INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

JL: What drew you to Los Angeles, and what are the advantages to cooking here versus in Chicago?

DB: The big thing in leaving the group and moving is not that I didn’t love Chicago. Originally, when I started cooking in Chicago, my goal was always to move back to New York just because it always felt like home. Every time I got another job, “Oh, this is the next step to getting there.” I thought Alinea was only going to be a year, and it was 10-and-a-half. When I was ready to start looking, it was probably three years before I left Next. Originally, I had the goal to have a completed business plan and a whole projection on spaces, prices, and locations, hand Chef and Nick the packet and say, “This is what I want to do. Do you guys want to be a part of this?” For the most part, I did that. They had so much going on in Chicago, and I knew I didn’t want to be in Chicago – it just wasn’t going to work – we both had too much going on. Over this time, I’d started looking in New York, and I was also helping coach Bocuse d’or, so I was spending time in San Francisco. Everything we were buying in Chicago seemed to be growing wild in Napa and San Francisco. I started thinking about, as I was looking to leave the restaurant, why people leave restaurants. Unrelated to why I wanted to leave, I was just looking in general. When someone left that group, chef would say, “Why did we let them leave? They’re so talented. Could we have done something with them?” That conversation always resonated with me. Why do people leave restaurants and groups? I knew that I wanted to do something that had more impact than just my restaurant. I wanted to do something that could benefit the industry as a whole, and could benefit the people that helped me get to where I am. No one gets anywhere on their own. Every chef has had an army behind them to help get where they are.

I wanted to do something that allowed us to change the culture of the restaurant industry, which starts with your own restaurant. In New York and San Francisco, all of our business models were working to run the restaurant, but that’s kind of where it ended.

If you’re one of my cooks in New York, where are you living? You’re living in Harlem or Queens, maybe Jersey. You’re living an hour train ride away. We can pay you minimum wage, that’s about it. The day you start is the day you start the timer for when you have to quit. You either get promoted to make enough money to survive, or you have to move on. San Francisco is the same, but it’s more expensive. You can’t live in San Francisco, and if you live in Oakland, you can’t take the BART because if you leave work at 1a.m., the last [train] stops well before you’d leave work. You can’t ride your bike because you can’t ride over the Bay Bridge. So you have to have a car, and car insurance, and parking’s a fortune in San Francisco. The same is true. You start working for us, you have to start a timer for when you have to quit. I didn’t want that, when I started at Alinea, my paycheck was $680 every two weeks. At mk, it was $520 every two weeks. You can’t live like that.

My business partner lives here and in all of this time, three years of doing this, he kept saying, “Look at L.A. Look at L.A.” I resonated with L.A. initially, it didn’t make sense. He lives in Encino, which is perfectly fine, but I lived in the Meatpacking District of Chicago, a block from the restaurant. When he would visit me, he didn’t love Chicago because he didn’t like what I was showing him. I’m sure if I’d have taken him to the suburbs, he would have loved it, and vice versa. When we finally realized that, he started showing me downtown. I had a lot of friends who were either opening here or moving here. It was a perfect storm. I knew the Eleven Madison Park guys really well. I’ve known Tim Hollingsworth for years. Jordan Kahn and I cooked together at Alinea. I’ve known Jessica Largey for a bit. I started to see there was going to be a strong sense of community in a city I was otherwise unfamiliar with, and didn’t think would be there. I started to develop a relationship with Nancy Silverton – she’s incredible, just a great person – she said, “I don’t defend L.A. to people. Either they like it or they don’t, but if they’re not invested, they’re never going to get it.” She was right.

As I started to make that L.A. decision, back to when I had that conversation with our team, we started talking about the culture of the restaurant and the restaurant industry as a whole, how you treat each other. We thought, “This is our opportunity to do something different. This is our opportunity to find a place where we could 1) afford to pay people appropriately 2) change the dynamic of the business model in how you charge and pay people, and how you can afford an appropriate quality of life and 3) how you grow the brand. We ultimately decided there has to be a way where we can grow the brand around individuals.

