#7: How Andy Pforzheimer Scaled Barcelona Wine Bar and Bartaco from Fine Dining Roots

Daniel Tsentsiper (00:00.167) into the conversation. Awesome. Andy, welcome to the show. How's it going? Andy Pforzheimer (00:05.422) Great. Nice to be here. Daniel Tsentsiper (00:08.008) Awesome. Listen, I am so excited to have this conversation with you. I kind of stayed up all night just thinking about all the stuff I wanted to ask you. Before we kind of dive into all the details, all your amazing stories in the restaurant industry, let's take a step back. Before the show started, we talked a little bit about what you were studying in college. Can you walk us back to maybe the beginning? to us about what inspired you to go into the restaurant industry and maybe... one of your first jobs that you had, like what was the building blocks for where you are today? Andy Pforzheimer (00:43.118) My first restaurant job was I was a dishwasher. There was only one restaurant in the one nice restaurant in the town I grew up in and I washed dishes there because I thought it was I was too old to be a paperboy and the first job he gave me was he gave me a shovel and a hot water hose and boosted me up into the dumpster and and left me there for the afternoon to like dislodge all the crap in the dumpster. And I was 14 or 15. I didn't know any better. So I spent the afternoon in the dumpster. And that was my first restaurant job. And I came back the next day. And he kind of was surprised to see me the next day and put me in the dish pit. yeah, I loved working. I still like working the dish pit. And so then, I mean, that was in high school. Then. Daniel Tsentsiper (01:27.253) You showed up. Andy Pforzheimer (01:41.646) I was wrestling in high school and my, you know, have to, I don't know if you know anything about wrestling, but you have to, well, you have to lose weight all the time, right? And you're always counting calories in order to make weight for something. And I would come home and my mother would be making whatever for dinner and I would say, well, I can't eat that. And I need to have this. And she would, she eventually said, you know what, this is what's for dinner. You want something else? Daniel Tsentsiper (01:48.95) You have to be very meticulous about what you eat. You have to lose weight. Andy Pforzheimer (02:10.06) You make it. So I made all my own dinners through my junior and senior year of high school. And again, I really liked it. I liked it. I got to college. It was the one thing I liked to do. Didn't really want to be in college, but there were a few things that I thought were fun. But I worked as a prep cook at a place called Paco's Tacos. I moved from prep cook to. Line cook, which basically meant you put things in the microwave. And we had a manager who was continually dropping acid and coming to back and putting cockroaches in the microwave and then putting it into a weight to make them explode. oh, he was an interesting guy. used to put marshmallows in ketchup squeeze bottles and put them in the microwave, which is a lot of fun if you've never done that. Daniel Tsentsiper (02:41.395) Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (02:56.596) Not the best mentor, I'm assuming. Definitely. Daniel Tsentsiper (03:06.569) Yeah, never done that before. Andy Pforzheimer (03:07.64) That was kind of my, no, that was my cooking career. But I liked it. I liked doing that even when I didn't like being in school. And then I was on the humor lampoon, the humor magazine, the lampoon at school. And they had a tradition of these black tie dinners where they would do crazy, know, people would dance on the tables and smash plates and wear tuxedos. And I volunteered to be the person who cooked those dinners. And I had an old copy of the New York Times cookbook and I would cook for like 70 people. I had no idea what I was doing. I had one other guy who helped me. And this was the most fun I had. Then I failed a class and school was not happy with me. I was, okay, this is not, I want to cook. And I was... in a restaurant in New Orleans on winter break with somebody. And I was explaining this to a chef who came out and wanted to know why a couple of teenagers were in his restaurant. And he said, well, you've got to go to France. You have to learn how to cook in France. I said, this is pre-internet, pre-everything. I said, I don't know anybody in France. So he gave me a name and an address. I wrote to the guy, and I said, I want to come work for you. And I never heard back. And I told my parents I was going to leave school and go to France and learn how to cook, which completely freaked them out. This is 1980, and that was not what you did in 1980. And I came to an understanding with my parents that I would finish school. I would go to France, do this thing. I would come back, and I would graduate. That's what they needed to hear. So that's what I did. I finished my sophomore year, went to France to go track this guy down. When I got to the restaurant, it was closed. Again, no internet. Hadn't heard from anybody. I just showed up at this address in France. I bicycled there. And it turned out they were on their August vacation. So I hung around for a couple of days in this little town until they came back. I went to the guy. said, hey, I'm the guy who wrote you that letter. And he said, he said, Daniel Tsentsiper (05:27.892) Who the heck are you? Andy Pforzheimer (05:29.23) Yeah, no, he said, I got the letter. said, I can't get You can't work here. You have no working papers. You're not allowed to work in France. And so I thought quickly and said, well, I have no money and nowhere to stay. And I came here to do this. it's going to take me, I have to write my parents. And it's going to take weeks to get money. And can I at least stay here? He was very nice about it. He said, yeah, well, write your parents. Daniel Tsentsiper (05:34.471) Yeah Andy Pforzheimer (05:58.614) Until then, you can sleep in the garage, and you can't cook or do anything, but I'll find you stuff to do. So he gave me all the crappy jobs. I cleaned his car. I mopped out the walk-ins. And as it turns out, his daughter was a year younger than I was. And she was trying to learn English because in France in 1980, that's how you got ahead. and they didn't really teach English. They did a bad job of it