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The meez Podcast
Josh Sharkey (Entrepreneur, professional chef, and founder/CEO of meez, the culinaryOS for food professionals) interviews world class entrepreneurs in the food space that are shifting the paradigm of how we innovate and operate in our industry.
The meez Podcast
Eric and Bruce Bromberg of Blue Ribbon Restaurants
#90. On this episode of The meez Podcast, host Josh Sharkey sits down with Eric and Bruce Bromberg of Blue Ribbon Restaurants.
For over 30 years, Eric and Bruce Bromberg have been redefining what it means to offer a neighborhood dining experience. They’ve expanded from their original SoHo location to culinary hotspots in New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and Nashville.
In this episode, the Bromberg brothers share the secrets behind their enduring success: creating spaces without boundaries, building a team that feels like family, and staying inspired by the neighborhoods they serve. They reflect on how they’ve grown a restaurant group where 12 of the original 15 employees are still key contributors—and what it takes to foster that kind of loyalty and passion in a notoriously tough industry.
Where to find Blue Ribbon Restaurants:
Where to find Eric Bromberg:
Where to find Bruce Bromberg
Where to find host Josh Sharkey:
In this episode, we cover:
(01:27): A valuable piece of advice Josh received from Bruce and Eric
(15:18): How Eric and Bruce deal with mistakes
(21:59): The biggest difference in Blue Ribbon today vs. when it began
(24:41): The excitement of Blue Ribbon staying open late
(32:54): How did the sushi restaurant begin?
(52:55): Takeaways Bruce and Eric received from opening their restaurants
(1:06:41): Does Blue Ribbon mean the same thing to Eric & Bruce as it did in the beginning?
(1:12:51): What's next for the Bromberg brothers?
[00:00:00] Bruce Bromberg:
You know, if people like see the kitchen or something and they're like, Oh my God, it's, or they watch the bear or they watch the menu, whatever these shows are. And they're just like, it's so stressful. And Oh my God, like, how do you deal? And I'm like, that is the calmest place in the world. Right? I mean, that is honestly the kitchen Saturday night, busiest frigging line. Board is full. That is, I think the calmest and most in control maybe is the right word. That we can feel
[00:00:33] Josh Sharkey:
You are listening to season two of The meez Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of meez, a culinary operating system for food professionals on the show looking to talk to high performers in the food business.
[00:00:45]
Everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate and operate. And how they consistently execute at a high level, day after day. And I would really love it if you could drop us a 5 star review. Anywhere that you listen to your podcast. That could be Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google.
[00:01:05]
I'm not picky. Anywhere works. But I really appreciate the support. And as always, I hope you enjoy the show. Yeah, well welcome to the show. Yeah Do you guys remember when you did that that project in Vermont? Yeah, and I don't remember it was called but uh, it was Woodstock Inn. The Woodstock Inn. That's right.
[00:01:27]
Yeah You know sometimes just things stick with you and I was I spent like a week with with you guys I think Dave was with you all at the time as well. Yeah, and um, I vividly remember asking you, somehow we got into a conversation, Eric, and you gave me this sort of lesson about building businesses, that you have to set people up for success.
[00:01:46]
And I think the context was like, some cook was screwing up, or we were talking about a cook screwing up, and it was probably that there was some complexity there. And you were drilling this like, this idea of like, you got to make things simple for people so that they can actually be successful. And I don't know why, but it was a light bulb for me because I just.
[00:02:05]
You know, coming up in Kitchens in New York, it's like, how hard can the station be? And can you add more, can you add more steps? And, and how difficult can you make these pickups? And it seems like somehow you had an insight early on that that's not the right way to go. And I'm curious when that came about, like, how did you, how did you have that insight?
Because it's clearly how Blue Ribbon operates today.
[00:02:27] Eric Bromberg:
I think ultimately it starts with learning lessons from watching our dad build a business. As we were kids, he was a lawyer, but he started a law firm and built it into one of the biggest law firms in New Jersey. And so while he was doing that, he was kind of going that same attitude and that same approach that you described.
[00:02:57]
of let's make this as complicated and difficult and hard for everybody as possible and be the best but people burned out people fried and a whole bunch of like critical people to his partnership left at one point, and that really stuck with us that, you know, you can make one restaurant and act like a fool to make company and business, which is what we wanted to do from day one.
[00:03:36]
I mean, we wanted to do it from like, when we were teenagers, we wanted to make as many restaurants as possible. and have this food company that, you know, displace Hellman's and Heinz and every other thing there is, we're like, we're coming for you. But the reality was, unless you can set up each job so that the people you're hiring can do it.
[00:04:06]
You're stuck in your kitchen. You're stuck in your restaurant. And not that being stuck in a restaurant is a bad thing if you want one restaurant. But if you want to have a second restaurant, and you want to have a third restaurant, and you want to have a twenty fifth restaurant, and you don't want to be miserable every day going in to see what people are doing wrong, you have to set up systems that are handleable and manageable.
[00:04:33]
By the people that you're dealing with, you can't have this sort of dream approach that you have the ultimate cook in every position who is striving for excellence and can kick ass every station. Because a lot of times in circumstances, guys like that don't stay with you. Cause they're capable of doing much more and being, you know, more productive. Wanting to learn more.
[00:05:04]
They want to make progress. They want to get to the next restaurant. They want to do that. And for us, it was like, let's take whoever we can coming in as dishwashers and teach them to be a cook, teach them our approach to cooking, our approach to how you handle your station, the steps you take, the motions you take, how you, you know, essentially how you execute every step.
[00:05:32]
And if we can actually teach that, then we have the ability to go on and do a second restaurant. Because our objective has always been, let's try and teach the second wave to be better than the first wave. Be stronger, stronger at the stations to kind of You know, we adjust things here and there to, to make it work for who we got, but essentially the dream for us has always been the team together as long as possible.
[00:06:04]
Keep the group together. If you got to work for 18 hours a day, you may as well be doing it with people you like and not, you know, we've not in a circumstance where you're like, Oh my God, I can't wait to get out of here. And, you know, we've all been in restaurants that have toxic situations and. In France, we, uh, kind of watched and were part of, you know, kind of abusive.
[00:06:32]
Uh, as I think it's the safe word environments where, where it was just, you know, treacherous and people were crying and it was just bad frigging news. And when we started, we're like, let's do something different. Let's really make this about setting up circumstances where everyone we hire can be proud of the day it's work they put it.
[00:07:01]
And by the end of the day. They feel accomplished instead of, you know, emasculated. If we can kind of put ourselves in a situation where people are naturally comfortable at their job and feeling proud of themselves, then we have stability. And then those who excel, we can open a new restaurant and have a spot for them.
[00:07:24]
Cause otherwise they're, you know, after a couple months, years, whatever it may be, they're going to look for something else. Beyond what you can pay them, beyond what you, you know, the monotony of working in a single location for a long time. So it's given us the flexibility, I think, to expand in the rate that we have and to maintain consistency, which is really been our main focus from day one.
[00:07:54] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, and it's not a novel idea, but it's pretty novel in that it when you have good food as well and Also, I think for people that listen that might not know Blue Ribbon I mean you've been around for almost three decades So it clearly it works But you know that's not necessarily an approach that we hear from restaurants where it's also really good food especially when you started back to the day because usually there's like an arc for when a chef opens restaurants is like, okay, I'm just going to be as wild as I can so that people think that this is amazing and it will be impossible to execute, but we're just going to like ride this tightrope and then over time, they kind of mellow out and, you know, find, find a groove and sort of, you know, become less narcissistic, right, where it's not as much about them, but you guys didn't have that arc.
