Barack Obama came up to me at a party a couple of years ago,” says Chicago restaurateur Rich Melman, “and said, ‘Hey, I’ve enjoyed your restaurants’.” The Obamas have celebrated special occasions (anniversaries, birthdays, that victory thing) at Spiaggia, which is not one of Melman’s places, and have expressed a fondness for Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo—but no serious Chicago restaurantgoer can avoid Melman’s establishments for long. “One place of ours he used to go to a lot was Petterino’s, in the theatre district,” says Melman, “which is sort of our Sardi’s. We have caricatures of customers on the walls, and we did one of him. He got a big kick out of it and asked for a copy to give to his wife.”
Rumor has it Obama also likes the burgers and ribs at Grunts, meaning R. J. Grunts, across the street from the Lincoln Park Zoo, the first restaurant Melman opened—and it was there that I sat down with Melman not long ago to find out more about how he achieved his own kind of executive prominence. “This is a nothing little place,” he says as we settle in. “It certainly doesn’t look like anything revolutionary. But thirty-seven years ago, it was an absolute breakthrough.” It was also the progenitor of what is quite possibly the most diverse and remarkable restaurant empire in America today. Melman—who looks at least a decade younger than his 66 years, an effect accentuated by his jeans and sneakers and his almost boyish enthusiasm—was a baseball-loving college dropout with vague entrepreneurial tendencies when he opened Grunts in 1971, in partnership with a real-estate agent and haberdasher named Jerry Orzoff. He wasn’t exactly a restaurant novice, as he explains over lunch—a Mr. Chicken sandwich (“sort of a chicken French dip”) and an exceptionally juicy cheeseburger. He started working in his family’s deli business when he was 14. “Restaurants were really all I knew,” he tells me. “Sometimes I think people who are brighter than me have a disadvantage because they can do so many different things. I wasn’t that smart, so I had to focus.”
Orzoff, who died in 1981, helped keep Melman on track. “When people asked Jerry what he did in the company, he’d say, ‘Rich takes care of the restaurants, and I take care of Rich.’ We had a pretty amazing relationship.”
The two opened R. J. Grunts—the name marries their first initials with a word that was once described as representing “the noise made by a girlfriend of Jerry’s when she ate”—with an initial investment of $17,000. The look was (and remains) funky: walls of stucco and unfinished wood, mismatched furniture, a miscellany of art on the walls, hanging plants. It was very much a restaurant of its time. “I have a copy of our first menu,” says Melman, “and we had an organic meal of the day, a macrobiotic meal of the day. People wrote political messages on the checks. I probably shouldn’t say this, but we had a menu after nine p.m. designed for stoners.” Grunts also played music that “was from Woodstock, not the elevator music you had in most restaurants,” and let servers wear street clothes instead of uniforms.
Then there was the salad bar. “People have written that we invented the salad bar,” says Melman, “but that’s not true. What we did was redefine it. Instead of just a few kinds of greens and some dressings, we put up forty or fifty items. I knew how to make potato salad, coleslaw, egg salad, chopped liver, all those things, from my parents’ deli, and we added them. I even put caviar on the salad bar—the kind that cost five bucks for a big jar.”
Before long, the Grunts format was being widely copied in Chicago and elsewhere. “When we started making money and I started thinking about opening a second place,” says Melman, “I decided that I had to do something different. Also, I don’t like to travel very much, and I figured if I wanted to stay around Chicago, I couldn’t keep opening the same place over and over.” In 1973, he and Orzoff launched Fritz That’s It!, in suburban Evanston, which Melman calls “a step up” from Grunts, followed by the Great Gritzbe’s Flying Food Show, back in Chicago. Melman’s then girlfriend, Martha Whittemore—later to become his wife—suggested that he call his fledgling company Lettuce Entertain You, in honor of the salad bar at Grunts. In the same punning spirit, Melman gave his next two places the groan-inducing monikers Jonathan Livingston Seafood and Lawrence of Oregano. “One thing I regret today,” he says, “is the silly names, because people didn’t take us seriously.”
That was certainly the case when he tried to acquire his first dress-up restaurant, the venerable Pump Room, in the historic Ambassador East hotel, on Chicago’s Gold Coast. “I left a message for the owner, explaining who I was and asking if he’d be interested in selling,” Melman recalls, “and he never called me back.”
About a year and a half later, though, the place came on the market, and Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises—now widely known as LEYE—snagged it. “The first night I ever ate in the Pump Room,” he confesses, “was the night I bought it.”
The restaurant lost $150,000 during Melman’s first year. To help turn it around, he brought in a top-flight chef, Spanish-born, French-trained Gabino Sotelino, who had been cooking nearby at the exquisite Le Perroquet. “I told Gabino that if he did a great job at the Pump Room, I’d help him with his dream restaurant. He did, and I did.” Sotelino’s establishment was Ambria, which opened in 1980 and remained one of Chicago’s fine-dining stars until it closed in 2007 as Sotelino became increasingly involved in other LEYE projects. (The company ran the Pump Room for 22 years before losing the lease.)
“Little by little,” says Melman, “I realized that while this business is first of all about good food and good service, you also have to make money. Otherwise, you can’t take care of your people.” (LEYE doesn’t release financial information, but in 2004, Chicago magazine estimated its 2003 revenues at $200 million.) LEYE, which now has around 6,000 employees nationwide, shows up regularly on “best to work for” lists.
