Opening a restaurant is an insane thing to do.
You spend years obsessing over details nobody should reasonably care about. You argue about chairs. You move light fixtures three inches. You hold entire meetings about a shade of red. Somehow, that bathroom doorknob is a matter of life and death.
You debate neighborhoods and foot traffic. You sign leases and personal guarantees that make you quiver. You sigh as construction budgets go over, knowing profit margins are always razor thin.
But somehow, you convince a group of people to believe in a vision that exists only in your head. Then one day you open the doors, inviting strangers to come in and decide its future. It’s insane, but it's exactly how things should be.
The truth is I love restaurants. I love running them. I love the thousand moving pieces that come together into something that feels alive. Restaurants are the place where those obsessions over details are useful.
As someone who never finished high school, restaurants were the place where I found people who made sense: artists, athletes, dreamers, and even misfits belonged. We begin with great ingredients and try not to get in their way. Over the years, New York brought artists and craftspeople into my life. Humm is a restaurant built by my friends. Their work fills these rooms.
Photograph by Adrian GautAs my third restaurant, HUMM, opened last week, I’m still reflecting on how I ended up here. I wanted to create the kind of restaurant that could grow and change with New York City, but also that restaurant I was searching for — that reminded me of home, and the lessons my mother taught me about cooking.
She wanted to taste the ingredients first. If she had a religion, it was that everything deserved dignity. Carrot, rabbit, lettuce, chicken: no hierarchy. You don't bully a carrot into being a rabbit. You respect every ingredient equally and coax each thing to become itself.
It took me a lifetime to understand what she meant.
Today, I trust her simplicity. At the heart of HUMM, the restaurant is the wood-burning oven. Everything passes through its fire. Vegetables from our farm. Fish and meat from nearby. Whatever arrives in the morning.
I still care obsessively about the food. I always will, but some of my favorite memories in restaurants happened long after the cooking was over and menus were closed.
When I dine out, I rarely remember exactly what I ordered. I remember the night my now-wife wrote her number on a napkin. I remember my daughter's sixteenth birthday. I remember the dinner when Danny Meyer offered us Eleven Madison Park. I remember walking home through New York long after midnight feeling like the city belonged to me.
I remember looking around a room and realizing nobody wanted to leave. The conversation lingered. Another bottle of wine appeared. Someone told one more story. Nobody was thinking about the food anymore, not because it mattered less. It has just become part of something bigger.
I wanted to create a restaurant with that feeling: Of being exactly where I wanted to be, on the kind of night that quietly becomes part of your life.