in her school. So I would teach her English in the afternoon in between my stints pulling fish scales off the wall. And after a couple of weeks, I couldn't lie about it anymore. said, OK, my parents have written me, but I'm wondering if I can stay through the end of the fall or something. And he said, well, if you keep teaching my daughter English, you can stay. And then. I was 19 and most of the people there were 16 and 17. They didn't want to be there. I did want to be there. I was just a better worker than they were. And we came to an understanding. He let me stay. And if we were ever raided by immigration, I had to go dive under the bed. But we never were. And yeah, so I stayed there for a year and a half. And I became the chef plus in. And I got back to the States. I finished my degree because I said I would. I worked in. Daniel Tsentsiper (07:11.618) Yeah, thank God that didn't happen. Andy Pforzheimer (07:27.874) a restaurant in Cambridge. mean, coming back from France with a year and a half classic education at a Michel Astaire restaurant, it was not hard for me to a job in Cambridge. Yeah, and then when I graduated, I set out to go see if I could do this for a living. So that's Daniel Tsentsiper (07:35.369) Yeah. sure. I'm sure. Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (07:47.967) What was it, I guess, what was it about that experience in France that made you want to come back and actually pursue cooking as your profession? What really clicked when you were there learning from this chef? Andy Pforzheimer (08:02.732) I mean, you know, the people ask me about, I want to be, I want to open a restaurant. I want to be in the restaurant business. And I immediately tell them, it's terrible. You're going to hate it. Don't do it. You know, this is like, go be a dishwasher and do this whole thing. Because my feeling is, if I can talk you out of it, don't try. Like, you're going to fail, right? And if a year in the dish pit and prepping and the rest of that, if that makes you unhappy, Daniel Tsentsiper (08:21.867) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (08:30.67) Get out. You're going to fail. I don't know is the answer. I did this 90 hours a week. We were there by 8. We didn't leave till midnight. We had one day off. And Sunday, which was lunch only as opposed to lunch and dinner, we spent all of Sunday from about 4 o'clock in the afternoon till 10 cleaning. That was the week. Six days, 12 hours a day, more than 12 Daniel Tsentsiper (08:52.961) Thank Andy Pforzheimer (09:00.718) 16 hours a day. And I had a great time. So you asked me, mean, so there wasn't anything that, it wasn't necessarily something that made me say, I'm going to do this. It was more, there was nothing that made me say, I'm not going to do this. Daniel Tsentsiper (09:15.647) Yeah. I guess it weeds people out early on is if you, like you said, yeah. So if you can't, if you can't handle the grunt work, there is absolutely no way that, you can make it all the way to eventually owning your own restaurant. So you came back to, you came back to Cambridge, you started working in, you know, in a real, in a real, would say like real kitchen in the U S, how long were you there for? And what did you, what made you decide to keep going? Andy Pforzheimer (09:18.774) It weeds people out. Andy Pforzheimer (09:40.078) Well, was in class, right? So I worked in this restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday morning because otherwise I had class. I was 20 hours week or so in addition to actually finishing school. And as we talked about, I was taking intensive Russian course and I had real course load. But I looked forward, I would go to class all week, but I really looked forward to getting you know, putting all my whites and making salads and pastas on Friday and Saturday night. And then after, of course, you know, I was a college student, so like, the world didn't start for me until I'm nine at night anyway. So I would get off work at 10 or 11, and I would have, especially Saturday, they'd give me like any leftover filet or stuff like that. And I would just go straight to somebody's party, you know, with steaks in my hand. No, it was a great life. Yeah. Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (10:33.12) guys. Daniel Tsentsiper (10:36.576) I'm sure you were definitely the popular one. And what happened there? What happened from there? Where'd you go after that first job? Andy Pforzheimer (10:40.078) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (10:44.206) So in 1984, when this was, there was no such thing as, again, no internet, no clue what was going on in the world. There was no food TV, there was no chefs' regrants. The only people writing about chefs at all were Craig Claiborne and the New York Times, and he had sort of three or four that he followed. So it was kind of fun to, I'd never met any of them, but. Daniel Tsentsiper (11:10.217) and Andy Pforzheimer (11:13.518) I could read about what other people were doing in food. But John Mariani would travel the country. This was very unusual. Again, nobody cared about restaurants. Nobody cared about chefs. Nobody cared about food. But John Mariani would travel the country, and he would write an article once a year for Playboy on the 25 best restaurants in the United States. It was the only thing like it. It was a gag. There was nothing. But I clipped this article and I took the top five and I said, okay, I'm gonna go get a job in one of these. three of them were French. And one was in New York, so I went straight there to Luteste and Andre Soltner laughed at me. And I spoke perfect French and I said, I'm trained over there. He's like, yeah, no, I don't hire gringos. Daniel Tsentsiper (12:04.828) Yeah. Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (12:10.542) And he was nice about it. And it's funny, because if you talk to chefs of a certain generation, I was talking to Thomas Keller about this, it's like every American chef that you might recognize the name of, who's on TV, or has restaurants, whatever, all of us were at the back door of Lutece at some point being told, away. It's the one thing we all share in common. Daniel Tsentsiper (12:34.354) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (12:40.206) So back in those days, you could buy a train ticket for unlimited travel in the United States for a month for $99. So I bought one of those things. And then I went to all the other. I went to Chicago, because the number two restaurant on the list was a place called Le Francais in Wheeling, Illinois. And I got on the train. I saw Wheeling, Illinois. And I said, uh-uh, no, got back on the train. Yeah. And then I went to a place called Les Anges. Daniel Tsentsiper (13:01.576) Yeah, I'm outta here. Andy Pforzheimer (13:09.289) on Pacific Coast Highway in... Santa Monica, which was great. I talked to the owner. He offered me a job in like three minutes. I said, okay, well gotta keep doing my train tour I paid for. So I went to the number four place, which was a restaurant called Santa Fe Bar and Grill. It was the only non-French restaurant on the list. It was called the Santa Fe Bar and Grill and it was run by this guy named Jeremiah Tower and he was doing this incredible food. Daniel Tsentsiper (13:20.486) Yeah, you gotta shop around a little bit more. This is too easy. Andy Pforzheimer (13:40.11) Mariani was all over it. And I got to Santa Fe Bar and Grill and they said, no, know, Jeremiah's not here. He's at the new restaurant. Stars. So I said, yeah, no problem. So I was in San Francisco. I was in Berkeley. And Santa Fe Bar and was in Berkeley. And then Stars was in San Francisco. So I got on the bar and I went from Berkeley to San. You know, I had no idea my way around, but I figured out how to find it. Daniel Tsentsiper (13:47.838) and Daniel Tsentsiper (13:51.913) That's in San Francisco, right? That's right. Yep. That's right. Andy Pforzheimer (14:06.158) And I walk in the door, and they said, oh, he's not here. He's at Santa Fe Bar and Grill, which I found out later was what they did just to make people go away. And I said, oh, that's too bad. I was hoping for a job. He was like, yeah, no, we're not hiring. And I said, oh, OK. Is there someone I can do? And I don't take no for an answer very easily. So I said, is there someone I can talk to? And they got sick of me, so they sent out the chef to cuisine. And he said, do you have a resume? And I did. And the first two things on it are went to Harvard, trained in France. And he looked at it he goes, you went to Harvard? Yeah, he goes, hold on. He disappears. Comes back out with Jeremiah this time, who has been in the back. And Jeremiah went to Harvard in 1969, right? So he was intrigued. As it turns out, that was a strike against me. I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, I didn't know that at the time. He just didn't, you know, he had an OK experience at Harvard. Daniel Tsentsiper (14:44.806) Yeah, the whole time. Daniel Tsentsiper (14:50.095) Mm, I see. Daniel Tsentsiper (14:57.247) really? Why is that? Andy Pforzheimer (15:04.398) didn't think it was going to produce any chefs who work hard, which then there's some legitimacy to that. But he was intrigued by the French part. So we talked about France for a while. then he said, was it like a Tuesday or something like that? He said, can you start Thursday? Can you start Thursday? And I said, sure, of course I can start Thursday. Now remember, I'm halfway, I'm all the way across the country, halfway through a train trip. Daniel Tsentsiper (15:05.735) Thank you. Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (15:20.647) in Andy Pforzheimer (15:33.646) He's asking if I can start a... Yeah, I said sure, yeah of course. I didn't ask what it paid. I said okay. And so I left, I said thank you, and I went straight from there to the airport where you could get a $99 ticket on People Express, I think. You had to go out of Oakland. Flew home, put all my stuff in a bag, because I didn't have my real stuff with me. Daniel Tsentsiper (15:33.808) And you just agree to a job full time. Andy Pforzheimer (16:04.982) Put it in a bag, went back to the airport, got another $99 ticket, flew back out, had nowhere to stay. I had met a guy on a train who said, ah, if you're in San Francisco, you should come visit. So I called him. And he said, yeah, I guess you can sleep on the couch. So that's what I did. So I was back by Thursday morning. And I showed up at 1 o'clock and went to work. Daniel Tsentsiper (16:25.0) Wow. Well, and it seems like the early on in any chef's career is just pounding doors, putting yourself out there and being comfortable with, you know, taking the rejection. And what I liked a lot about your story is that what are they looking for? What are they looking for? So you didn't, you didn't actually train to be a chef, right? You went to go work while you were in school and you got hands on experience. Andy Pforzheimer (16:33.975) yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (16:39.406) Well, why would anybody hire somebody with no experience? You've got to talk your way in. Daniel Tsentsiper (16:53.543) For someone like Jeremiah, what is he typically looking for when he's hiring someone starting out? Is it something on their resume or is it just likeability factor? He just liked your tenacity and you were able to win him over. What are they looking for? Andy Pforzheimer (17:09.518) Well, I think it's a lowest common denominator business. I mean, the people who work in your kitchen are, sometimes you get lucky and they're smart and hardworking, but 90 % of the time, you come in one day and where's the guy who's supposed to work the grill? he's in jail. I mean, that's normal. So I probably wasn't gonna be in jail. I survived a year and a half in France, which means, Daniel Tsentsiper (17:14.769) Mm-hmm. Daniel Tsentsiper (17:35.42) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (17:38.498) I mean, he knew what that meant. You work your ass off. That's not something that everybody who walks in the back door of a restaurant in San Francisco, especially California, which is famous for the work ethic that is only okay. As it turns out, I worked in California for three and a half years in restaurants. And as it turns out, as I found out, if you walk in with any kind of a New York City background, at least back then, Daniel Tsentsiper (17:42.149) Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (17:52.519) Yeah, I agree. Daniel Tsentsiper (18:03.419) Easy. Andy Pforzheimer (18:07.864) They hired you. It's just a whole different work ethic. Jeremiah didn't need anybody to