To know Jean-Georges Vongerichten is to know decadence.
The 67-year-old Strasbourg, France native may be best known for his eponymous midtown restaurant with two Michelin stars. He moved to New York City in 1986, when the city’s fine-dining scene, depending on who you ask, was in a dire state of affairs. (Vongerichten, for one, said the American palate hadn’t quite progressed to its current state of cultural advancement.)
Vongerichten’s first big gig—at age 29—was as an executive chef at Lafayette, a French bistro in the Drake Hotel, which ended up earning a four-star review from the New York Times. That’s where Vongerichten first met Bob Giraldi and Phil Suarez, two filmmakers with a keen interest in restaurant development.
Giraldi and Suarez partnered with Vongerichten to open his first restaurant, JoJo, on the Upper East Side in 1991. (Suarez, in particular, has stuck with him for the long haul; the business partners have opened nearly 40 restaurants together.)
JoJo began Vongerichten’s long tenure as a chef-owner; he has nearly six dozen global restaurants to his name. In New York, his home base, he’s done everything from classic French-American (Jean-Georges; Perry Street; Nougatine), to Latin (ABC Cocina), to modern American (The Mark; The Fulton; ABC Kitchen), and even to vegan (abcV). In fact, Vongerichten has done the near-impossible: keeping a New York City restaurant alive amid razor-thin margins, and then doing it again, and again, and again.
He refuses to franchise out his restaurants, hand over the reins, or leave New York City behind. That’s because New York is still totally alive to Vongerichten, he told Fortune over the summer after his once-daily customary visit to the Union Square Greenmarket.
Keeping the spirit alive
Even the pandemic wasn’t the death knell to his restaurants the way it was to hundreds of others. Though it delayed the grand opening of his Tin Building by Jean-Georges food hall in South Street Seaport, the pandemic actually offered him the opportunity to double down on an area that few fine dining establishments know as well as he does: takeout food.
Owing to his years operating in hotels, Vongerichten said he had reached a point of ensuring room service or delivered food is of equal standard to a sit-down meal. The key, he said, is focusing on items that travel well. One such example: crispy rice sushi, which he began doling out in delivery boxes along with a QR code that taught customers how to prepare it.
But today, no such inventions are necessary. Over the last two years, the dining scene in New York has completely matched its pre-pandemic levels in Vongerichten’s eyes.
The real mark of success for Vongerichten is a crowded restaurant in traditional business districts—areas that were hollowed out during the pandemic—such as his own Four Twenty Five by Jean-Georges, in Midtown East. He was nervous when Four Twenty Five opened its doors last year, because “Park Avenue was empty.”
But no longer. “I saw a new renaissance in midtown,” Vongerichten said, in no small part due to the emergence of power hour, a new, more mature twist on happy hour.
‘I try to do something that people like to come back for’
Most New York restaurants don’t make it to five years. But Vongerichten’s restaurants tend to last significantly longer; while a few, like Mercer Kitchen and Spice Market, have closed, most of his hallmark eateries, like JoJo and ABC Kitchen, remain hot tickets.
“I try to do something that people like to come back for,” Vongerichten explained. That consistency is ever more difficult to guarantee, as meals have become pricier, owing to the razor-thin margins and the ballooning costs of everything from raw materials to pantry staples to wages.
But as an executive chef, Vongerichten insists on remaining on top of every detail at each of his locations, sniffing out signs of trouble before they can topple him. “I want to know who’s cooking, who’s doing the day-to-day operations, how much the overhead is, how much my rent is—how much I need to break even,” Vongerichten said,
Another key differentiator that he said can divide fine restaurants between bankruptcy risks and city stalwarts: Proper ZIP code orientation. Failing to consider the neighborhood vibe when renting out a restaurant space is probably the biggest mistake today’s young hopefuls are making.