[00:08:43] Eric Bromberg:
Yeah, the thing that really clicked for me was when Mondrian closed. Yeah. And they'd just gotten three stars. It was like, this is, you know, what we all strive for. This is what everybody wants to do. Get, get three stars in the times and accomplish this great feat. And then I was like, well, wait a minute.
[00:09:05]
They did that and they're freaking close. So what is it actually that you're trying to do? And at that point. You know, the blend between business and culinary approach kind of came through us and synthesized back out into what Blue Ribbon became.
[00:09:25] Bruce Bromberg:
And I think, you know, I came in, I went to cooking school five years after Eric. Eric had been in New York for a number of years cooking. And I came back from, you know, straight from like working at Pierre Garnier and Cordon Bleu and all these, you know, fancy places. And I think initially, you know, my head was more where you just described. I was like, I got these dishes. I've been thinking about them for years.
[00:09:54]
This is what we're making and blah, blah, blah. And I remember like making my first special, you know, where Eric was like, all right, you know, make, make something. I made a dish and it was great, you know, it was, I forget exactly, but some veal chop or this or that, and there was, or I was like rolling out pastry dough to put rolling out dough during service and folding, yeah.
[00:10:19]
Yeah, like the last turn on puff pastry or something, so it was just perfect. And I remember like, you know, Eric, Eric said to me before service, like, okay, this is great. It's a beautiful dish. You know, how's it going to be when there's four on the board and you're making the seventh one? And, and basically it was crash and burn and, you know, over, I still probably didn't learn after that first one, but, you know, it was kind of errors.
[00:10:48]
Kind of focus on the fact that us as managers, as much as anything were ultimately the people responsible. And I think that's one thing that I think Eric, you know, taught the entire blue ribbon, you know, team and the hierarchy of the team was that. It, the onus really falls on the chef, the floor manager, the GM.
[00:11:18]
These are the people ultimately who are responsible. And what blows me away is when we move to a new city or we hire new chefs and like Eric said, we used to just hire, you know, the dishwasher, the prep cook, then they became the salad guy, then they, you know, work saute for a little bit, then, you know, they got to the grill and that's the blue ribbon model for 32 years.
[00:11:41]
It hasn't been possible when you go to a new city, you know, and you're 3,000 miles away. Everyone from sous chefs to chefs just have this. This thought and mentality that I'm going to test everyone around me, and I'm going to test the line cooks. I'm going to test the prep cooks. They need to, you know, pay their dues.
[00:12:06]
They need to be beaten down. They need to fail. They need to, you know, do all these things. And then the sous chef will like let you know all the mistakes the line cook made and why service was a disaster. And Eric and I are sitting like, are you freaking kidding me? Like, this is your job. You are the one responsible.
[00:12:28]
You are in charge, not these guys. So I think that's the whole kind of. You know, putting the onus on the managers. And that's when I started to understand that yes, I could make this amazing dish, but it threw the entire kitchen into a tailspin and made it so service was impossible and we couldn't succeed.
[00:12:53]
So that was my fault. That wasn't anyone else's fault. So yeah, I think we've always been in, it is up to us to create that environment. And like Eric said, we came from a bunch of really bad environments. We came from, from a couple of great ones too, where, you know, I worked in the same restaurant called Le Recamier in Paris that where Eric worked years before me.
[00:13:17]
The greatest experience of, I think, both of our lives. And that's also where we learned about responsibility. Of the chef, because the chef controlled that kitchen in an extraordinary way. Then you came into, you know, New York and you would see these other restaurants where everyone would just want to quit and leave.
[00:13:40]
And I think air worked in some tough environments in New York as well. And when we were sitting there writing, you know, building Blue Ribbon and then writing the menu, our focus wasn't really what food we were making. It was what environment we were creating, and that was, you know, 1991 into 1992, uh, where we were just like, let's create a place where people can be successful every day.
[00:14:06]
And yeah, sure, there's issues, things don't always go perfectly, but it was important that the dishwasher could handle the dish pit, and the prep guys could finish the prep list. And we didn't come down on everyone when they didn't do it. It was our fault because we hadn't thought through all the variables that could have tripped them up. And that's where that onus fell back on ownership or whoever was in charge.
[00:14:33] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. I mean, that really, it really stuck with me. I think I, I, I don't know, again, in a very short time sort of absorbed a lot of how, how you all approach that. And to this day, you know, I have this, I have this philosophy of everything's my fault basically as a leader.
[00:14:49]
Either I created the wrong. You know, I didn't train them well enough. I did not nurture them the way they need to be nurtured or I, or I hired the wrong person, which is the worst one, which hopefully doesn't happen as much. But you know, it's funny when you hear a manager complaining about like the team is not doing well and you're like, you realize that that's you, you, that you're complaining about, but it's tough.
[00:15:10]
How do you deal with mistakes? Like, how do you handle, like maybe just at the leadership level, how do you guys handle when someone makes a mistake?
[00:15:18] Eric Bromberg:
Kind of depends what level of mistake. Generally, we're really kind, try and let the, depending upon what it is, if it's a decision during service, that was the wrong decision, we won't push back during service as it's happening, we'll let them go through it and then we'll let kind of the night settle and then the next day, you know, a straightforward conversation, I wasn't there, couldn't see exactly the circumstances, but here's how I see it and what you should have done.
[00:15:55]
Under, you know, as opposed to what maybe you did do and what we do to combat that essentially is, and this may be, you know, kind of abstract, but from hiring somehow or another, you have to choose people who instinctively know right from wrong or will Without anybody watching, we'll want to do the right thing.
[00:16:23]
Some people just inherently will try to do the opposite of what you're asking or what they think is right and ignore what you're Yeah. How do you vet for that when you're hiring? Just talk. You know, it's so much easier when you're doing it, when we do it in New York or we do it somewhere where we have a team and we're moving that team.
[00:16:52]
When it's out of town and we're bringing in people from the top, that's difficult because you have a short sort of window, but you try and ask questions that, you kind of give a right from wrong black and white sort of circumstance. And we will never give anybody shit about a decision they made in the heat of the battle, right or wrong, as long as they followed really the simple three points of, of reference, which are reference number one, what's the best choice for the customer?
[00:17:27]
Number two, what's the best choice for the staff? And then third behind those is what's the best financial decision. And as long as that process is followed, then a decision will be made that inherently is more correct than not. It's easier to sort of readjust somebody's thinking in general terms than in specific terms.
[00:17:57] Bruce Bromberg:
I think with like general mistakes though, we we've never, I can pretty unequivocally say we have never yelled at somebody for overcooking a steak or dropping a plate, or, you know, the kind of the mistakes that take place in our business on a fairly, we're not charging someone when they make You know, they do something wrong or stuff, but there are also learning moments, right?
[00:18:25]
It's like, why did that happen? Did you, did we not follow procedure and stack things in the dish station the proper way? Are you using, you know, you're, you're new to the grill. Are you using a thermometer? Are you cooking the steak in the technique that we did? So I think we approach mistakes as learning moments and it also gives you great insight into the
[00:18:49]
capacity of who you're training. And when it's the 10th time I'm saying, here's the thermometer in the steak station, right next to you, you're still having this issue. Use the thermometer, you know? And if they're not, then you have a bigger issue, right? That's more of a, you know, guidance. Maybe that's our fault, or maybe it starts to become their fault if it's, you know, habitual and perpetual.