come up with new dishes or make sauces for him. He needed somebody who was going to show up every day and do exactly what he said until he said stop. That's what he was hiring for. But who also knew the difference between, no, you can't put that on a plate and send it out. So I think I checked those boxes. And maybe somebody had quit the day before. But the restaurant was like, Daniel Tsentsiper (18:25.862) Mm-hmm. Daniel Tsentsiper (18:36.572) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (18:37.514) a month old. He just opened. didn't know any of this. It turned out to be, this was at Starz. This was at Starz. Starz, and he had taken his whole team with him from Santa Fe to get Starz open. And some of them had to go back to Santa Fe because he was running both of them. So I think after that first month, and this is fairly typical when you open a new restaurant, the staff that you hire for day one. Daniel Tsentsiper (18:42.502) This was at Stars or this was at Santa Fe, which is where's the restaurant you got the job at Stars? Okay. Yeah. Amen. Andy Pforzheimer (19:06.392) They tend to wash out. mean, you often have 100 % turnover in the first month, right? Because almost by definition, people who don't have a job and are sitting around waiting for you to open probably aren't the most in-demand cooks out there. Yeah. And so he had an opening, and I walked in at the right time and got lucky. Daniel Tsentsiper (19:08.091) and Daniel Tsentsiper (19:23.132) That makes sense. Daniel Tsentsiper (19:28.773) Good for you. And what did you learn with with Jeremiah? What was some? What was this was like the first like, you you're working for an acclaimed chef. I'm sure you learned a ton about standards about putting out good food. What were some of the highlights from that experience? Andy Pforzheimer (19:32.971) Everything, Andy Pforzheimer (19:41.262) Yeah, that's what you learn. I work for Jeremiah, work for Ann Rosensweig, I work for Martha Stewart. And this is what you learn from all of them, is that's not okay. It's like, yeah, but we have 15 plates to put out and 15 more behind that and the stove broke and it's like, doesn't matter, that's not okay. This is what great people, this is what they have in common. Like, I have a vision in my head. If it isn't that vision, you can't, don't do it, right? And that's a hard lesson to learn. mean, and you certainly argue that I never learned it to the extent that these people lived it, right? I wish I had that level of intolerance, but to have that level of intolerance, you also have other stuff going on in your life which doesn't make you as happy as you could be. So it's a trade-off. But with Jeremiah, I remember vividly he was manic about the salads, because he would get them from these farms in Marin, and they were beautiful, and they came right. He wouldn't buy anything premixed. You'd have to get the heads, you'd trim them, and all the bad leaves off. And he went crazy. If he saw bad, like a wilted leaf, you know the slimy leaves that sometimes are in there? Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (20:57.24) Right. Daniel Tsentsiper (21:03.2) Well, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (21:08.512) making nuts and the first time I made, I was on the Garde Manger and I put a salad together and there's one of those in there and I might not have seen it, it's possible, or I might have seen it and gone, man, I gotta make a lot of salads and I lost track of where, it's in there somewhere but I don't know where, right? Normal pump out food stuff and Jeremiah came along and sure enough, he's looking at a whole, like 20 plates and boom, right there, there's that leaf, there's that leaf. Daniel Tsentsiper (21:34.702) Hahaha Andy Pforzheimer (21:36.11) And he just reaches in to the salad, and has very long fingers, and he reaches in, he pulls out this slimy leaf, and he holds it right up to my mouth, just like that, like touching my lips. And he says, this is for you. And I'm like, ha ha ha, yeah sure. And he goes, no no no, eat it. And I wasn't quite sure what to do, and he said, eat it. And I stared at him he said, you wanted someone else to eat this, right? Daniel Tsentsiper (22:04.29) Yeah Andy Pforzheimer (22:05.58) I was like, yeah, I guess so. I opened my mouth and I ate it. And of course, if you've ever eaten a slimy lettuce leaf, it's not nice, right? And so I ate it. He looked at me and he went, and he walked away. Didn't say anything. But man, you want to learn a lesson about picking through salad? Yeah, that was old school. Yeah. So that's what working for Jeremiah was like. Daniel Tsentsiper (22:22.585) Yeah, I'm sure that's not I love that And I'm sure it's a culmination of, mean, it's, you learn all these little things that eventually you take on, you know, to your own business, right? You open up, we can talk about all the different restaurants you've opened throughout your career, but you pick up those lessons working for the best of the best, right? And oftentimes from speaking with restaurant owners, I see that those lessons are, are learned the hard way, right? You're put into that situation where you're confronted with. Andy Pforzheimer (22:51.106) Yeah, yes. Daniel Tsentsiper (23:00.953) Maybe it was in Europe and your part in that moment. It was an oversight. You didn't see that piece of lettuce or maybe you did see it. You deliberately thought that it was okay because amongst the sea of all these lettuce, you know, lettuce heads, one little mistake doesn't really mean a lot, but for someone like Jeremiah, that's everything, right? It's one bad customer experience can completely, you know, completely ruin his image. So Andy Pforzheimer (23:20.992) Yeah, I mean... When I, right, so when I was running 20 restaurants or 30 restaurants at a time, you have to break these things down into sort of teaching mantras because you end up saying the same thing over and over over again. But we had a few at Barcelona and Bartaco and one of them was what you tolerate becomes your standard. I have 100 things that are, yeah, right? It's like if you're, but that's not a cooking thing, that's an everything thing. Daniel Tsentsiper (23:34.892) is it Daniel Tsentsiper (23:45.974) I that. I heard you say that. Yeah, I love that. Daniel Tsentsiper (23:53.93) No, that's right. Andy