What it comes down to is that I only want my name on two doors. One that will be on my tasting menu and fine dining restaurant, which is what this will become when we move it. I also want a little French place because I love cooking French food. Between the two, it’s an opportunity to cultivate a lot of talent. Either you want to cook at one or you want to cook at the other. Out of those two scenarios, you get the philosophy of the restaurant, but also a lot of technique. From there, anyone on our team that’s ready for a restaurant, we want to partner with them and open their restaurant. Not like minor partner, like, “You can have 10% and you’ll be the chef. You’re a 50% partner.” Most people leave to open restaurants because they want to own the restaurant. They go out and find a partner. Best case scenario, they’re a 50/50 partner on the ownership side. My business partners and I were like, “Why can’t we do that for other people?”

JL: Who’s your business partner?

DB: He’s a guy named Mike. It’s him, his dad, and his brother. Mike is a film producer. He was my groomsman and has been one of my best friends for a long time. I like to write, so I wrote this elaborate deck and story of what my restaurant was going to be – mainly to help me understand it, but also so he would have something to show investors. He helped me edit it and talked through it. This was a whole three-year process. When it came down to numbers, he was like, “I’m not good with numbers. I’m more on the creative side. Let’s talk to my brother.” His brother has an accounting background. He hit a point where he was like, “I can’t do more than this. Let’s talk to Dad.” Sam has taken like four companies public and invested in a bunch of stuff. He’s interim CFO of another company now. He’s also an accountant and has a law degree but isn’t practicing. Sam re-wrote the entire business model for the whole thing. When we decided not to partner (myself and the Alinea group) Mike and his dad were like, “We have all this time and energy and understanding of this; we can partner with you.” So we decided to work together.

That’s when the conversation started: how do we grow the brand? How do you keep people, grow around them, build a culture?

JL: Or not getting the credit, or any number of things.

DB: I just hate feeling like I don’t have control of what I’m doing. If I can’t see it, and it’s not like a tangible thing to me, I lose track of it and can’t deal with it. Our whole thing was, “Why aren’t we just empowering the people we’re going to put in charge anyway?” If you’re really good at making bread and you’re one of my cooks, then we’ll figure out how to put a bread program in, and we’ll give you ownership of it. If it’s good, then we want to put you with Ann, our business ops person/CFO/partner, and you guys sit and she’ll help craft a business model. Maybe your dream is a bakery. We’ll try and open a bakery. We’ll partner with you and handle business operations, we’ll get the investors, and the goal is just you’re doing what you love doing.

JL: When you use the word “we,” who are you referring to in the collaboration process?

DB: All of us. Everyone here has a part. There’s only seven of us. Ann handles all the numbers. Jeremy – if you were eating here, you’d think he’s one of our servers – but he will be the Service Director for the company. Jordon is our somm. Matt was an intern at Trio and opened Next with me and was a sous chef for me and was at Mozza for a while. Daniel did pastry with me for almost two years at Next and worked at NoMad and was a chocolatier for a while before he came back. McKenna worked with Matt at Mozza and handles all our farm relationships now. We sit and do everything. Ann tells us what we can and can’t afford, what makes sense from a financial perspective. The nice thing is my partners, Mike, Sam, and Aaron, they’re only here if there’s a problem or if we need advice.

JL: You planned a second restaurant that isn’t fine dining, which you said is French. How do you envision the differences and similarities between that concept and Dialogue?

DB: I always see a little bit of a trickle down. Here, it’s a very curated tasting menu. There, it won’t be. It’s going to be a la carte. We might do a five-course prix fixe, but really it’s just food I love cooking at a place I want to go eat at. I love being in Paris and eating at a place like Bistro Paul Bert, and you’re sitting outside and the French guy is sitting next to you smoking a cigarette with a big glass of wine and baguette and his giant newspaper. There’s accordion music playing somewhere, and I don’t even know if there is, but in my head there is. Very “Ratatouille” like. There’s just a feeling about that that’s so romantic. It’s not that we’ll have that, but I want to go into a restaurant with that kind of mindset. I look forward to sitting at this place and dining. It will happen one day. No exactly sure when… but one day.

