely. My dad would do these elaborate weekend, grand party type stuff. Cooking was big, and I learned to cook from them at a very early age. I always liked it, but never, ever thought about it as a possible career.
I went to Penn. I was a Wharton undergrad and just followed the track. I went to New York after I graduated and I pretty much knew from day one sitting in my cubicle that it wasn’t going to be for me.
Chris: Wow, I can’t imagine that feeling. The walls kind of closing in and thinking, “I just spent how much of my life dedicated to this thing?” and I get here and realize, “Is this really what I want?”
I’m always curious about people who choose that path in college, was there anything in high school that turned you on to it or was it just that you got to Penn, did some prerequisites, and felt like, “Alright, this is where I’m headed.”
Steve:To be perfectly honest, and this might be sort of apocryphal, but it’s a memory in my head that I was very influenced [chuckles] by Michael J. Fox’s character on Family Ties.
Chris: I forget, What’s his name?
Steve: Alex P. Keaton.
Chris: Alex P. Keaton, that’s right.
Steve: I wanted to get into the best college I could, but had no idea what I wanted to do. On the Penn application, you have to check one of four boxes, engineering, arts and sciences, Wharton or nursing. I looked at the application and I was like, “Well, if I check Wharton, I’ll be employable at least.” And that’s what Alex P. Keaton would do. So that’s what I did.
Chris: Ok, so back to your timeline. You get through Penn, get a job, sit down at your desk day one and realize it’s not for you. What year is this?
Steve: This is ‘95.
Chris: What happens from ’95 to Marigold?
Steve: I worked for three years, got up the courage to quit. Ended up traveling, went to Spain. A buddy of mine, his girlfriend’s father, in the 1960’s had bought this little tiny farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, about 20 miles from Mediterranean near Malaga.
So my buddy was like, “All right, I’m going to go there, you want to come with me for a month? We can stay for free, we just got to get a new room.”
Chris: What an offer.
Steve: Yeah. So we went to his place, no running water, no electricity, just a small village of like a few hundred people. My friend left after a month and I had nowhere to be so I was like, “I’m going to stay.” I stayed as long as I could until it got too cold. There was no running water, so you were showering with collecting rainwater so that got impossible as it got colder. I stayed for two months by myself just living a monastic life which, I’m not a very social person, so I was like, “I loved it.”
Chris: [laughs] Just you in a barn with no heat.
Steve: Yes, and I was like, “I can do anything I want.” I had nothing to do. But then I flew back to the States and literally, I remember feeling as soon as I stepped off the plane, I was like, “Shit, I need to get a job.” So I ended up going right back to where I came from. My bosses had moved to a different firm, so it was somewhat new. Went back there. Which felt comfortable, but also a little bit like a step backwards. After about a year there, I had started thinking seriously about cooking school and whether that was something that I should try.
The one thing I did outside of working in New York was I cooked a lot. A buddy of mine was at Columbia and his parents had bought him this sick apartment which is much nicer than anything I ever lived in. I used to spend the weekends cooking and throwing these big dinner parties for our friends. I was always interested, so I was like, “I should just do it.”
So I talked to my bosses and there was a nice program, a cooking school, it used to be called the French Culinary Institute. I was like, “I’m going to have to leave work at 4:30 two days a week. Is that okay?” They were totally cool with it.
Chris: They sound incredibly supportive.
Steve: They were. They’re amazing. They’re great people. I can’t say enough about them. I went to school at night, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. I was pretty serious about it because I was older. A lot older. A lot of the younger kids were there because they didn’t want to go to college. But I was very serious about it. I got a lot out of it.
So then I had a conversation with my bosses, and I was like, “I’m going to work another year as a way to repay you the flexibility that you’ve given me. I’m going to work another year, and then I’m going to leave,” which is what I did. I came back to Philly.
Chris: So now where are we timewise?
Steve: This is in 2001. It’s in February of 2001. I got a job cooking at Twenty Manning.
Chris: It seems like that restaurant has made it through everything.