Pforzheimer (23:55.276) Right? If you run a busy operation and there's something going on and it's not the way it's supposed to be and you go, ugh, I'm too busy, I can't deal with it, guess what? That's the new standard. Because everyone saw you look away. So they all know, well, but that's okay, right? And that stuff kills you. Kills you. And so, yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (24:08.888) That's right. That's right. That's right. Daniel Tsentsiper (24:19.436) That's right. That's right. And, go ahead. Andy Pforzheimer (24:25.784) Well, I was going say the other thing that I found myself doing all the time as a multi-unit owner was I would say to somebody, OK, I'm curious now, Daniel. Like, I just saw what you did. So there's one of two things going on. One, even though we have manuals and we've this conversation 100 times, you didn't know you weren't supposed to do that. So that's option A. Option B. Daniel Tsentsiper (24:48.492) Mm-hmm. Andy Pforzheimer (24:53.974) You knew you weren't supposed to do it, but you disagree. So you're just not going to do it. That's option B, right? And option C, you knew you weren't supposed to do it. You agree that you're not supposed to do it, but you did it anyway. So it's one of those three things. And what I'd love to know is which one is it. Daniel Tsentsiper (25:15.468) and Andy Pforzheimer (25:19.106) And anybody who's worked for me has heard this conversation. And of course, everybody's answer is, well, it's none of those. It's actually, no. No, it is one of those. I guarantee it is one of those. I want to know which one. Daniel Tsentsiper (25:30.712) Right. Would you appreciate if someone, sorry, Would you appreciate if someone knows that something is a rule, but deliberately doesn't do it and then challenges you on that rule because they believe that rule is either flawed or can be improved upon? What would you, What would you say to someone like that, that is questioning the status quo? I'm sure you've dealt with hundreds of those types of people. Andy Pforzheimer (25:51.63) That's, sure, sure. mean, if you're smart and you're hearing this question for the first time, you're going for number two, because number two at least has, there's a little bit of wiggle room number two, but number two, answer is, well, the way to handle that is you ask me, why do we do this? Or you tell me I don't want to do this. We had this conversation before you just go ahead and wing it. It's not really OK. It's better than the other two. Daniel Tsentsiper (25:58.954) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (26:21.922) But even so, Daniel, surely you knew that since this is a rule and it's in the manual and we talked about it yesterday, if you said, I'm just not going to do that, you probably should have said something to me, right? Shouldn't we have had this conversation? That would be the response. Daniel Tsentsiper (26:38.979) We're going to take a bit of a fast track here. Knowing your story, I know you've worked at many different restaurants and we can double tap into all of those, but I think it would be a very long, long episode. Let's kind of go into around what was the 1996, 1995, when you were starting Barcelona Wine Bar. Tell us about that story. You were working with Sasha and how did you guys meet and what was that? that pivotal moment that made you guys decide to open up a restaurant together. Andy Pforzheimer (27:12.792) So Sasha was not a restaurant guy. He was a professional tennis player. But he came from an Argentine family, and he loved to cook, and he loved to eat, and he loved to entertain. He would have 20 people over his house, and he made amazing. He was a really good cook. And more importantly than being a really good cook, he was really good eater. He just had a phenomenal palate. Not only I like this, I don't like this, but I like this because, and I don't like this because. He was really good at it. Daniel Tsentsiper (27:18.837) Olaf. Andy Pforzheimer (27:41.57) So he always wanted to have a restaurant. But nobody would back him for a He had this idea for an Argentine kind of grill restaurant. Nobody would back him, but he did meet a guy who said, well, I'll tell you what, if you come work for my new place as a maitre d, get a little experience, then I'll back you. So he did that. A year went by, two years went by, the guy kind of was jerking him around. And finally, Sasha said, OK. I'm going to quit. I quit. I'm going to go do this myself. he found a friend of his had a tiles. He owned a building. There was a tile store that was going on business. And he said, you want to put a restaurant in here, you can do it. And we had a mutual friend. There was a guy who had wanted to open a restaurant a couple years earlier, had come to me. I said, I won't do it. But I'll help you with write a business plan if you need to raise money. Again, he never didn't know how a restaurant worked or how it ran or how you put money together. So I had done that, and he'd opened a place. so this guy had told Sasha, if you need to raise money, go see Andy. He'll help you put your business plan together, which I did. But then because the space that he had been offered was like 120 feet long and 15 feet wide, it was a tile store. It was very long, skinny space. And there's no way you can't do a restaurant. 120 feet long, 15 feet wide, but what you can do is a tapas bar. And Sasha had lived in Spain for six years. And so he thought, okay, well, if that's the only space I can get, I'm just gonna do a really long bar and I'll serve food behind that. Which at the time, there were no tapas bars in the United States and I didn't know what it was. I'd never heard of one, but he showed me the business plan and the menu. And I thought, oh, this is cool. You mean like you can just have lots of little things? I love to eat like this. This is how I go out and eat. I just thought it was really cool. And I said, I'll tell you what. If you want a partner who knows how to actually create this thing and put it together, I'll do this 50-50 with you. And so he said, great. And so we both raised money. And we built it together. So that's how that started. I just loved the idea. Daniel Tsentsiper (30:00.117) And where'd you guys raise your money from? Friends and family? Or you said you had a third partner, right? I came in. Andy Pforzheimer (30:07.69) No, that was the second restaurant. didn't happen. That happened later. For this one, yeah, friends and family. Checks from $5,000 to $25,000. I don't think we had a check for more than $25,000. Took a while. Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (30:10.153) I see. Daniel Tsentsiper (30:20.946) I'm sure that if you're not someone with dozens of restaurants under your belt, that access to capital from like a bank or even an angel is very hard to come by. So you kind of have to scrap all the money you can from the friends and families and fools to open up that first place. Andy Pforzheimer (30:39.212) That's right, yeah. mean, the first restaurant, even Angels, no. Angels need a track record. Well, Angels are professional investors, right? mean, they're not doing it for love. They're doing it for money. And your first batch of people, they do it for love. Daniel Tsentsiper (30:43.882) They're very hesitant. That's right. Daniel Tsentsiper (30:56.118) Yeah. And I always, I also hear that the location is as important as the food. The location you guys found wasn't ideal, but did it work out in the area? Was it like a good storefront? Like What made you guys decide to go with that location given that it wasn't like the best layout. Andy Pforzheimer (30:57.71) Andy Pforzheimer (31:16.878) Well, I mean, I can answer that in retrospect as somebody who understands what restaurant real estate should look like, and I know what was good and bad about it, but at the time, we didn't know any of that stuff. It had three things going for it. One, was in this sort of a gentrifying neighborhood. It was an old crappy neighborhood that people were opening little restaurants and bars in. As it turns out, that's not a very good reason to do it. It was across the street from a movie theater. Daniel Tsentsiper (31:25.899) Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (31:30.462) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (31:47.214) eight screen movie theater. And we thought, OK, it's a bar with food that you can eat really quickly. This is great because people will be coming and going all day. That was a really good reason to do it. And it had a whole lot of parking, which was also a really good reason to do it. So two out of three of the reasons we did it were actually good reasons. Daniel Tsentsiper (31:58.995) Okay. Daniel Tsentsiper (32:08.371) And when you look for now, guess in retrospect, when you're, when you are looking for a new location, what are the sorts of components, different characteristics that you're looking for when opening up a new location? Andy Pforzheimer (32:22.542) Well, I mean, you have demographic components, and then you have sort of curb appeal components. And they're different. So the demographic component is all about what is this? Is it a pizza parlor? Is it a fancy French restaurant? I mean, you want to be in the area where your customer goes out to have that kind of food, right? I mean, for a little, you know, we went through this mistake period of wanting to be where our customer lived, but that's actually not where you want to be. You want to be where they go eat. You know, because sometimes these neighborhood restaurants don't do a lot of business, but the mall downtown is where everybody, everyone drives out of their neighborhood and goes to the mall downtown. We had two restaurants in DC. We opened one in, on 14th Street, which was sort of the nightlife. Daniel Tsentsiper (32:58.278) and Daniel Tsentsiper (33:04.709) All right. Andy Pforzheimer (33:16.43) the new nightlife district in 2015 or whenever we opened it, killed it. Phenomely busy restaurant, like from day one. Couldn't believe the amount of sales we were doing. And a significant number of our clientele came from Northwest Washington, sort of up near Chevy Chase and that sort of Wisconsin corridor. So for our second one, we looked up there and we found a space, couldn't have been more dead center for where our clientele lived. And it didn't do all that well because all the people who lived next door went down to 14th Street to eat because that was the cool part of town. So we learned that lesson. Yeah, yeah. So you want to be there. So in a demographic sense, you have to understand who are your customers, right? What is the use case? When did they use you? And when they use a restaurant like that, where are they going? And you want to be there. So that's the demographic part. The curb appeal part, do you need a patio? Do you need one big? Daniel Tsentsiper (33:47.444) I see. Yeah. Got it. Andy Pforzheimer (34:12.302) you know, kind of square room, or can you live with cut up space and a long room? Can you live on two floors, right? We decided for Barcelona specifically, actually, and for Bartaco, we liked an open square space because we generate activity from the bar. We want you to see the bar from everywhere because that keeps the place fun. And in a long skinny space, you can't do that. You have to put a wall up and... Daniel Tsentsiper (34:19.942) in Daniel Tsentsiper (34:27.764) Hmm. to Andy Pforzheimer (34:41.038) You can't see people go past the bar, and then they're in this other part of the restaurant. And it's kind of quiet back there, and that's not why they came. So we look for as open a square shape patio. We always want as much free space as possible. So you want sidewalks and concrete pads in the back. And yeah, there's a lot of components to it. Daniel Tsentsiper (34:44.722) Right. Daniel Tsentsiper (34:55.293) in the air. Andy Pforzheimer (35:11.256) good real estate, we want to be next to complementary uses. Maybe not competitive, but complementary. So we want to be next to Lululemon for Bartaka, because it's the same customer. So things like that. Daniel Tsentsiper (35:23.636) right. Amazing. And so I heard that Sasha was the, he was definitely the visionary. He's the one that came up with most of the layouts came up with all the flair and the finesse. You were more in the back of the house, right? Actually running the ship. Could you tell us a little bit about how you guys kind of delegated, how you separated your roles and what were you in charge of and what was Sasha in charge of? What were like the early days of, you know, building that first restaurant? Andy