Every menu that we’ve done here, we’ve snuck something super French in it. We did a duck presse in our second menu. Last menu, we did a straight French course. It didn’t look French, but it was supreme de poisson sauce blanquette, herbs de Provence. It was straight French.

JL: You’re going to relocate Dialogue to a permanent home.

DB: Yes, the goal with Dialogue as it sits right now was for us to have all the core people in our company in one room developing our culture and developing our identity. A lot of people – and I was almost guilty of this, too, until our first lease fell through – a lot of people, when they move to a new city and open their flagship, they say, “Here we are, come to our restaurant.” Looking back at Chicago, almost every outsider failed. Jean-Georges had Vong, which was awesome, and it’s now called Vong’s Thai Kitchen. I’m not sure if it’s open. [Vong’s Thai Kitchen closed.] Spago failed. Bluewater Grill closed. Great restaurants just don’t make it because the outsiders never invest in the city. Chicago is a great example of, “We don’t like outsiders because they don’t do anything to be a part of us.”

When I first moved here, we were negotiating a big space downtown. I had a flagship restaurant I was going to open. It was going to be awesome. I liked the plans, the drawings, design, everything. It was awesome. When the lease fell through, I realized that I’d done nothing to invest in the city or understand the city. I was literally showing up saying, “This area looks cool. This is what I’m going to do.” The gift was that it didn’t work and we decided, “Why don’t we learn more about the city first?”

JL: What did you do to reassess and re-approach?

DB: I sat on the patio of my apartment and thought about it and talked to my business partners. I was really upset about it at first. I was pretty depressed. “I moved here to do this whole thing and I can’t do it now.” It was two restaurants in one space. It had this really cool 28-seat fine dining restaurant and a high end a la carte French spot, two kitchens… but the whole idea was that you had to walk through one to get to the other. Now, in retrospect, as I talk about it, it’s so over the top, but at the time, it was very cool. I kept thinking, “Why would people come here? What have I done to make people want to come here?” We thought, “I want to be part of a neighborhood. Here’s an opportunity to do something very small and intimate that forces interaction with the diners. Let’s learn about the city and learn about the dining scene here. Let’s meet our guests. Let’s build a clientele and figure out what this restaurant wants to become. When we know what it wants to become, then we’ll find that space and move there.”

With this, let’s design something very sparse, very minimal where the diners create the atmosphere. You see it as a prep kitchen right now. During service there aren’t flowers on the floor or cloths protecting the tables. Diners come in and they’re talking to us all night. They’re asking questions and interacting with us. It’s a big part of the restaurant. It’s really informed me a lot – not just about L.A. diners – but diners in general. I’ve never interacted with diners, so to see how people react to things about how they want to be engaged or don’t want to be engaged is very informative. Part of me wanted to put this out in the mountains, have a couple rooms and be able to forage. Part of me wanted this almost Alinea like in the middle of a neighborhood where there’s just a building that’s unmarked and you walk in and it’s this crazy place. Because I’m still torn about it, I realize that I didn’t really know what I wanted this restaurant to be.

JL: Do you have a map for the next stage of Dialogue?

DB: We’re getting there. This will be the hardest place to find a new space because right now I have two really good ideas for it, and I don’t know which idea is right. In the mountains with a couple rooms, something like SingleThread, would be very cool. In SingleThread, you have people going to Sonoma. Whether the restaurant is there or not, they’re still going there. If I put this in Topanga Canyon, who’s going up to Topanga Canyon? Other than for a restaurant or people driving from PCH to the Valley, there has to be something else to draw people in. This still has some time in this space to figure out what it wants to be.

JL: You have a clear vision for the French restaurant as far as when and where?

DB: We know the neighborhood. Everything we do now is going to be on the Westside. We’ve pulled completely out of downtown. One thing I realized with downtown is that everybody from out of town is going there right now. A dozen chefs will be open in the next year and a half. I’m sure their mindset was very similar to mine. Their mindset is likely, “This aesthetically looks similar to what I know, so I’m going to make it what I know and I’m going to move my thing there.”