[00:19:14]
So, you know, I think we just deal with errors because. You know, it, it's, it's every single night. I don't care how good your restaurant is, whether you're La Bernardin or the, you know, the pita place on the corner, there's mistakes made, it just happens. And these things are inevitable. We deal with them again, as a responsibility of the chef and the leader in the kitchen.
[00:19:37]
So it's, it always comes down to, did you set them up? Have you trained them? If you're just yelling at them, you just, you just drive a wedge into that potential level of communication. And that kind of mentoring, you know, you're just driving a wedge into that. You're, you're eliminating that ability to positively mentor.
[00:19:57]
So much of what we do is about teaching. I don't think a minute goes by when I'm standing in the kitchen where it's not a teaching moment. Whether it's, you know, me peeling a carrot and trying to do it better than I've ever done it before or watching somebody else peel a carrot who's uninterested in peeling a carrot, right?
[00:20:18]
It's like, hold on, hold on, stop. You know, you're not caring about this process. You're not, you're not thinking about what you're doing. You know, your mind is somewhere else. Like, let's come back. Let's address each item as, you know, with the importance that it deserves. So. I think that's helped us a lot and that's something that we try to instill in all our younger chefs and people coming up, that there's, there's relevance in every single step, there's relevance in every movement and gesture and interaction, and you have to be aware of it, and if you're not talking about those things all the time, because you see, you see stuff happen that's not right, I often say to chefs, like, you're, you're watching a guy cook a steak completely differently than we've taught them or how we do it in this restaurant.
[00:21:08]
As soon as you don't say anything, you've accepted that, right? You've let them, you've actually taught that person that what you said three weeks ago, doesn't really matter that much, right? So I think that's a big part of those, those kinds of mistakes is as long as you're constantly guiding and communicating with your team.
[00:21:29]
Those mistakes generally aren't so massive that you have to, you know, take real disciplinary measures to get there.
[00:21:38] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. It is almost three decades now, right? It was like 27 32 years! 32 Jesus, three
[00:21:45] Bruce Bromberg:
Blue Ribbon a month ago, and Sushi29, so Oh my god. So, I mean,
[00:21:54] Eric Bromberg:
I didn't even realize I was 32 years old.
[00:21:59] Josh Sharkey:
Um, wow. Uh, I'm trying to do math here. I'm 43. What is the biggest difference today from, from when you started? Like, like something, is there anything like viscerally, like, wow, this is so different what we do today in aggregate of the whole company, you know, from when you started, you know, three decades ago.
[00:22:17] Bruce Bromberg:
I mean, I think from, from my point of view, one of the things, and it may also be, I mean, there's probably a couple of things, but, but one of the things is I think in the beginning, even when we had one, two or three restaurants. It really came down to being nice to people and making good food. And I think if we did those two things, you were there, like you had a good restaurant, you know, if those were your focuses and you achieve them and you just treated people great, you made delicious food, you gave them good service, that was, you know, 99 percent of the battle, I feel like in the last.
[00:22:57]
You know, numbers of years, their last decade, let's say, there's a lot more conversations with lawyers and accountants and financial this and social media and vying for your position. And there's just things that take you out of that kind of central focus of cooking good food and making people happy.
[00:23:22]
That's still, you know, in our world, that's still at the forefront of how we deal with our restaurants. But there's all these little things kind of pulling and nagging and tearing and, you know, Oh, you did a special. Did you get that video and did you post it and did that and did people respond? Or, you know, you posted this video and it had somebody wearing torn gloves and look terrible and take it, you know what I mean?
[00:23:45]
And then it's, you know, there's just, and there's the litigious stuff. There's like the, the industry has changed. There's the margins. You know, we used to be able to run 33 to 35 percent food costs and you were like golden. That was like, now, now if you're running 25 percent food costs, you're, you're, you're on a razor thin edge.
[00:24:06]
So a lot of these things costs and just the realities of the business. I don't know if competition is the right word, but just the, that sense of vying for something beyond word of mouth. has definitely had an impact, I would say, on the business.
[00:24:26] Josh Sharkey:
For a lot of us in New York, at least, uh, the first time we experienced Blue Ribbon was going there after work, you know, finish work and go there at two in the morning or whatever, whatever. And, uh, you know, get the oxtail and things like that. I don't even live in the city anymore now. Is that still a thing?
[00:24:41] Eric Bromberg:
Totally. I mean, since COVID, We pulled back our hours, you know, to nine o'clock during COVID. And then it went to 9:30, 10 o'clock, 11, 12. Now we're up to two o'clock. We're back out to two o'clock.
[00:24:56]
Hopefully we will get to four o'clock sometime in the future, but we are as busy as we've always been late night. Did you plan for that when you started? You know, I don't think we sat down and said, Hey, gee, we're gonna get a whole bunch of chefs and da da da da da. But we were frustrated working as chefs in the city.
[00:25:20]
And you work six days a week, you have your one day off or whatever, try to go, you end up sleeping until eight o'clock at night anyway that day, and then try and go out with, uh, your wife or girlfriend. You know, it's just an uptight situation. So going out after work, like how cool would that be? You could go out and get a real restaurant meal with good service.
[00:25:50]
Chef in the kitchen and something going on. That's really what we focused on. We were like, where do we want to be? We don't want to serve a lunch. We don't want to wake up. We were, you know, we were waking up at two in the afternoon at that point, going to work and working all night, staying up until whatever, they're like, what could be better than doing lunch at, you know, 11:30 at night.
[00:26:14] Bruce Bromberg:
Yeah, we both trained in Paris and there were real restaurants open, right? Brasseries. So, Quai du Cochon, and Bonfinger, and Batifort, and La Coupole, all these, there was options for you to go out. And then, You know, when we moved back to New York, it was the city that never sleeps, yet. Like, there were, there were a couple places, right?
[00:26:37]
There was like, Floral, uh, the Meatpacking District. There were a couple of spots, but Left Lucky's Steak.
[00:26:46] Josh Sharkey:
Employees Only, kind of
[00:26:47] Bruce Bromberg:
Yes, but the chef left, right? The chef left at 11:30, and there were a couple guys in the back. Or even 10 o'clock the chef left. Yeah, there was a, there was an abbreviated menu and sure, you could get a burger, but you, you couldn't go out and dine.
[00:27:00]
And, you know, we had this tiny little 800 square foot room. It was in no way gonna be a grand French brasserie. But that was kind of the image in our minds was those, those experiences we had had in Paris at, you know, Au Pied de Cochon at two in the morning, where that place, it hadn't, until the pandemic, it hadn't closed the doors since, The second world war since 1945, they didn't even have locks on their doors.
[00:27:29]
Restaurant was open for like 50, 60 years. And that was such an inspiration to us and the oysters and like having somebody shucking oysters at the front of the restaurant, which was super uncommon in New York in 1991. Like these things, we, we had such a minimal budget. We had such a tiny little place. But we just knew there were these couple of key elements that we wanted to have.
[00:27:53]
And it was basically oysters, full menu till late at night. We didn't, I think, in the very beginning, know it was going to be till 4am. And more than anything, I don't think we knew that chefs were going to because it's not like it was filled with chefs, it was just filled with people, you know, Parisians out after a show or doing this and musicians and, and, you know, even in the very beginning, it wasn't so much the chefs.
[00:28:22]
It was like the piano player from the Carlisle, this like 80 year old guy who would come down with his girlfriend after he played piano and got off. You know, his 1 a.m. shift and he'd come down in his bow tie and sit at the bar, you know, we had a couple of restauranteurs coming in or. People that were closing up their businesses late. That's kind of what we got. And then the kind of floodgates open.
[00:28:48] Josh Sharkey:
Was there something that happened that like flipped the switch?
