Larry Forgione: "An American Place" For American Cities

By JULIETTE ROSSANT One of the hottest, and quietest trends among super chefs and celebrity chefs is opening restaurants in cities outside major American metropolises. This week, Larry Forgione has done so, opening An American Place Restaurant in St. Louis's Renaissance Grand Hotel. Deborah Peterson reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the opening of Forgione's first venture outside of New York City. Will we see Olives in Oakland or Daniel's in Dallas or The French Laundry in Phoenix? We already are -- witness Lidia Bastianich's offshoots of Felidia with "Lidia" in Pittsburgh and Kansas City. With greater distribution of quality gourmet ingredients and the growing wealth and desire to dine well in America's smaller cities, chefs are taking a look more and more outside of major metropolitan areas. If these restaurants are primarily "destination" restaurants, where guests go for important occasions, they will have more than enough business. By comparison, destination restaurants that open in tourist areas like Aspen with Olives (see Super Chef p. 107) or Palm Beach with Charlie Palmer's short-lived Aquaterra (see Super Chef pp. 65-66) can't fill their seats in the off-season and have a tough go. (The verdict is still out on Daniel Boulud's still new Cafe Boulud, also in Palm Beach.) Perhaps the restaurants for chefs and their investors to watch for clues as to which cities to expand into are (in the American market) a step down from super chef-level, fine dining restaurants such as the major steak chains of Smith & Wollensky, Ruth's Chris, Fleming's, and Morton's. Like all uncharted territory for chefs, restaurant expansion into second-tier cities has its risks. Wolfgang Puck attempted this in the 1990s with a short-lived ObaChine chain in Beverly Hills, Seattle, and Phoenix (see Super Chef pp. 29-30). Choosing which of America's growth cities in which to open -- location -- remains important, as do the appropriate price level and level of refinement. Of course, Larry (see Super Chef, pp. 52-54) has been doing more than restaurants over the years and has ventured outside of Gotham City -- perhaps most profitably with a company called American Spoon Food, run by Justin Rashid, based in Michigan, and producing largely bottled, preserved ("spoon") foods. Press: St. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis Business Journal Sauce Magazine Riverfront Times Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, Larry Forgione --> back to Super Chef