JL: This looks like a city.

DB: Yeah, in my head, I could have picked up Next and set it there and it would have made sense. But now that I’ve lived here long enough, it doesn’t make sense. It was kind of a naïve opinion for me to think that, but whenever you move somewhere new, you immediately gravitate toward what is familiar – “where is my new X”. You’re not always trying to assess what is there as much as trying to replace what you had. As I started to understand the city more – and we’ve had [Dialogue] for nine months – my wife and I moved closer to the restaurant, so now I’m more a part of this neighborhood and understanding it more. I feel like our personality in what we want and what we’re liking leads us to stay in this area. I want everything to be nearby so I can be a part of all of it. Even if it’s your restaurant and we’re just partners with you, I still want to be able to drop in and say hi and see how you’re doing and be there to support. We want to keep everything nearby and plant our flag in one area.

JL: What’s the role of fine dining at this point, and how has that changed since you joined fine dining?

DB: Tru was probably the most traditional fine dining restaurant I have, and probably will, ever work at. Matching stacked plates. Everyone wore a full suit. White gloves for the cheese cart. Everyone moved clockwise around the table and served with the same hand and cleared with the other hand. Fine dining was ritual and routine and, “We can be more precise and exact than anyone.” The evolution of fine dining moves away from the robotic, mechanical, this is exactly the best thing you can do, to more being about personality and refinement and anticipating guests’ needs. Obviously the food has to be at a certain caliber, but at that point, I want you to be comfortable. I want you to smile the minute you walk in, and I want to make sure you smile when you leave. I want you to never have to ask for a thing. Before you have a chance to ask for water, it’s there. Fine dining is about applying standard and adhering to it. The guest’s needs should be anticipated. Aside from that… it’s a loose framework.

JL: You’re on board with the open kitchen at this point, I imagine.

DB: It’s great. At Next and Alinea, it was open enough where everyone could see in there, but the guests weren’t ever a part of the kitchen experience. They could just see in or occasionally get a tour. It gets a little weird sometimes. Sometimes you look up and you’re not ready for it, there’s a guest sitting there like this [mimics holding a phone] when you’re describing something. That gets a little weird to have them putting a camera right in your face, but for the most part, it’s been an amazing experience.

JL: That can be invasive.

DB: It’s more like we’re here to have a conversation. If you’re at your friend’s house and you’re talking, would you film them like that? There are some things I’m still getting used to and figuring out whether I like or not. It’s always awkward. You try and not become part of the guest’s conversation if it doesn’t include you. Some people talk about weird things and they talk very loudly, especially when they’re drunk, they may try to include you in the conversation. Sometimes a guest doesn’t get a course, like our oyster leaf course that is intentionally challenging, but I would say 70% of the guests really get it. The other 30% don’t. Most of the time, the 30% that don’t pick up the leaf, set it aside and eat what’s under it. You don’t want to interrupt and offer too many instructions, but at the same time, if you don’t offer instruction, they miss out on the point of the course. Open kitchen dynamic’s strange, but it really gives you the opportunity to craft a guest’s experience in a space where there’s not much guest experience to craft.

In most restaurants, there are a lot of opportunities to control the experience: you have the distance from where they valet or park to the front door of the restaurant; from the front door of the restaurant to the host stand.;from the host stand to the table; and all of the time at the table with the servers. Some restaurants, you can control the experience after. If we’re at The French Laundry, I can control where you sit before you come in, if you want Champagne before, you can spend time outside in the garden. We can give you a tour of the farm. You can do whatever you want with the guest experience there.

Vespertine, you can go on the roof. You’re greeted in the kitchen first. You have the dining room. You have the outdoor area. You have the indoor area. There’s so much to do with the guest experience that’s not just the table. For us here, we only have the table. If you walk out the door here to go to the bathroom [into Gallery Food Hall], you smell waffle cones. You might get run into by a little kid with a balloon. For us, open kitchen is at least a way to offer a unique guest experience that we couldn’t otherwise.