Steve: This is in February of 2001. I got a job cooking at Twenty Manning. The chef there is a guy named Kiong Banh. You hear some of these horror stories about kitchen culture. He was the opposite. He’s just the sweetest and a true gentleman. I worked there for a year and what I learned from him was how to behave in a kitchen.
Then I ended up getting a job at Salt which is literally right up the block. That was a restaurant opened by a guy named David Fields. He hired this guy, Vernon Morales. He’d cooked all over. He had cooked at elBulli in Barcelona and not as an unpaid stage, but as a paid employee. He had real chops. It was a pretty big gun to bring to Philly to do what he wanted to do. The restaurant was not very successful, but I learned from Vernon. I learned most of what I know about food from him. He was at the top of his game.
Then, after about a year there, I came to a realization that I was on the older side of my peers who were line cooks. I had a little bit of money saved up from working in finance and I was like, “You know, I’m working my ass off anyway, it’s not rocket science, I should just do this myself.” A friend of mine who lived in West Philly who knew that Marigold was for sale or closed, whatever. He’s like, “You should take a look at it.” That was in late 2003, I went and-
Chris: Then you bought it?
Steve: I bought it.
Chris: That’s awesome.
Steve: And we opened in October 2004.
Chris: I know that in terms of that, you wrote in the book, things went really well, good reviews, people were liking it, the concept was working, all good. But you weren’t happy and it was taking a toll on you.
Steve: Yes. It was a scary moment because I was like, “Well, I didn’t like investment banking, maybe I don’t like this, am I ever going to find something that I like?” For me, it was a very lonely year. Everything just felt like the weight of the world on my shoulders. Even though it was just like tiny BYOB in West Philly.
I felt like I needed to take a step back and I was introduced to Mike. Actually in two different ways. I was introduced to him by Mark Vetri who I knew who was one of the first people I met when I came to Philly. He’s the one that actually got me the job at Twenty Manning. Mark’s always been like the godfather of the scene. I didn’t know him very well but he was always sort of going out of his way to help young chefs.
Then, at the same time, my wife who is from Pittsburgh and Mike was raised in Pittsburgh and they were family friends growing up. Mike’s mom was a very influential teacher in my wife’s education and she’s like, “You’ve got to meet Mike.” We met twice and I said, “You want to be the chef here.” That was in the late summer of 2005.
So he started in September. I actually didn’t go near the restaurant for like two or three months. I would talk to Mike on the phone but I was like, “Do your thing.” Then, I started to get restless and started to hang around the restaurant and develop my relationship with Mike. After about a year, we were pretty close and started talking about doing projects.
Chris: So let’s fast-forward to Zahav. You and Mike get to know each other over a year of working together, you’ve built a bit of a bond and you decide to walk away from Marigold.
Steve: We kept Marigold for a little while. I was a chef there for about three years. But we would find ourselves during slow times talking about ideas. We had talked about Zahav on and off for over a year. Mike had this idea that the way that people eat in Israel was very compelling and not really well-known or available here.
The other thing that was happening, was Jose Garces had opened Amada. In my 16 or 17 years in the industry here in Philly, that was one of the most important openings we’ve ever had because he was an independent chef/owner who could not only do something that was great and critically well-received, but also commercially successful.
Maybe I’m wrong, but in my mind all of us in the younger generation who dreamed of being a chef in their own restaurants wanted to do that. We were not making any money at Marigold. We were getting great reviews, but it was like, “What’s the point?” We all wanted what Amada had. Not only was that an inspiration for us, but also the style of eating, tapas, wasn’t that dissimilar from how people eat in Israel. We were talking a lot about that. So we decided to go for it.
Chris: Talk about the difference between launching Marigold by yourself, versus Zahav. Considering at that point you had a partner and you’d been kicking this idea around for a couple years. Did you feel more confident or were you just as nervous?
