Chef Romano toasts purveyors as Union Square Cafe turns 20

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 10, 2005 by Caroline Perkins

It takes a community of distributors to keep the Union Square Cafe in New York City supplied with the products that executive chef Michael Romano needs to create the dining experience that has kept the restaurant at the top of the ratings for years.

This month, Union Square is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It opened in 1985 as restaurateur Danny Meyer's flagship operation. At that time Romano, returned from an illustrious career in Europe, was chef de cuisine at La Caravelle, where he later became the first American to hold the position of chef. Romano joined the Union Square Cafe in 1988 and shortly thereafter The New York Times awarded it three stars. Romano became Meyer's partner in the Union Square Hospitality Group in 1993, and he is founding partner of Tabla and Blue Smoke, two of the group's other restaurants, as well as the two new cafes in the Museum of Modern Art.

In the 17 years that you've been at Union Square Cafe, you must have built up long-term relationships with your distributors. What do you value in these relationships?

Some of my purveyors--we don't call them distributors--have been with me since [the] La Caravelle days. The relationships are built on trust. It's not about the cheapest price, it's about providing quality products consistently. Also, we need them to respect our hours and delivery times. In return we pride ourselves on paying them promptly.

Do you have a number of specialty purveyors that you work with?

Yes. For instance, D'Artagnon in New Jersey supplies us with specialty meats, game and so forth. I've been working with them for 20 years. We have a number offish suppliers. We have several purveyors in every category. We also buy produce from several farmers at the Union Square Green Market. We let them know our needs ahead of time so they won't sell all their supplies to retail customers.

Isn't it confusing to buy from so many purveyors?

It is more work, but we get better products that way. We are not tied to one company.

What is the biggest challenge?

The challenge is to get purveyors to understand the quality we're looking for. Sometimes they slip, but mostly we do not have any problems.

It sounds like, with such long-term relationships, any problems would have been worked out over time.

We really think of our connection with purveyors as a partnership rather than as an adversarial relationship. The management team went on a retreat as the Hospitality Group started to grow. We had just opened Gramercy Tavern and we wanted to identify what's important to us. We came up with five tenets. One is taking care of our purveyors, and that means establishing good relationships with them. We base those relationships on integrity, trust, respect and a willingness to work on pricing.