“It sounds corny,” says Chris Meers, one of 55 LEYE partners Melman has brought on over the years, “but there really is a family atmosphere at the company. Who else provides 401(k)s for their dishwashers?”
Melman estimates that he has opened more than 150 restaurants over the years. Today, the LEYE portfolio includes 80 establishments in 11 states, with five or six more in the works. (Melman keeps a bulging idea file, he says, adding, “I’m always looking for holes in the marketplace and for things we can do differently or better or both.” On the other hand, he says, “I’ve never had a long-range plan. My partners do, and I agree to it … as long as we can alter it every week.”)
What makes the company an anomaly in the multiunit food-service business is not just the consistent quality of its many operations but also their sheer stylistic breadth, from all-American to exotic, food stand to dining palace—and from marketable concepts like Corner Bakery and Maggiano’s Little Italy (both sold off to massive Brinker International) to rarefied gastronomic shrines like Everest and Tru.
Melman tastes new food constantly. For instance, before he opened his sophisticated seafood restaurant L2O, on the site of the old Ambria, last May, he’d frequently sit in a private room at Tru and sample dishes created by the new establishment’s chef—Laurent Gras, formerly of Peacock Alley, in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and Fifth Floor, in San Francisco.
Tastings of a different kind go on daily, informally, in the test kitchen at the LEYE offices in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, north of downtown. When Melman and I walk in unannounced one morning, there are three chefs laboring. One is tinkering with muffins for the restaurant Foodlife. Another is developing turkey jerky to be served at a forthcoming restaurant built around wine-friendly food. A third is, as he puts it, “working on classic salads in a new way.”
“I’m always out there looking for talent,” says Melman, “and when we bring somebody on, we generally put them in the test kitchen first. People are always learning from each other. Sometimes in the test kitchen, one and one makes three.”
We taste a variation on the classic Caesar salad—a bed of shredded romaine with traditional Caesar dressing—topped with small romaine hearts in Caesar vinaigrette. We taste a summery salad of heirloom tomatoes with tiny spheres of mozzarella and bits of celery, avocado, and radish, in a tomato-water vinaigrette. We taste another salad of shaved fennel, carrots, and radish with butter lettuce and a light white-wine vinaigrette. Melman gets excited. “I love these dressings,” he says. “Can we bottle them? I love this.”
As we leave the test kitchen, he is positively glowing. “Sometimes,” he says, “I find it hard to believe that I actually get paid for doing this.”
Richard Melman’s formula for success? There simply is no formula
Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises never did have to revert to endless versions of the same winning restaurant. Here’s a sampling of the company’s eclectic offerings in Chicago alone: Nacional 27 is a festive, hard-edged, rackety place featuring Modern Latin cuisine, including nontraditional ceviches, potentially addictive little barbecued-lamb tacos, and market specials for both food and drink. Diners have a choice at Shaw’s Crab House—bright, clamorous oyster bar or woody old-style dining room. Crab and oysters appear in numerous guises, and the fresh seasonal fish has just enough done to it to make it interesting. There’s nothing flashy about Osteria Via Stato. The food is simple and authoritative—like a first-rate Caesar salad, pappardelle with excellent ragù, a good selection of salumi and cheeses, and an unusual whitefish milanese. Mon Ami Gabi is a picture-postcard French bistro as conceived by Gabino Sotelino. (It’s one of five such establishments, including one in Las Vegas.) The space is cozy, with a nice buzz, and the food—pâtés, salads, coquilles St.-Jacques, steak frites 11 ways—is straightforward. “Casual Asian” doesn’t sound like an especially promising concept, but Big Bowl, one of eight nationwide outposts, was developed in collaboration with Asian-food authority Bruce Cost—and it shows. The focal point here is a choose-your-ingredients stir-fry bar, but you can also find great dumplings, melt-in-your-mouth saté, perfect fried calamari, and excellent barbecued pork on top of glistening jasmine rice. Wow Bao is another Cost project (and proof that silly names haven’t been banished entirely from LEYE). The specialty? Bao (Chinese steamed buns) with fillings that are mostly nontraditional (teriyaki chicken, Thai curry chicken, and spicy Mongolian beef). At Foodlife, in the Water Tower Place complex, diners get a “credit card” upon entering and are turned loose to pillage 13 kiosks devoted to soup, pasta, pizza, stir fries, noodles, Mexican dishes, and more. (You pay your check on the way out.) Tru is the preserve of chefs Gale Gand and Rick Tramonto. Here, you’ll find a sleek, modern dining room full of art, serious wines, and serious service. While there’s obviously a skilled hand in the kitchen (executive chef Tim Graham handles day-to-day duties), restraint is a foreign concept: Foams and emulsions abound; rhubarb is made into paper; and there’s licorice and kumquat with the suckling pig. Melman calls Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab “probably the best everyday restaurant I’ve ever done.” Loosely related to (and inspired by) Joe’s Stone Crab of Miami Beach, this bustling, brassy place boasts a celebrity clientele and a bar-and-grill soul. Naturally, the menu features sweet stone-crab claws, as well as oysters Rockefeller, bone-in filet mignon, and crisp hash browns so good other restaurants ought to take them off their menus. —C.A.
For information about Lettuce Entertain You restaurants not mentioned here, visit leye.com.