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" How many restaurateurs can say they inspire New Yorkers to wait two hours for cheeseburgers and were chosen as one of Esquire&amp;#039;s Best New Restaurants of 2010? Danny Meyer&amp;#039;s bragging rights are pretty extensive, and this week he celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first venture, Union Square Caf\u00E9. It&amp;#039;s a restaurant that, like Meyer, has a unique ability to evolve while preserving its essence. Of course, he couldn&amp;#039;t have done it without former executive chef Michael Romano (who now oversees the restaurant group&amp;#039;s culinary development), but we don&amp;#039;t think the garlic potato chips hurt, either. On the occasion of their joint celebration, we sat down to talk with both Meyer and Romano about the restaurant&amp;#039;s humble beginnings and their unique collaboration. ESQUIRE: Union Square Caf\u00E9 opened 25 years ago but Michael came on three years later. How did that happen? DANNY MEYER: My first restaurant job was at a seafood restaurant called Pesca, where Michael was recruited to be co-chef. He was the first guy who came to the restaurant who really knew how to cook, and we hit it off. And Michael then got a job as a chef at La Caravelle, and I went to Europe to learn how to cook. And I came back and opened Union Square Caf\u00E9 on October 21, 1985, and three years after we opened it was very, very clear to me that the restaurant had become better than its food. It was literally a nine-month courtship to get Michael to agree to come down here. We had dates together. ESQ: How did things change when Michael came on board? DM: It was a huge, huge deal when Michael came here. Literally within months Michael&amp;#039;s cooking earned us a third star from the New York Times, which was pretty much unheard of back then for a casual restaurant. Union Square Caf\u00E9 was one of the first places to show that you can be casual, down-to-earth, refined, and excellent at the same time. New York had gotten, back then, most of its restaurant and culinary inspiration from western Europe, where excellence was always accompanied by a little bit of formality, not open-armed hospitality. ESQ: So it sounds like your first priority was making the restaurant hospitable. DM: It wasn&amp;#039;t a strategy, it was the only thing I knew. I had favorite restaurants in St. Louis, but it was rarely because the food was so amazing, it was because the welcome was so warm and genuine. ESQ: What was it like coming into that environment, Michael? MICHAEL ROMANO: It was a big change for me. I had been working for years in Europe, and this downtown place \u2014 it wasn&amp;#039;t French food and not the structure that I was used to. The environments I&amp;#039;d been in were mostly 100 percent male. So that was a big change for me. Not only were there men and women working in the dining room, the kitchen when I got here was mostly female. And it was a more relaxed atmosphere. I felt the hospitality. But it didn&amp;#039;t mean that things could be lax. It was fresh and enthusiastic and all the old clich\u00E9s and old habits and mindsets were gone.  ESQ: What do women add to a restaurant? DM: Balance. And I think a natural sense of nurturing. MR: And it balances the testosterone level. If you have an all-male kitchen, it has a certain atmosphere. When I was at La Caravelle I hired a young woman, and the owner, who was the chef, came into the kitchen one day and just freaked out. He literally pointed to her and said, &amp;quot;What is that?&amp;quot; ESQ: On that note: what&amp;#039;s your best tip for making people feel welcome? DM: This place has taught us a lot of lessons that we&amp;#039;ve applied to our other ventures. This is the Adam&amp;#039;s Rib of our restaurants. It led to Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison, Tabla, Blue Smoke, Shake Shack, The Modern, Maialino. The biggest thing we&amp;#039;ve learned is to separate hospitality from service. We realized many, many years ago that, yeah, you&amp;#039;ve got to have good service. You&amp;#039;ve got to get the food to the right person at the right table at the right temperature at the right time. But it&amp;#039;s the things you&amp;#039;re doing for somebody. It&amp;#039;s the custom things you&amp;#039;re doing that make each experience feel like the restaurant is on your side. In service, it&amp;#039;s one-size-fits-all. In hospitality, one size fits one. MR: You put that in a really brilliant way. I also heard, a long time ago, about service being a monologue and hospitality being a dialogue. But there was really a turning point, and it was when you came up with these five tenets. We started thinking, &amp;quot;What is it we do?&amp;quot; And that led to this idea of the five things that for a million dollars we would not walk away from that are core. And the most brilliant idea was the first one, which is, &amp;quot;We take care of each other.&amp;quot; So by doing that, it changed the whole feeling of, &amp;quot;The customer is king, the customer is always right.&amp;quot; And not that that&amp;#039;s not true\u2014 DM: That is not true. The customer is not always right. I&amp;#039;m not always right. You&amp;#039;re not always right. No one is always right. Saying that the customer is always right is a recipe for creating bad morale on your team, because it&amp;#039;s dishonest. Put the customer second, and we get better service and hospitality. MR: Starting the cycle \u2014 because it is a cycle \u2014 of &amp;quot;we take care of each other.&amp;quot; I had first-hand experienced that in France, where you were expected to give high levels of service, and then when you stepped through the doors to go back into the kitchen, sometimes you were treated like an animal. And then you had to sort of brush that off and go out and be wonderfully hospitable. That&amp;#039;s so difficult and so\u2014 DM: Dishonest.  ESQ: Danny, you were twenty-seven when you opened Union Square Caf\u00E9. If you could give your younger self advice, what would it be? DM: I would say, &amp;quot;Good job, you listened to your passion, and you followed it.&amp;quot; There was a lot of ignorance. I didn&amp;#039;t even know what cash flow meant. But this restaurant is still thriving twenty-five years later and it&amp;#039;s purely based on the intuition of doing the right thing. My advice would be, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t ever lose the sharpness of hearing your own self.&amp;quot; ESQ: That almost sounds like what your twenty-seven-year-old self would tell you now. MR: It takes at least one person&amp;#039;s intense passion to make something great. And then that person has to be able to surround himself or herself with like-minded people who bring other talents and abilities. Then it can turn into something really special. ESQ: In an era of celebrity chefs, what is it like to work at a restaurant that is known as a &amp;quot;Danny Meyer production&amp;quot;? MR: It&amp;#039;s a choice. Some people have an entrepreneurial bent that makes them say, &amp;quot;I have to be the final word,&amp;quot; and that&amp;#039;s great. As Danny said, you should follow that. I personally really enjoy the collaborative spirit. I&amp;#039;m a pretty decent cook. DM: That&amp;#039;s like the Pope saying he&amp;#039;s pretty decent at praying. MR: But Danny has so many incredible gifts in the restaurant as a whole that I might not be able to do. I love seeing people and talking to guests, but it&amp;#039;s not where my first passion lies. ESQ: How do you keep the menu fresh but still have the things that people come here to eat? DM: It&amp;#039;s an art. And sometimes we nail it and sometimes we don&amp;#039;t. There are a finite number of things that any restaurant can serve at a high level of quality. Understanding how to edit the classic with the new is a really important thing. And we&amp;#039;re going to make mistakes. But when we make mistakes we really care. ESQ: What dish was the biggest mistake? DM: The biggest mistakes sometimes lead to the best opportunities. There but for a cook&amp;#039;s serendipitous mistake we would never have our garlic potato chips. We had confit of duck on one of our early menus, and it would typically be served with thick cottage fries that are fried in duck fat and saut\u00E9ed with garlic and parsley. Michael&amp;#039;s predecessor was on vacation, and a cook was cutting the fries and didn&amp;#039;t have it set at the right thickness. And the sous-chef said, &amp;quot;You gotta throw those out and start over.&amp;quot; And I said, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s just see what happens.&amp;quot; And I would say if you look down there they are on every other table right now. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/a8776/union-square-cafe-anniversary-102210/>