Steve: We didn’t know anything. [laughs] Even though I had opened a restaurant, we literally didn’t know anything. So yes, we had the partnership and we would have both died without it. But Zahav, was a much bigger project with a much bigger budget. Some of it was investor money from friends and family who it would have been embarrassing if we had lost it for them. Over half of it was money borrowed against our homes.
Chris: Right. So now you’re in this place with significantly more risk.
Steve: Real risk and we didn’t build Marigold ourselves, it was like a DIY thing. Frankly, I don’t remember if we got permits or anything. Zahav was the next level up, and I didn’t understand any of that.
At the time, I didn’t know anything. We were over budget. We were over time. We picked a location that ultimately worked out well, but looking back, it was probably a very questionable decision to take that location. Even though Marigold had some critical acclaim, it wasn’t like landlords were beating down our door to offer us their “A” locations. We were lucky to get engagement and callbacks. It was really stressful.
Chris: I can’t imagine. Between permits, inspections and licenses. All that red tape and navigating systems you are completely unfamiliar with.
Steve: Yes, and especially when you’re trying to do it yourself because you don’t have the money to hire professionals who know what they’re doing. It can be very defeating. [laughs] Then we opened, and things were not great.
Chris: Let’s talk about that. I know every situation is different, but how much runway did you give yourself to get this thing up and running and get customers in the door?
Steve: I mean, we had very little because we didn’t have any money left. There was a point early on where Mike’s dad wrote us a $10,000 check, that I kept in a file in my drawer, because we thought we weren’t going to make the next payroll. We had to do a lot of hard things, like fire people for the first time.
But looking back, the hunger that you have when you’re in that situation is a big part of why I think Zahav is a special place today.
Chris: Yeah, there’s a special sort of positive tension and camaraderie that happens when you’re in the trenches in something like that, and really scrapping to make it work.
Steve: Yeah, there’s a magic there that you just can’t snap your fingers and recreate. I think that came through to customers. We kept refining the concept and figuring it out. We got some good luck too. It was the second year Philly Mag had done their top 50 restaurants, and we were number one.
That was an immediate opportunity to show a lot of people what kind of restaurant we were. By that time, we had figured things out. For a while, it was like crickets in the dining room, then all of the sudden we were busy.
Chris: Was that a year before that happened?
Steve: Yes, it was basically one year.
Chris: Must’ve been a scary year.
Steve: If that hadn’t happened we might have closed.
Chris: So we’re about halfway through, so I want to fast forward a little.
So now you’ve got Federal, Abe Fisher, Dizengoff, Rooster, Goldie and you’re growing, things are going really well. Last I heard you were at a staff of about 200 plus people. I don’t know where you are now, but how do you try to maintain quality? How do you manage that with such a large staff? Are you concerned at all about just being too big at some point?
Steve: Yes. We’re sort of in a transition period now in terms of our size. I would say Mike and I are nearing the threshold of what we can take on individually. At the manager level, we have say 40 managers. Mike and I still basically have individual relationships with all of those people, but that’s getting harder and harder to get the quality time because you’re spread so thin, and we’ve got new projects and books and all of that.
Federal in a lot of ways is sort of our laboratory and testing ground for adding a little bit more structure to the way we do things. Trying to move on from Mike and I making every single decision, and everything has got to run through us. We have 40 managers, so let’s maybe try to introduce a little more structure.
Chris: Makes sense. Seems like a natural point to start talking about those changes.
Steve: And we’re still in the early stages of trying to figure that out. We had some missteps like in New York and Miami where we made probably two big picture mistakes. One was underestimating what it would take to recreate our brand equity in a different market, and then manage that operationally.
Two, was not hiring ahead of growth. It’s so hard in this industry to find good talent so we constantly find ourselves hiring behind the growth. We overestimated what our structure was when we probably needed a little bit more critical mass to support thinking about things outside of it.
Chris: Not to harp on it, but I am curious, you try something like this, you take on another city. Do you have enough going on that you can say, “Okay, let’s just take our licks and realize it didn’t work?” Or is that still a very personal thing and it still hurts?
Steve: I am, probably to a fault, I can be pretty unemotional about things.