Pforzheimer (35:53.87) Well, in the early days, we both thought we were in charge of everybody, of everything. So we fought all the time. But eventually we sort of came to an agreement on this one. And he was the creative, right? And I was operations. And operations was everything from finance to menu. So we had these very clear delineations, but there were always these overlap places, right? And that's where we fought. We didn't fight in the other parts, because I would say, Daniel Tsentsiper (36:05.522) Okay. Daniel Tsentsiper (36:18.61) All right. Andy Pforzheimer (36:23.212) I really think I don't like this color. And he would say, I do like this color, and this is my call. And I would say, OK, you're right. I don't agree with you, but this is 100 % your call. And vice versa. He would say, don't think we should buy chicken from this guy. And I would say, yeah, well, I disagree with you, and I get to make the decision. So those were easy. The hard ones were the overlaps. And the overlaps tended to be in two places. One is the menu. I have very strong opinions about the menu since I have to cook it. He has very strong opinions about the menu since he had the taste buds. And I learned to work around that. learned to trust him. When he said, this dish isn't good, you should do this, this, this, I would say, OK, stop. You get to say, this dish isn't good. Daniel Tsentsiper (37:08.882) Hmm. Andy Pforzheimer (37:19.116) You don't get to say, here's how to fix it, because that's not yours. But I'll defer to you on this isn't good. Let me go make another one. See if you like that one better. You can give me suggestions, but you can't tell me anything about the making of it. So we would kind of finesse it like that. And the other one is the layout of the restaurant. So when you design a restaurant, you have two different things. You have sort of a top down view. Daniel Tsentsiper (37:36.817) Right. Andy Pforzheimer (37:48.568) Picture a blueprint, like maybe with circles for tables and things like that as a top down view. And then you have an elevation view, which is now you're looking at what's on the walls, what's on the ceiling. And I had to sign off on the layout view, on the top down view. I didn't have any say at all on the elevation. Daniel Tsentsiper (38:00.122) in Daniel Tsentsiper (38:13.678) Yeah, the decor and everything on the walls. Andy Pforzheimer (38:15.758) Yeah, I mean, yeah. But I had a lot of say on the seats. We used to fight about chairs. He liked these really cool Eames chairs and Bauhaus chairs. And I was like, I don't care what they are as long as they aren't more than 17 inches wide because I can't get six people at a 42 inch round if they're more than 17 inches wide. Daniel Tsentsiper (38:25.596) Is it? Daniel Tsentsiper (38:42.514) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (38:43.768) So we've, or I don't want the bathroom back there because people have to walk through here to get there. And he would say, well, if you put the bathroom over there, then I can see it from over here. Right, so we would have, you know, I'm looking top down, he's looking sideways. Daniel Tsentsiper (38:48.623) Right, right. Daniel Tsentsiper (38:59.314) Yeah. And I'm sure for that first location, it was such a tiny, skinny, low square footage space. It was very tough to have that freedom to decide where everything goes. But for the next few restaurants, what did they look like? Did you guys go for a much bigger space for your second and third? Or did you also kind of given the fact that you were still growing constrained by capital and constrained by choice? Andy Pforzheimer (39:22.586) Yeah, it was constrained by capital. everything was second gen. We took over restaurants, right? Which always cost much more than you think it was going to, but we had very defined budgets. I we only had as much money as there was in the bank, and would go to the... Then I would go get a loan if I possibly could and put those two things together. That's all the money you have. I mean, the curse of being much bigger is you have a budget, but then you blow it by a million dollars because you can. And there's always something you want to do. But in those first few, we couldn't do that. The first one where we had a really blank canvas that wasn't an existing restaurant was New Haven. And we hired an architect, which we'd never done before. And Sasha and the architect fought like cats and dogs. But it was beautiful. mean, that came out beautifully. It cost us much more than we thought we were going to spend. But it also made more. So it worked out. The New Haven was our fourth or fifth restaurant. And that was the first one where we actually Daniel Tsentsiper (40:12.187) Mm-hmm. Andy Pforzheimer (40:21.186) We actually had this piece of paper in front of us, and we thought, knowing what we know about flow and everything else, how would we design something from nothing? And Sasha's idea was to really divide this square into four quadrants. And the top left was a kitchen. The top right was private space. Daniel Tsentsiper (40:41.018) Mm-hmm. Daniel Tsentsiper (40:48.752) and Andy Pforzheimer (40:49.368) flex private space where we could do parties. The bottom left was the bar and the bottom right was the dining room. So from the dining room you could see the bar going this way, but you could also access the private space for a busy Saturday night. And the kitchen, so everybody could see everything from everywhere. And there was actually a spot sort of towards the center of the square where we put the host stand. Because that, well, but that way the host didn't have to keep leaving to see. Daniel Tsentsiper (41:12.4) Oh, Right, right. can see the entire restaurant. Wow. Amazing. Andy Pforzheimer (41:20.722) Yeah, I have a table getting up soon. Yeah, so that one was the first one where we actually put sort of a scientific hat on and did it the right way. Daniel Tsentsiper (41:30.192) And what was the timeframe from the first one in 96 to, I guess we're talking the one, this is your fourth one by now. How long did it take you guys to get to that many lookage? 