SEDUCTION of STEPHAN PYLES, The

D Magazine, Mar 01, 2001 by Malouf, Mary Brown

WOLFGANG PUCK DID IT. SO DID EMERIL LAGASSE AND MARK MILLER. SO WHY shouldn't Stephan Pyles do it, too?

The latter day chef's ultimate dream is not Michelin stars but multiple units. Preferably including ones in Las Vegas and Orlando.

It's not an impossible dream. Many chefs, elevated to star status, have delegated the actual cooking to faceless assistants so they can take on the task of branding and personality. The successful chef is squeezed between the twin temptations of creative control and capitalism.

The money is in expansion, but expansion requires a corporate engine to make it happen. So when Stephan Pyles announced he was selling his hip hot spot, Star Canyon, to Carlson Restaurants Worldwide,. who could be surprised?

On the other hand, who could be surprised when, halfway through the contract, Stephan Pyles and his Star Canyon cohorts walked out on the deal of a lifetime?

Pyles sold Star Canyon and his AquaKnox seafood restaurant to Dallas-based Carlson in 1998. That sale created Star Concepts, part of the emerging brands division of Carlson, the company that owns, among other things, T.G.I. Friday's and pulls in more than S 1.6 billion in systemwide revenues.

The arrangement between Carlson and Pyles was one of the first between a celebrity chef and a chain restaurant company. As Stephen Spence, restaurant analyst at Southwest Securities, told the Morning News at the time, "This is a fairly atypical arrangement. Typically, when you have a large restaurant company like Carlson, the concepts aren't headed by a chef like Stephan Pyles. The restaurants you've heard of, but you've never heard of a chef that goes along with them."

But Wally Doolin, Carlson's president and CEO, has been a Star Canyon fan since the Oak Lawn restaurant opened. And, as he says of himself, "I'm either really smart or really dumb." It was his crazy idea to partner with Pyles and put Carlson in the celebrity-chef business. To run the new emerging brands division, he lured Royce Ring to Dallas from Chicago, where he'd been with Restaurant Development Group, proprietors of Mambo, Nick and Tony's, and Grappa, among other highly brandable fine restaurants - just like Star Canyon.

Pyles' restaurant has always had its own identity and stood on its own as a destination. The New Texas menu is served in a cool cowboy decor. And the food, though certainly creative and upscale, has never been overly glamorous. The hit dish remains the bone-in cowboy rib-eye with pinto bean-wild mushroom ragout and red chile onion rings. That's fancy food anyone could understand.

Star Canyon has the usual exposed kitchen so diners can view the cooking production, but they seldom saw Pyles on the line. Long before the deal with Carlson, Pyles had moved out of the Star Canyon kitchen into the office, where he concentrated on his books, tours, cooking shows, and the new upscale seafood emporium he and Cox had decided to open, AquaKnox. The motivation was, frankly, money.

"At that time, we were not making loads of money," says Michael Cox, Pyles' off-and-on partner since the Routh Street Cafe days. "But we were making our investors happy. We were the toast of the town. How do you build on that? We had a lot of intellectual resources and experience at Star Canyon-more than enough for one restaurant. We felt we could leverage two or three more locations without losing quality."

But, Cox insisted, all the locations had to be within their comfort zone, south of Mockingbird Lane and north of downtown, between North Central Expressway and the Tollway. If they kept their properties within those parameters, Cox figured the principals could actually be on each property every night. He even clocked the drive times between proposed locations. To Cox and Pyles, the restaurant business has always been a personal endeavor. Their goal-and their mistake-was believing they could maintain the personal touch in a corporate structure.

Carlson's first idea, for instance, was to replicate Star Canyon in Fort Worth, North Dallas, and Houston. Pyles and Cox objected, saying that sister restaurants in Fort Worth or North Dallas would cannibalize the original. Houston, they maintained, was not ready for Star Canyon because of the city's built-in bias against Dallas imports. Instead, an Austin Star Canyon opened in January in the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, "This is the only place in Texas it seemed like it would work - partly because of the special location," says Cox. "Still, it's all an experiment."

Cox sounds tense when he talks about Carlson. "Lots of people think Carlson ruined Star Canyon and AquaKnox," says Cox. "I wouldn't say that." But the tension between creative control and corporate consistency became acute. "To a certain extent, consistency quells creativity," reflects Pyles, in the extremely cautious manner he has when discussing his partnership with Carlson.

"The corporate structure has its place in society," Pyles adds. "In fact, I wonder if anyone can really understand the United States until you've worked in a big company. But that's not me. I tried really hard to be part of the team, but what I learned from this venture is that I really need to stick to the basics - a kitchen, a dining room, and a chef. At one point I felt like I'd lost my soul. What I've done before has been all about me. This was very impersonal." In Cox and Pyles' view, the business side and creative control collided, and not unexpectedly. Royce Ring would beg to differ.