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COVER STORY, MAY 2005
MORE THAN JUST A MEAL
Fireman Hospitality’s family of restaurants in New York City use a mix of location, personality and great food for true hospitality success.
Nicole Thompson
In January 2005 in the Times Square Theater District in New York City, Sheldon Fireman, founder and CEO of Fireman Hospitality Group, opened his sixth and latest restaurant, Bond 45, in the 100-year-old Hammerstein Theater building. The Italian restaurant, meticulously conceived, planned and designed, takes diners back to New York in the 1940s. On the outside, the 120-foot storefront has been methodically aged, and a retro neon sign reaches 45 feet high. In designing the restaurant, Fireman brought in a theater scenic design team, including John Lee Beatty, an award-winning Broadway scenic designer, to help recreate the 1940s. Inside, every detail of the restaurant was researched and executed, from the Prohibition-era bar to the mosaic tiles from Italy, most made during the 1930s and 1940s, with some as old as 150 years. When diners arrive, they pass through an open kitchen, where they can see chef Brando de Oliviero and his staff at work, and perhaps sample a meatball or two on the way to the maitre d’ stand. Everything in the restaurant looks retro, from the brass handles to the mirrors, and the result is that the restaurant is comfortable and welcoming. Instead of a slick high style, it celebrates the beauty of the past.
This incredible attention to detail has made Fireman’s company one of the most successful independent restaurant owners and operators in the country. Fireman freely admits that he can be obsessive in researching a new restaurant concept. And it has paid off. The company’s estimated volume in 2004 was almost $52 million, despite the fact that four of the five restaurants are within 150 yards of one another. In addition to the newly opened Bond 45, Fireman is behind some of the hippest places in New York — Café Fiorello, The Brooklyn Diner, Redeye Grill, Shelly’s New York and Trattoria Dell’Arte. In an eye-popping figure, The Brooklyn Diner alone did approximately $6 million in volume in 2004 — with only 1,800 square feet of space. Bond 45, at the time of this writing, is running close to projected volumes, doing about $150,000 in the eighth week of operation during one of the worst times of the year for restaurants with the wintry weather. In an average week, Fireman restaurants average almost 30,000 diners. For 2005, Fireman Hospitality expects a total volume of about $67 million, including an estimated $9 million for Bond 45.
Fireman, a New York City native, created, built and ran Hip Bagel on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and there he developed his philosophy for hospitality and a flair for merchandising. He was living across the street from the Lincoln Center as it was being built, and in 1974, he opened his first restaurant there, Café Fiorello.
Recognizing the importance of having two to three meal periods a day and the cachet a certain clientele gives, Fireman opened his next restaurant, Trattoria Dell’Arte across the street from Carnegie Hall in 1988 in a collaboration with Milton Glaser.
“Carnegie Hall has a bit more office structure than Lincoln Center,” says Fireman. “We knew we could do two to three solid meals a day — lunch, dinner and after Carnegie Hall events, plus all the hotels around there.”
In the mid-1990s, he opened The Brooklyn Diner and Redeye Grill in the same L-shaped building near Carnegie Hall, and in 2000, his fifth restaurant, Shelly’s New York, opened near Carnegie Hall.
With four of the six restaurants so close to one another, how does Fireman Hospitality stay in business? Awareness of market demands, incredibly detailed research, and most importantly, providing diners with both the experience and the food of the highest level.
“ We’re not very stereotypical,” says Fireman. “We have a real culture and philosophy and management has been here a long time.” Among the goals of the company are: building good relationships with landlords, carefully choosing location, investing real dollars in restaurants that can serve three meals a day, willingness to change and the money to do so, and of course, excellent food and a unique guest experience. Hospitality is the company’s number-one goal.
When Fireman begins thinking about a new restaurant, he starts with an exploration of current needs in the marketplace.
“I’m very humble, I spend time in the marketplace and I ask myself, what does the marketplace want?” Fireman says. “I ask people in the marketplace what they want. All I’m doing is pleasing the marketplace. When I please the marketplace, I please our company and our investors.”
Once a market need has been identified, the research begins — research on both dishes and design. “I’m compulsive,” says Fireman of his research. “Everywhere I go, I’m researching. I’ve never been to a town or a country where I didn’t first go to an architect’s bookstore. We design, with help from theater designers, our own places.” To set the visual tone of a new restaurant, Fireman does two things. After paging through the hundreds of books he has collected over the years, he puts together a giant picture book of the story he wants the restaurant to tell and writes it up in 15 to 30 pages. “If I can’t put the story in words, I can’t do the restaurant,” says Fireman. He also translates the vision he has in his head to a scale model.
