Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax spent years talking about opening a restaurant while running a criminal defense law firm, and every time they got serious, another client arrived with a substantial retainer and pulled them back to the courtroom. After a lengthy trial in San Francisco, they decided it was time to stop talking and start doing.
They signed personal guarantees on a lease in Beverly Hills, mortgaged their homes to borrow $250,000 from the bank, and opened California Pizza Kitchen in 1985. In a recent interview, Rosenfield, whose new book is called The California Pizza Kitchen Story, shared that they underestimated almost everything about running a restaurant, having committed to the concept without a chef, a menu, or a management team.
The defining moment came about two months after opening, when they had to terminate the chef-consultant they had hired.
“We realized that unless we could attract, motivate, develop and reward great people, we would never get beyond that first restaurant,” he said. “It would have been one and done.”
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A value worth more than the sales it might cost
The company’s ROCK values, which stand for Respect, Opportunity, Communication, and Kindness, were codified years after CPK opened, to put into words what the founders had practiced from the beginning. In those early days, Rosenfield said, their guiding principle was simply to do the right thing.
The clearest test came in the early 1990s, when restaurants still routinely allowed smoking and operators feared losing customers if they banned it. A manager told the founders he was struggling to find servers willing to work the smoking section. Rosenfield said he and Flax immediately recognized that they had no right to require their team members to work in an environment that exposed them to secondhand smoke.
They banned smoking throughout CPK, becoming, to Rosenfield’s knowledge, the first national restaurant chain to do so.