[00:28:51] Bruce Bromberg:
Drew near point. Yeah. I mean, it was a couple of things that happened. Drew was enormous though. He, I think we were on Montrachet was still open in Tribeca grill. And somehow we were on his route.
[00:29:06]
Home and, you know, driving past one night, he saw the neon in the window. And we were, what, a couple of months old, I guess, Eric, maybe three, four months old. And he came in and he knew Eric from, I'm not sure where, but from jams or something like that. And, um, he came in, like, literally just would stand there and look around the room and be like, this is fricking amazing.
[00:29:33]
Like you guys are insane and, you know, the most incredible thing. I'm having oysters and I'm having a bottle of shove at like, you know, 2:30 in the morning in New York city and frogs legs and bone marrow. And he's like, I'm telling everyone. And literally it was like, he told everyone, Kuz and Roger and Wolfgang Puck and Bernard Waza, like every chef from France who was coming through to do the James Beard house that Drew just drilled it in.
[00:30:05]
And then it was like the, the, you know, a few years later, or it was then Danielle and Jean Georges and then Mario Batali had just moved. To New York and had opened a restaurant a block and a half away from us. And then, you know, Mario was coming in and he would bring his staff, then Bobby and Lawrence Kretschmer would bring everyone from, you know, their restaurants and it, it just Mesa grill and then Bolo.
[00:30:31]
And so it just slowly kind of started to grow and. You know, on any given night, a Tuesday, a Thursday, a Sunday, it really didn't matter.
[00:30:45]
We would just have, you know, there was the Jean Georges table, the Danielle table, Charlie Trotter was in from Chicago because he was doing an event. There would be his table, there would be Drew Holdingcourt, you know, and it was just our, it became our every, like literally every day.
[00:31:02] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, that was a scene too. I mean, I guess by the time I, I didn't get to New York till 99 or 2000. It was, it was at that point, um, I guess it had already hit. That was one of the first places I went after work.
[00:31:13] Bruce Bromberg:
Yeah, I mean it was crazy and we would, you know, from a cooking point of view and a chef point of view, it was such an interesting thing because we would get ready.
[00:31:24]
We'd get into the restaurant at 2:30, you get ready. We open from 4pm till 4am and we would, you know, get your station set, do everything, have dinner with the staff, do service. We do. 225 covers with 48 seats and we power through and 11:15 we like have a little bit of a lull mellow out. We'd all clean, you know, the cutting boards, wipe down the kitchen, get everything and just get ready to do it again.
[00:31:54]
And by 12:15 the place was full and we would just roll like till 4 a.m. It was amazing. Beyond, really. Or, yeah, beyond. In the early years, there was a lot of beyond. And we sat till four. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'd hand you a menu at, you know, 4:15. Yep. Seat you at four. Oh, yeah. We'd pack your dessert at six. Our kind of rule was like seven o'clock when the day crew starts showing up, when our morning chef was like, when the bread maker would show up, we'd go, okay, time to go.
[00:32:31] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. It's a lot of, a lot of bone marrow to store. It was a lot of bone marrow.
[00:32:35] Bruce Bromberg:
And it was amazing that that dish resonated in the way it did. It was like,
with the chef community, more than anything, it was just, I mean, literally people were coming in just saying, we heard. We need to get this dish, you know, what is it? We don't, we've never even heard of it.
[00:32:52] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah.
[00:32:52] Bruce Bromberg:
It still lives to this day. Yeah to this day. This day.
[00:32:54] Josh Sharkey:
How did you get into sushi? Cause you guys, I mean, obviously there's like really good sushi as well. And it's a Kaya and you guys are some, you know, you know, Jewish guys from New Jersey who, yeah, spent some time in Paris, but where did sushi come from?
[00:33:12] Eric Bromberg:
Ultimately just fell in love with sushi. I started falling in love with sushi. Uh, there was a Japanese commis at the Le Recamier when I was there in Paris. And so he. After work or on days off, he would take us to, uh, a sushi place and I'd never really eaten sushi before that I'd eaten it like two or three times maybe, and it was just a really dramatic, sexy place.
[00:33:44]
It was called Yaki Japo. And, uh, it was, I don't know, it just stuck really forever. And Bruce and I just, we're so taken by Japanese culture, Japanese design, Japanese approach to food. Initially, in 1993, we actually were going to open a fusion Japanese restaurant on the corner of Spring and 6th Avenue. And we kind of got it, we were like going to do French and Japanese.
[00:34:26]
Fusion and all this kind of stuff. And we were like, well, that's kind of hokey doing fusion. So let's not do that. Let's do something, you know, utterly traditional. And when. We were, we had opened Blue Ribbon and we were so frigging busy, it was just unmanageable. And we couldn't really keep product for a day in our refrigerators.
[00:34:52]
We just didn't have enough room. So we were like, we need another space. We need like a refrigerator, a walk in somewhere. So we reached out to our landlord and said, do you have any additional space? Thanks. Thanks. And they said, well, we have this one little spot up the street that used to be a spot for, uh, baby carriages or before that it was for horse and carriages or horse and buggies or whatever it was, uh, storage in the basement and it had been a little chocolate shop and they're like, you can have this space.
[00:35:26]
And the rent was, you know, back then, super cheap. And so we were like, okay, we'll take it. And then we got all excited. And we're like, okay, let's make a fish market.
[00:35:37] Bruce Bromberg:
We couldn't exhaust. There was no room to exhaust. Oh, yeah, right.
[00:35:40] Eric Bromberg:
There was no exhaust. There was no nothing. So we're like, what can we do with no exhaust? We're like, well, if we're going to have a refrigerator full of seafood, why don't we set up a retail counter and make seafood, make a fish market? That kind of went on for a little while. They're like, how the hell do you make a fish market? How do you do retail? Like, what is the point of that? So then we were walking our dog.
[00:36:07]
Uh, we're living up on Madison Avenue and 30th. And we were walking our dog, Bruce and I were walking, and we walked by a sushi place on Lexington and 29th, or Lexington and 30th, maybe. It was this funky looking, pink, tiny little place, and no one was in it, but the sushi chef. So, anyway, we went back there that night for dinner.
[00:36:35]
And we just went in and we, this was before omakase was even a word known in this country. And we just said, you know, hi, can you make us something? And he got this little guy behind the counter, he was standing on like milk crates. And he was like, okay, and just like ran around and ran in the back and came up and made us this stuff.
[00:37:01]
And pretty much from the first bite, we're like, this is different and better than where we've been going. We then kind of went on this mission to try every Japanese sushi place in Manhattan. One, like every day we'd go either for lunch or for, you know, What year was it? 93? 94? 94?
[00:37:26] Josh Sharkey:
When did Seki open, by the way? That was much later, or?
[00:37:29] Eric Bromberg:
Sushi Seki? I think they may have been open at that point.
[00:37:34] Bruce Bromberg:
They may have existed at that point. I don't know. Good question. I'm not sure. Right around there. Anyways, the big one those days was like Sushi Sei and I think Hatsuhana were like kind of the midtown, not terribly friendly to people who didn't look like they treated.
[00:37:53] Eric Bromberg:
They found them to be very austere. Yeah. Very uncomfortable from what we thought was a comfortable restaurant. We found that the service was cold and disinterested, and there was basically a gist toward us being Americans that we weren't worthy of the good fish. One day we're at Sushi Se, Bruce and I are at Sushi Seki, and we are sitting, we ask to sit at the sushi bar, they say no.