Chris: [laughs] Yeah. You talk about it pretty, even-keeled.
Steve: We lost a lot of money in New York, we lost a lot of money in Miami. It’s not like we didn’t try. Yes, you just have to take your licks. As a point of pride, I would love to be able to say like, “Everything we’ve ever done has worked,” but it was a lot more stressful to have those things open and not working and worry about them than it was to admit defeat. Once we did that, I slept well.
Chris: You’ve said before that you love this idea of being able to walk to your locations. After New York and Miami, do you feel compelled to try again an improve on your mistakes, or does it make you question whether you want to expand to other cities?
Steve: It’s a constant topic of conversation between Mike and I, and between Mike and I and our Federal partners. I love opening new concepts, probably to a fault. If we only focused on Federal Donuts and nothing else, would we somehow be more successful than we are? Maybe. I just don’t know if that’s what I want to spend my time doing.
Chris: Right. You’re suddenly becoming a franchise model.
Steve: We talk about it all the time with Federal. But it’s not like some of the people we here who say, “I’m going to open this, and then I’m going to open 10 more.” We didn’t set out to do that. We wanted to do projects in Philly that we thought were cool and fun. That’s one of the keys to our success where when we have been successful. At the same time though, you feel like Federal’s the most mature in terms of being able to grow as a focused effort. Federal is starting to build its own little infrastructure and its own growth plans. We’ve got a growth plan for Federal and I don’t know if we’re going to go to another city yet, but we’re going to start and see where it takes us.
Chris: From an outside perspective, that makes a 100% sense. It just seems like the one concept that is plug and play, and also has this really fun idea of fried chicken and donuts powering it.
Steve: And I’m really proud of our culture and our willingness to change. That we’re able to say just because we’ve been doing something for years, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best way to do it. We’ve changed that donut batter recipe three times since we opened. Federal Donuts is seven years old, and we are still contemplating major changes. It takes a while. People forget about that. They want to be the Chipotle of this or the Chipotle of that. It can’t happen overnight.
Chris: We are getting closer to wrapping up, so I want to talk really quickly about Philly. What have been some of the challenges? What’s your feeling about the community here? I know in our industry there seems to be this sea change where people tend to be driven less by greed and competition and more helpful and really open and honest. I’m curious if you see some of that in your field as well?
Steve: Yes. It’s hard to say because my experience is mostly in Philly, but I do think the restaurant community here is generally very supportive. I’m not a social guy, I’m the kind of guy that goes home and I don’t really go out that much. But I know a good amount of people in the industry and we talk and we help each other out. When we have challenges, legal challenges or otherwise, there’s a free share of information.
The up-and-coming restaurant scene now and the growth that we’ve seen have just been explosive. And having a guy like Steve Star lead the way and set an example has been great. The hospitality industry has done a lot for this city.
I love Philly, it’s got a lot of problems, it’s the poorest, of any big city in the country it’s by far the poorest and that sucks.
Chris: But that’s why you’re doing things like The Rooster?
Steve: Yes, so I feel like I’m a Philly lifer and therefore, we try to take the long-term view like. Everything we do now, what would be good for today, but what’s going to be good for growing this company and trying to be good citizens. We try to take a long-term view.
Chris: Yes, and it seems like the way you’re doing it seems genuine. I know with a lot of companies now corporate responsibility and doing good is a big trend, but it just feels like it actually comes from the bones of your organization, the DNA of your team.
Steve: Thanks, yes, It’s been an interesting experience doing that, I’m glad that we did it. When I talk about Rooster, one of the things that I always come back to is, the hospitality industry is this weird oxymoron because if you think about what hospitality really means, it has nothing to do with exchanging goods and services for money. It’s about giving without the expectation of getting anything in return. So that’s what we do.
To be really, really, really good at it, those two things should be separate. Yes, that’s how we make our living, but we both agree on the idea that’s it’s not really about the food. We are all human beings who just want to feel like a part of something bigger. We want to feel valued as people. And that’s really our mission when you walk into our restaurant, is to make you feel good about being alive and not like you’re alone in the world.