He exhaustively researches every aspect of a cuisine. “When I was learning Italian food, I remember going out one night and eating six different dishes of spaghetti and clam sauce, just to find out who had the best one,” he says. He traveled all over Europe and America in the early days of his company to learn Italian and ethnic American foods. He constantly researches new dishes everywhere he goes, and if he’s interested in one, he’ll visit 50 to 60 restaurants to find out what really makes a potential dish distinctive.
With all of the extensive research that goes into each restaurant and to ensure that the diner goes home with an incredible experience, the company sticks to cuisines it knows — Italian and American. If someone tells him that the marketplace needs food he is not an expert on, he finds another need to meet. “There are only so many hours in a day,” says Fireman. “If someone were to suggest that the marketplace needed Mexican food, for instance, I probably wouldn’t do it. I know how I am, and I would have to spend the next 4 to 5 months traveling Mexico and the South. And I’m not hiring a consultant for Mexican food, because I don’t know the cuisine and then I would be totally dependent on a consultant. I’m not that crazy — to invest millions of dollars and totally depend on a consultant. It’s certainly wonderful food, but I’m leaving it to other experts.”
That certainly isn’t to say that his restaurants lack variety. “We are a human garbage pail of Italian food, American food, steaks, sushi, and ethnic New York foods,” says Fireman. “We do have a couple of unusual dishes, but you only need one or two, which is easier to learn. You don’t have to build a whole new restaurant.”
Building new restaurants, however, is something Fireman Hospitality is looking to do, albeit in the vein of the cuisines they already specialize in. It is eyeing several locations in New York City, and is looking to expand on the East Coast to start with and possibly specialty locations like Las Vegas.
“We’re just waiting for the right person to discover us,” says Fireman. “We need developers who really want to merchandise their property with something unique. We have a whole team in place to expand if we can make the sensible, rational deal. We want to take Fireman Hospitality to America. Slowly, comfortably, but we need a sense of the right people and partners.”
The Restaurants of Fireman Hospitality
Café Fiorello
1900 Broadway between 63rd and 64th streets
Opened: 1974
Known For: Giant antipasto bar and intellectual conversation among the diners, who are mostly denizens of the Lincoln Center, including staff, conductors and opera singers.
Trattoria Dell’Arte
900 Seventh Ave. at 56th Street
Opened: 1988
Known For: An institution of Carnegie Hall and also has an antipasto table. The visual concept of the location is an artist’s studio in Bologna, Italy, so scattered throughout the restaurant are fragmented pieces of art. One room has a giant collection of famous Italian noses, from Joe DiMaggio to the nose of an Alitalia plane, in addition to a gallery of famous Italians that have visited.
Brooklyn Diner
212 W. 57th St. at Seventh Avenue
Opened: 1995
Known For: Celebrity clientele and an upscale diner feel that serves real ethnic Brooklyn foods, whether it be Jewish, Italian, Spanish or Irish, and everything is cooked to order. A tablecloth diner where the maitre d’ wears a tuxedo in the evenings, it’s a finer diner. A place to see and be seen.
Redeye Grill
890 Seventh Ave. at 56th Street
Opened: October 1996
Known For: Appealing to the many celebrities and entertainers that spend time on both coasts of the United States. Named after the redeye flight on which many people traverse the country, the restaurant has two atmospheres and serves mostly fish. Huge murals represent both sides of the country, one on the columns with New York landmarks, like Central Park and Times Square, and the other a 40-foot wall piece with all the people and places of Old Hollywood. With giant windows and 20-foot ceilings, the restaurant also features a dancing shrimp bar, a smoked fish bar and a sushi bar.
Shelly’s New York
104 West 57th St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues
Opened: 2000
Known For: Being one of the more unusual steakhouses in New York City. Although the menu features prime, dry-aged steaks, stone crabs and oysters, it isn’t your typical masculine steakhouse paneled in dark wood. The art is very New York and wild, the place is filled with color. There’s a bar at the maitre d’ stand, there is a band on the second floor with a huge art-deco lounge and private party rooms.
Bond 45
154 W. 45th St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues on the site of the famous Bond clothing store
Opened: January 2005
Known For: Bringing theater back to the Times Square Theater District. Bond 45 has a comfortable ambiance and great Italian food. Inspired by New York in the 1940s.
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