[00:38:33]
There's no one in the friggin restaurant. They seat us at a table. And there's a Japanese couple at a sushi bar getting what we now know is omakase. And we looked at the menu, the waitress came, and we said, We want what they're having. And she said, Not for America. She said that? Yeah, you won't like it. We were like, What does that mean?
[00:39:01]
So, that whole experience for us was like, Alright, this is our mission from God. We need to turn sushi into a cool experience. It's not cool at now. It's not something that American diners feel comfortable with. How can we do something to change that and to make it worthwhile to go into this world? We talked to Toshi over and over and over.
[00:39:36]
Got friendly with him, his family. We're spending weekends together. How did you meet him? Just walked in and
[00:39:45] Bruce Bromberg:
Yeah, that was the, that was the experience at that tiny little pink sushi place.
[00:39:52] Eric Bromberg:
Yeah, so we said to him one day, he actually said to us, how, you know, what's it like in Soho? And we're like, it's so fucking busy. It's so amazing. You know, like we're, we're doing 375 covers, it was 48 seats and all this stuff. And he's like, well, maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to have a sushi restaurant in Soho. And we looked at each other, we're like, boing. Let's not make a fish market, let's make a sushi place. So then we, uh, asked him to be our partner, told him we're going to open in three months or two months. We opened 15 months later. We did all the construction ourselves.
[00:40:34] Josh Sharkey:
So how did you, or did you at all incorporate Blue Ribbon, the style of culture and, and of course, service, everything that you created. How did you bridge that with Toshi just coming in and running a sushi joint? Did you give like directives or did you have somebody?
[00:40:49] Eric Bromberg:
We ran, we essentially ran the whole thing with, yeah, we led the show on the vibe, the energy, how we handled customers. Basically.
[00:41:02] Josh Sharkey:
What did he think of all of that, by the way? Was he surprised to see this new way of having CC?
[00:41:09] Eric Bromberg:
We talked about it every day. So I think, you know, we were very into teaching at that point, so we just preached all the fucking time. We talked We, we must've been pretty difficult to deal with, but we were committed. It was like an obsession and we talked to him about it. He was coming from a restaurant that, you know, wasn't busy, rarely had more than five or six, eight people in it. And it was amazing to him, the opportunity to have, and it was, I would, you know, it wasn't perfect sailing, but it was, uh, it was challenging.
[00:41:51]
We. We reached out to him to try and conjure up his feelings from childhood and his experiences at home. What he would eat, what his mother would make him, what made him feel good. And that's the kind of food we started with, uh, uh, the first sushi. Was really as traditional home cooking as we could get and as true to the art of sushi as we could but in a New York American consuming environment.
[00:42:26] Josh Sharkey:
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[00:43:35] Bruce Bromberg:
I think, you know, with, with Toshi, we always kind of, we, we took those Blue Ribbon influences. In fact, in the beginning we were like bringing up to his restaurant, we would bring all these products from blue ribbon. When we would go up to have dinner with him, we'd be like, here's catfish. And he's like, no, no, not catfish. We're like, yeah, we just kept bringing stuff that was kind of on the menu and he would prepare it for us and make it a, you know, things other than catfish that he thought was a good idea.
[00:44:10]
But it was this kind of really amazing exchange of ideas and he watched us building it. And again, it was literally us building this room. It was every day he would show up in the morning with his little mini Japanese novels and his OTB tickets. And, uh, you know, he's here for an hour, go to OTB, come back and he'd watch us build stuff.
[00:44:34]
This was like, as Eric said, for over a year of us building this restaurant, Portoshi would come every day, every single day and stand there and we built it, me and Eric, a couple of the Blue Ribbon employees and this, this one, uh, carpenter and the restaurant really evolved in an extraordinarily organic way.
[00:44:53]
And we would go down to Blue Ribbon, Blue Ribbon was, you know, 50 yards down the street, busy as can be, after a long day's work, we'd go down to the kitchen, Toshi would then come down to the kitchen, we'd talk about food in the kitchen, sometimes he'd sit down, his wife Would come in and they would have dinner.
[00:45:11]
And so it, it just went on for like a year of this getting to know each other process, also living what was happening in Soho, what was happening in Blue Ribbon, the sensibilities of it. And I think one of the, one of the things when we first opened, which may have been the worst opening of all times, maybe a story for another day.
[00:45:32]
It was like this spirit of blue ribbon kind of came through, through design, through lighting. Eric and I never wanted to be at the sushi bar. Again, we were like, you know, two Jewish guys from New Jersey is not really who you want making your sushi at a, you know, uh, Japanese sushi restaurant. So we stayed in the kitchen.
[00:45:54]
And of course the kitchen was five by seven with dishwashing in that kitchen. It's now our private dining room, but our private table. But it was also. You know, it was the spirit and the level of hospitality at Blue Ribbon. So we taught the staff in a certain way that it was casual. It was downtown. We weren't uptight and we weren't, not everything had to be perfect.
[00:46:18]
It was, it was kind of a new foray into this kind of, you know, what we wanted a Japanese, how we want it to be treated. In a Japanese restaurant or any other restaurant. So that's really where the blue ribbon came through. And I think to this day, those restaurants feel very similar. The brasserie and sushi radically different cuisines, but there is a very similar vibe in both restaurants.
[00:46:45]
I mean, to this day, you walk into blue ribbon or blue ribbon sushi. There is at least five team members who have been there for 30 years in both locations, you know, 29 and sushi. They just have this kind of iconic legendary status at this point, but you know, there were years where the first year and a half at Blue Ribbon, we couldn't buy fish, like Eric said, there was a lot of, there was a lot of pushback to us being American owners and Toshi was kind of blacklisted, like we couldn't get good fish from All the people we all buy now, all you have to do is call up and say, sure, I'll pay the 60 for the amazing Toro.
[00:47:30]
They wouldn't even give it to us. We could not buy it. So we were struggling in the beginning and Toshi was unhappy. And we had people telling us we were terrible. We had people walk into sushi and say, we want fried chicken. Uh, we want the catfish. We want bone marrow. We didn't even have a kitchen. You know, we were, it was like the first nine months of that restaurant were extraordinarily challenging.
[00:47:56]
At one point we closed the back room. Well, at multiple points, but all we had left was Toshi. No, no Japanese chefs would work with Toshi. Because me and Eric, and little by little Toshi wound up having to call one of his friends from Japan and had him come through some agency, sign up for some agency, got us to us a month later.
[00:48:20]
Uh, still works for us, still works with us 30 something, you know, 30 years down the road. But that was the only way we had anyone beyond Toshi at the sushi bar. So we could only do 30 covers a night. It was very difficult in the beginning. People just weren't ready for kind of an American and run Japanese restaurant.
[00:48:47] Eric Bromberg:
And we had to learn how to talk and how to posture and how to interact with the Japanese world. We, we're so used to the French American approach to motivating people when shit hits the fan and did not work with these guys. Guys, and they would, I mean, we have a whole bunch of circumstances where chefs just put down their knives and walked out.
[00:49:25] Josh Sharkey:
So if it wasn't, if it wasn't that approach, how did you have to deal with them? It was the, what was the approach that worked?
[00:49:32] Bruce Bromberg:
It was a very delicate process. Uh, it all kind of had at the sushi bar kind of had to go through Toshi, which is what we, we learned, um, just kind of didn't necessarily want.
[00:49:44] Eric Bromberg:
It was a hierarchy of, of age, right? So the fact that Toshi was older, he then could have the respect to tell people what to do.
[00:49:56] Bruce Bromberg:
I mean, I was 28 and Eric was 32 and like, we would tell the 45 year old sushi, you know, we got to get this platter out there about, and you would think that was it. All we said was, you got to get this, you know, Hey, let's go.
