The industry trend watchers' new motto: 'this restaurant is great. Don't tell a soul'

Nation's Restaurant News, August 15, 2005 by Peter Romeo

Put down the Zagat guide, snap off The Food Channel and back away from that stack of restaurant reviews. Bunky, we need to talk.

Everyone appreciates the current obsession with finding new restaurant adventures. If aliens landed tonight, they'd probably race through the take-us-to-your-leader rap to get a recommendation on where to eat. And the earthlings would counter with a query about what places they absolutely have to try the next time they're on Planet Zarmuck. Sport-dining is the new passion, akin to what sports or politics might have been for earlier generations. For twenty- or thirtysomethings it borders on the religious.

You've done a great job responding to that hunger for novelty. Five years ago who'd have thought flavored foam would be an ingredient of the moment? Or that some fine-dining recipes--the batch calling for liquid nitrogen, for instance--would sound more like a chemistry experiment than something from a kitchen?

And those are just the food frontiers. We now have restaurants where you can nosh in bed, play virtual-reality games, dine blindfolded to accent the senses, be served solely by transvestites, have the specialty presented on a garbage can lid or ask that more meat be sawed tableside from Fred Flintstone-sized skewers. Las Vegas has nothing on the business.

But you're a few hairs short of a Mohawk with the stabs at outlandishness recently taken along the coasts. Those efforts are fostering a craze that makes flagpole sitting seem well-reasoned and intelligent. How could you be on solid ground with a movement that might as well be slugged, Dude, Where's Your Restaurant?

In New York and cities on the Left Coast, the coolest thing right now is to open a restaurant that you don't announce in a location you don't reveal, accessible by secret means, with an identity that guests are not supposed to reveal to anyone else. If all goes as planned, Hogwarts would have more drop-in visitors. The whole idea is that the establishment is unknown to anyone but those really, really in the know--a speakeasy where swordfish could be the special, not the password.

The poster concept is a newcomer to New York whose identity I won't reveal, in deference to its business strategy. To frequent it you have to know what place serves as its front. Here's a hint: It sells sandwiches and other foods--but only to-go--and there are probably thousands of similar formats in New York. What the others don't have is a customer passageway behind a door marked Employees Only. If you open the door and descend a stairway, you come to a hostess. Either she invites you into the place right then, or she gives you a phone number that you can call for a subsequent reservation.

It's not the only underground outpost in New York--or, perhaps we should say, not the only one that's been detected. Brooklyn, a magnet in recent years for entrepreneurs seeking lower rents and a more adventurous clientele, has become known for its secret restaurants. Coach Peaches is described in its ample press coverage as a "private dining club," but it sounds more like the proprietor's apartment in a section of the borough called Fort Greene. The club designation means the owner-chef can let in whomever he wants and offer them whatever strikes his fancy.

A similar latitude, according to press reports, is exhibited by Monkey Town, a loft offering food and performance art in an area called Williamsburg, home to large populations of Hasidim and avant-garde artists.

Lest you think this is one of those bizarre New York fashion flashes like break dancing or punk rock, consider that similar outlets also have been discovered in California's Bay Area. Similarly, Vancouver magazine ran a story about underground places being opened in its city by chefs who wanted to scale down the cost of their business and more rigidly control the variables, such as how many covers they serve.

It's easy to understand the marketing appeal of such a place. It offers the ultimate in elitism, where every customer is given the not-so-subtle message that they're extraordinary, just by virtue of being there. It also bestows the sort of bragging rights you don't get from merely landing a reservation at the hottest place in town. That is a privilege for which patrons will vie and, presumably, pay accordingly.

But it's easy to see the tragic flaw in the strategy. In a business where volume is the objective, the approach too readily fulfills the sage observation of the oft-beaned philosopher Yogi Berra: No one eats there anymore because it's too popular. The hideaways' success would undercut their sharpest point of distinction. If they achieve the secrecy and exclusivity they want, few patronize it. And if they catch on, the secret's out, and they're just another restaurant, though in a location you can't find.

As a novelty, the idea is unsurpassed. But as a business plan? I've got reservations. And I didn't even need a secret number to get 'em.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors and management at Nation's Restaurant News.