Chris: That’s great. And important to have alignment at the top of that bigger mission. Last part of this skews a bit more into our world, but I’m just curious about, as a small business, how you’ve handled marketing. It sounds like with Zahav, PR was that rocket fuel. So there’s two parts of this. One is about a restaurant that might be struggling or one that you’re launching for the first time. Is there an effort to do any outbound marketing there? Then on the inbound side, how are you handling modern reputation management with Yelp, Google Reviews and stuff like that. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
Steve: So you know, there’s a lot of animosity towards Yelp and those peer review sites among our community. And It hurts to read a bad review. It’s doubly hurtful to read an uninformed or just a nasty one. But, it’s actually valuable information that we’re getting for free. So we’ve responded to every single Yelp review. Every single Open Table review.
I think that feedback is totally positive when you’re getting face to face feedback. When you’re getting blind feedback, they’re much nastier but they’re also much more truthful, nasty or not, they didn’t like it. That’s free information that we use to address issues. When we see multiple cases of the same kind, that’s valuable information. It hurts, but you can bury your head in the sand and then suffer the consequences, or you could help fix it.
We’ve taken that approach, and that’s sometimes hard to get our team to buy into that, but we do.
Chris:The first question is more about have you done any marketing at all? Do you have a PR firm that helps you with press and getting you talked about?
Steve: In terms of advertising and PR, we have a PR firm. The one we have now, in New York, is more focused on the national stuff. Then we have a two-person in-house team that does communications and PR and has relationships with local media. The marketing we do is usually direct marketing like email marketing and social media-based. We don’t hardly ever advertise. For me I always feel like, “Wow, that restaurant has to advertise, maybe they’re not doing so great.” The best thing, and we’ve been able to do it most of the time is when you get great press coverage.
Chris: So for social media, you’re obviously creating content all time and getting great photography captured. Are you then putting money behind posts to boost that content?
Steve: We haven’t done it yet. It’s one of those things that as a small company we don’t have enough hours in the day. We have two people that do communications. One of them might as well be a full-time photographer. And we don’t make it easy is that we don’t have a dozen of one thing, we’ve got six or seven different concepts that require their own story, their own style. That’s been a whole sea change since we started.
Chris: The good thing is you’ve got good corporate bones and you’re beloved, that’s a huge help. I feel you’ve been really true to your core beliefs and that helps quite a bit. In your case, I was thinking it would be more about taking that next step, do we want more people through the door at this concept, or this location is struggling let’s get awareness up about it. It can be a super efficient way to help with that.
Steve: Yeah, it’s interesting just anecdotally. For Dizengoff, it’s a picture of hummus will get this many likes. A picture of hummus with a person in it will get this many likes.
Chris: Yeah it’s funny isn’t. The small nuances that change the performance of the photography.
Steve: It’s something where we’re still obviously learning as we go. But you can’t ignore it. A lot of people get into cooking because they’re like me and they’re not outgoing. They just want to get in the kitchen they don’t want anyone to bother them and they just want to cook food. If they want to express themselves, they want to do it through the plate and not in a conversation. I would love to live in a world where your success is only based on the food and the service, but that’s not the world I see.
Steve: Exactly. That’s a harsh reality, but it is the truth. Again, you’re doing it right, you’re doing it authentically, and that’s all that matters.
Chris: Last question, give me a restaurant to watch in 2019 that you’re excited about, that’s not yours.
Steve: Oooh, good question. Actually, I’m very excited for a few new restaurants coming up — especially Hiroki in Fishtown and Vernick Fish in the new Comcast Center. I also can’t wait to see what crazy deliciousness Joe Beddia comes up with in his much bigger Fishtown space
Chris: Nice, well we’ll keep our eye on those. Hey Steve, thanks so much for doing this. Great to meet you and have this time to get to know you a bit more.
Steve: Of course. This was fun. Happy to do it.