[00:50:09]
And then all of a sudden, two hours later after service, they're packing up all their stuff and emptying their locker and leaving. We're like, we're the nicest guys there are like, what do we do? And it was just great.
[00:50:21] Eric Bromberg:
I've disgraced myself. I can't come back to work tomorrow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. They were shamed.
[00:50:29] Bruce Bromberg:
Yeah. We dishonored family and can't work anymore.
[00:50:31] Eric Bromberg:
I mean, we are, we are so protective of our sushi chefs.
[00:50:34] Josh Sharkey:
So to this day, is that culture still Wow.
[00:50:40] Bruce Bromberg:
I would say it, it exists, but there is so many sushi chefs in America and so much kind of Americanization. And at this point there is a, a whole group of chefs who are very good sushi chefs who aren't just traditionally trained in Japan.
[00:51:02]
It's the next generation. So yes, I mean, we have learned. And we have an amazing. environment in those restaurants and really great communication between everyone. But you have to be aware of it's, it's just a, it's just a different world than what we grew up with or what we were used to now, obviously it's second nature and it's part of our family and we all get it.
[00:51:26]
And we all work very well together, but it's so different than it was. There's a lot of people.
[00:51:30] Eric Bromberg:
We don't let talk to the sushi chefs. And there it's very focused on. Respect and proper protocol and proper just interaction.
[00:51:43] Josh Sharkey:
How does that work with the bar and grill? The sushi bar and grill, is it similar? That's kind of a mix, right?
[00:51:49] Bruce Bromberg:
We kind of approach them all the same way. The sushi bars, whether it's Izakaya, Blue Ribbon Sushi, or Sushi Bar and Grill, or now the new one, Sushi and Steak. They all have varying degrees of kitchen, right? The original restaurant basically had no kitchen. Uh, to this day, it's still super minimal, but they all work really basically the same that the communication through the sushi chefs goes to a specific point person.
[00:52:17]
And that's how things are dealt with. And yeah, that's almost how it should really happen at each level and each area of the kitchen. You know, you don't want the waiter running into the dishwasher and saying, where are all my plates? Right. That needs to come through. The chef and stuff. And what we learned in the beginning was there was a little bit of flexibility with that stuff in the traditional French American kitchen there.
[00:52:42]
We didn't have that flexibility in the Japanese kitchen. So we've been very. Stringent and adherent to the way things are, are supposed to, the way things need to operate there.
[00:52:55] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. I mean, you guys, you guys have opened a lot of restaurants. Do you have like a, like some general heuristics now that you, you follow given how many, uh, I'm sure there's been some, you already mentioned there's pretty terrible ones, terrible openings, but you know, there's gotta be some, some big takeaways and learnings now, like after so many under your belt.
[00:53:12] Bruce Bromberg:
We've learned a lot. We, we've really have learned a lot. Not to say we still don't make mistakes and It's inevitable on like opening night, Eric and I all look at each other and be like, holy shit, like, really? Like, we made that mistake again? But I would say over the last number of years, we've become pretty adept.
[00:53:31]
We know the things that need to be in place. We know the positions that are the most important and need to be filled. And, you know, I think we're good at training. I think ultimately our ability to train. So we've had a string of, I don't want to jinx us, but we've had a lot of really pleasant openings where five days down the road, you kind of feel like the restaurant's been there for a while.
[00:53:56]
You know, and everyone's, of course you get better and better over the first, you know, four to six months. But I feel like with the team we have, we can also bring five guys from New York, three guys from Vegas, you know, up to Boston or vice versa. And we bring our key people again, the onus falls on management.
[00:54:16]
So it's like, let's train each station. You know, we'll have a head chef in each station when we open a restaurant. When you open new concepts, obviously you throw a big wrench into the works and everyone's got to learn how this whole thing, you know, we just opened this great place with a massive grill, wood fired grill.
[00:54:38]
That was like a huge learning curve for everyone. And yeah, that was actually a pretty amazing opening. With that said, we're still learning. We're still figuring it out five months into it. It doesn't have 20 years of experience, but. Yeah. Yeah, we've had some, some really rough ones back in the early days, but I think we've learned all of the openings in the early days were brutal.
[00:55:06] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. I mean, you don't know, you don't know about how other people open restaurants cause you, you, you're just doing your own, but maybe Can you, if you could even just speculate a little bit, and you had to tell people in general, some advice about opening restaurants, cause it always sucks. It always sucks, there's never enough time to train, never time to open.
[00:55:27] Eric Bromberg:
I think we do two things. One is, we try to open without press. It's not easy, obviously at this stage, but we try not to blow ourselves out the first week, and then try to pick up the pieces. We try to definitely open the beginning of a week, not on the weekend. And we control the reservations to the point where we think we have.
[00:55:57]
Leaders in every position that we know we can handle and serve, whether it's the kitchen or the floor. And that really goes a long, long way. We have the luxury of having a lot of people, right? We got a lot of employees and we have a lot of high level employees. So, to do an opening, we can bring 12 people.
[00:56:22]
Or 15 people and put them in every spot in the, in the restaurant and try to work on it. Cause you always have people who don't make it the first week. We're very focused on teaching the station how it should be worked, not just letting somebody come in and hope they get it or let them do their thing or let one shift do it this way.
[00:56:47]
One shift do it that way. We definitely focus on organization. Everything has its place, everything has its routine, everything has its process. And that helps us the more we get going. But definitely the personnel, uh, that we can count on and we can communicate in short sentences with. Who know the program and we've done it 30 something times already.
So, you know, that's really, I think what helps us the most.
[00:57:22] Bruce Bromberg:
And this, this is obviously comes down to somewhat of a financial question for, for various people and how they're opening the restaurant on what budget they're opening, but you spend all this time conceiving. You spend all this time planning, you spend all this time building, you spend all this time trying to get all the recipes right, you know, all this effort.
[00:57:46]
And then you get to that opening. And I think, you know, you, you have to be very careful about not allotting enough resources to an opening. Because when you don't, you, you push that process. Of getting the restaurant to where you want it to be that much further out. Right. So if, holy crap, we're running out of money and we have too many employees here, you know, it's stressful.
[00:58:14]
And for us, it's kind of like, don't go into the project unless you can fund it. You know, be extraordinarily careful. Understand that the first three months, call it the first hundred days are going to cost you a shitload. Of money, a ridiculous amount of money to get to where you want to be. And we want to get there.
[00:58:38]
Like our focus as restaurateurs, as chefs is we don't want to battle through six months, nine months of instability. And this one didn't get trained right. And this, you know, we, we, we try to get everyone there. Eric and I are there. Chris is there. Mike is there, you know, Mark is there. All our core team is there.
[00:58:59]
We want everyone there. So there's a cost to having everyone there. Um, the good thing is we feel, you know, 30 days in everyone's well trained and in a good spot. We put in that really strong effort in the beginning. We had people there. They worked overtime. We had more people than we needed. We had doubled up in each station.
[00:59:21]
There's a cost to all that. That helps you have better openings. We feel. There's a number when all of a sudden you have too many people and that gets complicated. But. I think us learning and making sure we have the right staff in place, the right leaders in place, so when we do do these openings, like Eric said in the very beginning, people are set up for success.
[00:59:45]
They want to stay, they want to be a part of it. They felt our energy as founders and owners and chefs. You know, those to me, it's like when, if we lose an employee from the opening four months in because of something we failed to do, that's a real disappointment from us. Because that person was there.