“You have to be in touch with your ZIP code,” Vongerichten said. “We can all use ZIP codes to see who’s going to come in regularly. If you’re in midtown, maybe not people from uptown or downtown. It’s those in the 10 blocks around you. Don’t have prices for Madison Avenue if you’re on the Lower East Side.”
Matching New York sophistication
Many restaurants will struggle with foot traffic—and long-term loyalty—if their designs or approach doesn’t align with the lifestyles of their neighbors.
Even back in the mid-1980s, Vongerichten said, people preferred going out to eat rather than cooking at home. “That hasn’t changed,” he said, even if the food itself has become more expensive. The main difference: Back then, the only ethnic food you could find in New York was in Chinatown, he said.
“I try to do diversity—I mean, look at the market today,” Vongerichten said. “Things have changed; there are more restaurants.” Indeed, Vongerichten is a standout among his peers for his eagerness to incorporate new and often unfamiliar flavors to his diners. He has a 14-seat omakase restaurant in Japan, JG Tokyo, as well as French-Indonesian at Vong Kitchen in Jakarta.
But he was still lucky, Vongerichten contended. “In 1986, there was a new wave,” he said. “Le Bernardin opened, bringing a new way of eating seafood. Then came Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud.”
The American palate at the time was far less sophisticated than it is today, which posed a slight challenge. But Vongerichten was nonetheless drawn in because sensed an openness to trying new things—especially in New York
“New Yorkers were always sophisticated,” Vongerichten said. “They always went to Paris, they always went to Italy, to London—to places where they saw something different. I feel like New Yorkers are at an advantage.”
While he admitted to not knowing “about the people in Alabama,” he still thinks today, “the whole country is different,” he added. “There’s a vegetable market in every city. There’s a local chef in every city.”
In a twist, it’s exactly those burgeoning local dining scenes in cities like Portland, Charleston, Nashville, and San Francisco that have made things more difficult for Vongerichten back in New York.
“Before, a lot of young chefs came to New York to learn about the different cuisines,” he recalled. “But now, every city in America has great local chefs. They don’t have to move as much, so we have fewer people coming in from the rest of the country.”
No substitute for hours in the kitchen
Because of the variety of foods on offer, after a 50-year career in restaurants, Vongerichten says today is the golden age. But for those unlucky restaurateurs whose places shut down within a year? It’s a matter of commitment, Vongerichten said; there’s no secret sauce (save for a really good sauce).
Hard work has no substitute; each day, Vongerichten is in the kitchen from 9am until at least 11pm. “If you want to get home at 7:30 and watch TV,” he said, then the chef life “is not for you.”
The thought of hanging up his apron is anathema to Vongerichten, who says he never wants to stop cooking.
Vongerichten acknowledges the difference between vacation-minded French chefs—like Dominique Ansel, who founded the cronut, or Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert—and American business’ hard-nosed sensibilities. Vongerichten said he falls somewhere in the middle. But on the more American side of things, retirement is a distant idea.
“What’s that word—retirement?” he said with a laugh.
“I have a mission in life,” he went on. “When I was a child, I wanted to be a clothing designer or an architect. Then I left school to become a chef. But now I’m doing everything I wanted to do. I’m part of the design with every single lamp, every single plant, every piece of silverware. It’s not just food,” he said.
But it is just the food that keeps him motivated. The actual business of keeping a restaurant afloat, which has broken so many of his peers, can be draining.
If he had his choice, he said, “I’d open a restaurant every month, and I would give someone else a key and tell them to take care of it for life.”
That’s because “the hardest part is not coming up with the concept. It’s to keep it going, and keep it fresh for the term of the lease—15 or 20 years—and be consistent the entire time.”
His dream in retirement (which he admits will likely never materialize) is to operate a restaurant entirely himself.
“It’ll be a counter, with maybe seven or eight seats. I’m going to cook, I’m going to serve you, and I’m going to wash the dishes. It’s going to be 100% me. That’s what I’ll do when I retire. No cost to the people, it’s just for fun,” he said, breaking into a grin. “Open twice a week.”