[01:00:05]
They saw this place come to life. They were there for the birth, right? I mean, that's the most impactful moment, right? You miss the birth of your child. Sometimes it takes people years to connect with that child. But when you see that thing happening, you're vested, you're in, you're all in. So it's, it's up to us to make sure that whoever's in the restaurant at that opening period feels that energy, feels that responsibility, sees the struggle, sees the efforts, and then.
[01:00:33]
In theory, you know, that creates for a much stronger restaurant down the road.
[01:00:39] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Common sense. It makes a ton of sense, but it is a lot. It's a lot. It's a big risk. It's a big risk and it's a big, yeah.
[01:00:47] Eric Bromberg:
You know, it's, it's scary when you're going, when you go into an opening and you got so much money on the line and you know, if you're not busy right off the bat, you're losing cash.
[01:00:59]
We were much happier doing that when the beginning, when we didn't know our ass from our elbow. Or what was really going on financially, we were like, yeah, we're doing great. And Bill, you know, the accountant comes in and goes, what are you guys up to? But there was less thinking going on in the beginning.
[01:01:19]
Now it's really, you know, pretty darn well thought out throughout the whole thing. We've been, we've done a side of, since COVID we've reopened all the restaurants, which was that we could, which was 18. And then we opened seven more in a year. And two months, so we have, you know, we, this is our first break now we have, and since 2020 and it feels kind of nice, but yeah, I'm proud of what we opened and we did, we got it all done and it's, it has a lot to do with the team and all the people and, you know, we use the same architects for 35 years.
[01:02:06] Josh Sharkey:
We’ve said purveyors. Yeah, yeah, I mean and and you know what you both you don't have that much gray hair.
[01:02:15] Bruce Bromberg:
I think I might have I trimmed a little today
[01:02:18] Josh Sharkey:
Look at the beard a little trim there, but
[01:02:23] Bruce Bromberg:
For us this isn't stressful stuff, I know and you know You know, if people like see the kitchen or something and they're like, Oh my God, it's, or they watch the bear or they watch the menu, whatever these shows are.
[01:02:36]
And they're just like, it's so stressful. And Oh my God, like, how do you deal? And I'm like, that is the calmest place. In the world, right? I mean, that is honestly the kitchen Saturday night, busiest frigging line. Board is full. That is, I think the calmest and most in control maybe is the right word that we can feel.
[01:02:59]
And, and we're at that point now with opening restaurants and designing restaurants and that process is, is really, it's super satisfying. It's really rewarding. It's, it's, you know, to be able to. Conceive of an idea and watch the entire process come to that opening night. And then 32 years later, you walk back in and you see that thing and you remember that screw you, you know, stripped up in the ceiling and you could still see, or you remember what happened at table 16 or, you know what I mean?
[01:03:32]
It's like all these, these things, it's an incredibly rewarding, uh, and then of course, you know, employees for 30 years have been, you Of amazing employees. It's just, you know, the stories are kind of incredible.
[01:03:46] Josh Sharkey:
Well, you know, you're, you're both sitting, you're sitting in Hawaii and you're in Connecticut with guitars behind you and you've opened up the guitars, you know, sushi joints and fried chicken joints and steakhouses and all the, you know, brasseries. And is this where you thought you'd be 30 years later?
[01:04:04] Bruce Bromberg:
I don't know that I ever thought,
[01:04:06] Josh Sharkey:
I don't know,
[01:04:07] Eric Bromberg:
I never thought I was going to be this old.
[01:04:12] Bruce Bromberg:
I'm kind of shocked that I'm still around. Yeah. Now it's, I don't think we've thought about it in that, in those terms. I don't think that, I mean, Eric and I, as little kids, I think Eric alluded to it.
[01:04:26]
We used to sit there and we were obsessed with Benihana as kids. Like literally for Eric's. 13th birthday, got him a hat, a holster, a knife, and then we proceeded to literally ruin our mom's kitchen over the course of the next year. She had to remodel the whole kitchen. We were obsessed with walks and, uh, making stuff, slicing shrimp and flipping them into ass.
[01:04:50]
But, you know, we wanted to make good versions of the foods we grew up. Like Eric said, like the Hellmann's and the Kraft's, and we were always like, God, you know, couldn't this be better? Couldn't there be a better quality of this? Or you'd go to the Chinese restaurant. That was fun, but couldn't we make a better version?
[01:05:08]
The Japanese, the, the steakhouse. So it had always been like something we talked about as teenagers. So I think we, in a way knew we wanted to make restaurants. But I don't think that, I mean, I don't think I ever thought someday I'm going to be in Hawaii owning, you know, 25 restaurants and flying all over the planet, trying to maintain it all.
[01:05:32]
I don't know, just never really thought of it, but I'd say we're still on the ride. So it's not so retrospective, I guess at this point. Yeah,
[01:05:41] Josh Sharkey:
I mean, you're still, you're still young. I would say.
[01:05:42] Eric Bromberg:
At a certain point in my career, I'll say, in my growth, I wanted to have live on a farm and have like an inn with a little restaurant on the North Fork or something like that.
[01:05:57]
And that was the dream. And I was in East Hampton at Sag Harbor at the American Hotel there. And that was what I believed was going to happen. And then serendipitously A guy came to work summer job as a captain, a floor captain, and he wanted to open a restaurant in New York. And he asked me to write a menu for them and I wrote the menu and then I started getting into it.
[01:06:27]
And then I was like, well, do you need a chef and want to, I'll come if you make me a partner. And he made me a partner and that came, moved to New York and that changed everything. Yeah.
[01:06:41] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Do you think Blue Ribbon means the same thing to you today that it did 30, 20 years ago?
[01:06:50] Eric Bromberg:
Wow. That's a deep question. Um, I mean, it's been a part of your life for a very long time. I think it is our vision of life and that may sound weird, but that's, I think we both, but I'll speak for myself. I think I'd view blue ribbon as a way of life, as an approach to life really, and just How you do things, how you want to do things, who you want to hang out with, how you want to be to other people, just kind of a compassionate, meaningful life that, you know, employing people is something that's really important and meaningful to us.
[01:07:37]
And the fact that we can continue to employ people for. You know, 30 years is an amazing thing, but the fact that we can still open places and bring more people into it and I don't know, it sort of sounds like a cult, but it's, uh, it's just how we communicate. It's how we live our lives and it's how we get along really.
[01:08:00]
So I, in that way, it's the same. Yeah. I don't, it's hard to know where you're going to be, when you're going to be and what it even is that's in the future, because. I've never really kind of looked at it that way. I always kind of looked at it as where am I now and where, you know, how do I want to behave? And that's Blue Ribbon to me.
[01:08:23] Bruce Bromberg:
Yeah, I think for me, it's very much the same. And I mean, Eric and I, as I was saying before, both worked at that restaurant, Le Recamier in Paris. The chef kind of laid it out for us. I mean, Eric was there for a year. I was there for almost two. You would ask him a question about like, you'd say, Hey, Robert, why are you using black pepper instead of white pepper?
[01:08:49]
And he would like literally stop service. He would just look you in the eye and like, ask you. What type of person do you want to be? And that's how he would start by answering this question of like, which pepper to use. And he was so spiritual and everything and everything mattered. Everything mattered.
[01:09:09]
And what mattered more to him, which is, I think, really a continuation of Eric and I, Is how you lived your life. And he always said, like, it's ridiculous that people have a work life and then, uh, like a home life. He's like, especially as a chef, because you do this all the time. This is everything. It's in your head.
[01:09:34]
He's like, I know. He would say like, when you go home, what are you thinking about? You're thinking about what dish you're making or, you know, it's just, it's never ending, right? As a chef, it's just really is never ending. And. He was always about, you know, why are you going into this industry? What is it you want to be?
[01:09:52]
And whatever you're doing here is your life. This is how you conduct yourself. How you deal with the dishwasher is ultimately how you're going to deal with your kid and how you're going to deal with your wife. And if you do it disrespectfully here, that's going to carry on. And that was huge, I think, to us.
[01:10:11]
And when we, we actually came up with the name of Blue Ribbon. We, we really wanted it to reflect that experience with Robert and Paris and cooking school, but we wanted it to be American. We didn't want to like, you know, call it le something something. We, we wanted to be American. We wanted, and that was part of what Robert said to us too, go back and do your thing.
[01:10:37]
You learned the stuff here, now you go. Create your, you know, your version. So, you know, Cordon Bleu is our cooking school. The literal translation of Cordon Bleu is blue ribbon. And it, it, it exemplifies so many things that are so paramount to what it was. And Eric said earlier, you know, what you do, what's right for the customer, you do what's right for the staff.
[01:11:03]
And, you know, there's this financial thing at the end. But that was kind of what Blue Ribbon meant to us, was being the best at what we could, we could be. And it didn't have to be the fanciest, right? The Blue Ribbon pig is sitting in mud at the county fair, or the pie wasn't a perfectly formed pie. Didn't look like Le Notre, right?
[01:11:23]
It was like some lady in her kitchen. And so that's where Blue Ribbon always wanted to fit. It didn't need to be the fanciest. It needed to be delicious, it needed to be made with integrity, it needed to be made with respect, but it didn't, you know, need to fit this other category. And that's why that moment that we came up with the name of Blue Ribbon and we were just like, boom, done, that's it, that's who we are, that's our American heritage, that's our French experiences. And that's ultimately how we want to live our life.
[01:11:57] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. I didn't know that about the origin of the, of the name. It's funny. You guys remind me so much of my favorite author is this guy named James Mishner. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's a, he's historical fiction. Uh, yeah. He wrote Hawaii and a number of other ones.
[01:12:11]
He has this quote. Actually, I'm going to read it to you guys, because I think you'll really resonate. I just pulled it up, actually. I have it on my desktop. But, um, it's not from a book. He just, it's just from an interview, and he said that, The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion.
[01:12:32]
He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he's always doing both. I've always loved that, that quote, and it's funny, the more you all were talking about Blue Ribbon, just as a, as an idea, not just a business, it reminded me of it, like, more and more.
[01:12:51] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, no, that's amazing. That, that is it. I mean, you said you, you haven't been, but do you think about the future now? Like, what's, you know, it's been 30 years, what the next 10, 20, 30 years is?
[01:13:03] Bruce Bromberg:
Um, yeah, we, we talk about it. We continue to open restaurants, it seems. We are still excited. We still have ideas. It's also at this point about inspiring the next generation of chefs and hoping we can create people who carry on what it is we've started at some point. You know, the kitchen becomes more and more difficult and that kind of traveling around the country and all those things become a bit more difficult.
[01:13:37]
But all in all, I think it's just to whatever we do, it has to kind of, you know, make Blue Ribbon stronger and better. And that's just kind of how we've thought about it all these years. Um, we always have opportunities. People is reaching out to us to do this project and that project. We're pretty picky about what we do and what we get involved in.
[01:14:02]
And we need to make sure our team and our company right there. It's more than just chefs at this point. There's, there's an office and there's, you know, there's more going on than there, there once was. So, you know, we have to be able to continue to, to excel. We don't want to do anything if we can't do it to the fullest.
[01:14:22]
So we're, you know, we're very focused on our team. We're focused on a lot of the guys who were, you know, dishwashers 30 years ago. They're still with us. Right. I mean, it's an amazing thing. We have prep cooks from day one who are still prep cooks. We have guys who are dishwashers who are now the chefs of restaurants.
[01:14:44]
It's just. Ensuring that their world, their legacy, their families, our families, you know, are taken care of and that we run the restaurants responsibly and do a good job. And yeah, just try to, you know, make people happy. At the end of the day, that's what we do. And that's why I think we're successful is we enjoy making people happy, right?
[01:15:09]
It's the basic, if you, if you don't enjoy that, You really shouldn't be in the hospitality business, right? This isn't a great place to just come and make, you know, money. We've heard too many people say like, Oh, I'm just going to sit back and help the cash as it rolls in. Those restaurants are always closed in like a year, right?
[01:15:30]
I mean, we've all seen it. If you don't love cooking and making people happy, there's no real point in continuing. We still love all that.
[01:15:40] Eric Bromberg:
It's essentially a way of life and an approach to life. So that doesn't really ever go away. So it's, the lines are sort of obscured as to whether there's actual retirement possible or it just goes until it doesn't.
[01:15:59]
Yeah, it's hard, it's hard to not feel The weight of 25 places and 1,700 people and all that stuff going on. And it's a, it's an immense accomplishment, but it's also a responsibility. And. It's, yeah, it's special. It's not, I mean, we're, we're a family business. It's me, Bruce, my wife, our brother, Ken, his wife, all of our friends. Yeah, it's quite a, Quite an entity.
[01:16:41] Josh Sharkey:
It is. It is. Well, I just want to thank you guys and I'm really grateful to, to know you and grateful for what you have built, obviously for your team, but for the industry. It's just amazing. So thank you. And thank you for taking some time to chat with me. Uh, always, always honored to be able to spend some time with you guys.
[01:17:00] Eric Bromberg:
It's exciting what you're doing. meez has been terrific for us. Great. It's really, I mean, it's helped us expand because we can get recipes and procedures and processes with videos and every other thing in the hands of the cooks. And that's something that, you know, we've worked on so many projects for so many years and struggled with PowerPoint presentations and other sheets and other, you know, uh,
[01:17:32] Bruce Bromberg:
We've tried everything,
[01:17:35] Eric Bromberg:
However, other procedure manuals and whatever, and people don't read them or they misread them. And, uh, visually it really helps us in it. Definitely. We opened Broadsery in Boston last year. Actually, we just celebrated the one year anniversary. Yep. And without that, we would have needed probably six more chefs to support the team than we had. So that's a super cool thing for us.
[01:18:07] Josh Sharkey:
That's amazing. I love hearing that. I'm gonna have to quote you on that one. Have you used the translation yet?
[01:18:12] Eric Bromberg:
I haven't, I haven't actually.
[01:18:14] Josh Sharkey:
The scaling or what do you mean translation? No, it translates like 140 languages.
[01:18:18] Bruce Bromberg:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, we do take that in, um, yep. We've been using that as well.
[01:18:24] Josh Sharkey:
Just change it, change the recipe.
[01:18:25] Bruce Bromberg:
I mean, honestly, the scaling is. Huge for us, and you create all these recipes at opening and then you realize what your, you know, your actual level of business is a couple of weeks in or a month in and you realize all the recipes you created. Now you have all these people doing math all the time in your restaurant. That's been my favorite thing with the meez is I'm like, uh, no, I only have 11 pounds of, you know, not, not 10, all this stuff that's made it really cool.
[01:18:59] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Love it. Love hearing it. Well, thank you guys. And thanks for the support.
[01:19:02] Bruce Bromberg:
Awesome.
[01:19:03] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, this was awesome. I really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into the meez podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, Fresh Daily. For show notes and more, visit getmeez.com forward/podcast. That's G E T M E E Z dot com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Keep innovating. Don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday. And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.