2005. Yeah. Well, and was that considered, I mean, for Barcelona wine bar, I would assume it's a very... Andy Pforzheimer (41:37.39) The fifth one was probably 2005, so nine years. Daniel Tsentsiper (41:54.018) It's not like opening up a fast casual restaurant, right? There's a lot that goes into it you have to scale slowly. What would you consider that the pace of opening up restaurants conservative and slow or did you guys going kind of like hockey stick going quickly for that type of fine dining establishment? Andy Pforzheimer (42:10.478) Well, mean, doing one every two years and then one every one year. It was really just about money and talent. It's always only about money and talent. I I spend my life now mentoring people who grow too fast. That's all they ever do. sometimes you find out how fast you can grow by growing too fast. So it's not always the end of the world. But I'm a firm advocate in sort of Daniel Tsentsiper (42:19.78) Right. Andy Pforzheimer (42:39.118) sort of almost a wave theory of doing this. It's like you have a growth year, and then you have a stability year. You don't want to put two or three growth years in a row together, because you outstrip your talent really fast. And then you start doing a bad job. then it takes two years. Like from the time you look at a location and say, I like that, to the day you open the door, two years, sometimes three. Right? Daniel Tsentsiper (42:44.898) I save. I save. Daniel Tsentsiper (43:07.087) I Andy Pforzheimer (43:08.15) You can get in a lot of trouble saying, I want to open eight restaurants, right? Because two years from now when they start opening one after the other, you may or not be ready for it. Daniel Tsentsiper (43:17.645) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I see. OK, so when did you know you were, you know, you were ready to kind of expand really quickly? Andy Pforzheimer (43:27.918) I don't ever think we thought we were ready for it. just, you know, we were on a private equity timetable. you know, we had a, and I say that like it's them telling us what to do. Private equity, in my experience, never told me what to do. Never. Not once. But what they do do is say, OK, let's put a plan together. Let's decide together where we want to be three years, five years. What's the goal? How are we going to get there? Daniel Tsentsiper (43:34.637) I see. Daniel Tsentsiper (43:49.55) Maybe. Right. Andy Pforzheimer (43:55.596) You put a plan together with them, and then now it's your plan. And it's like, I guess we've got to open five restaurants next year. And I've only got two signed leases. I better kiss my wife goodbye and get on a plane and not come back until. So it happens organically. But at the same time, if you take P.E. you're on a timetable. And you create this plan that. for the first time in my life anyway. Up until I was 50, I was like, yeah, let's not. You know what? I'm tired. I want to play more golf. Let's not open any restaurants next year. Who's going to say otherwise? Well, then you get in this situation where it's like, ugh, you know what? Our GM team sucks. We're not ready for this. I'm seeing bad Yelp comments for the first time. And yet, I got these two things are almost finished construction. Daniel Tsentsiper (44:52.366) I still gotta grow. Andy Pforzheimer (44:54.336) So yeah, better find, yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (44:57.266) Got it. Got it. And you guys opened Bartaco in, was it 06, 05? Andy Pforzheimer (45:04.742) Oh, no, no, 2010. End of 2010. End of 2010, yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (45:06.925) 2010. What was the idea? What was the idea behind opening a bar taco? When I think of I've been to one bar taco and when I contrasted to Barcelona, it's much more of a, I wouldn't even call it fast casual. It's a sit down place, but it's definitely on the lower price point, but it still has that finesse, still has that, I would say high quality feel. Like what was the intention behind starting that concept? Andy Pforzheimer (45:32.686) The high quality feel in the finesse just comes from that's what we do. I mean, if you do schlocky things, they're all going to be schlocky things. If you do high end, you do high I I couldn't do a crappy fried chicken place if you paid me. I wouldn't want do it. I'm not in that business, Exactly. It's not my DNA. Couldn't do it. But Bartako was born as a taco truck. Sasha wanted to do a taco truck because we used to. Daniel Tsentsiper (45:35.789) That's right. Daniel Tsentsiper (45:44.589) You're not in that business. Yeah, that's right. Andy Pforzheimer (46:00.29) eat at the taco trucks in New Haven on I-95 going up and down. We were looking at location in the casinos, and we would drive up and down. It's about a two hour drive, and we would stop and have lunch or dinner in these taco trucks. And he wanted to do one. And that morphed to having sort of this taco stand in downtown Stanford. And he kept coming to me with these cool ideas for taco stands. And I kept saying, go ahead. Knock yourself out. I'm not doing it. No, I got my hands full doing this. And then we had a restaurant in Greenwich with a very obnoxious landlord, and the lease was coming up. And we didn't really have a good provision. He was going to jack the lease a lot. And I thought, I don't want to be over a barrel on this. So I started looking for other locations so I could tell him, we're not paying this. We're out. And I found this location. Somebody told me about this lobster. a lobster roll place on the water in Port Chester. So I went and looked at it, and it was great. I loved it. The owner, his sister wanted to be in the restaurant business. He hated it. And we kind of came to a deal on it. And then his sister decided, no, she didn't want to sell. my time was up. So I had to go back and negotiate with my Greenwich landlord. And we came up with an OK deal. wasn't great. And, but I love the site, and I told the guy, you know, if you ever want to sell, let me know. And about six months after I signed the garage lease, he calls me and he says, okay, I'm done, my sister's done, we're out of here. And I was like, well shit, I just, you know, I can't put Barcelona there, it's only, it's two miles from the other Barcelona. So I saw Sasha and I said, okay, if you want to do that stupid taco idea, I've got this site, it's on the water, like. We're not going to go broke, right? Because you'll make something beautiful on the water, and everyone makes money on the water. So that's where Bar Taco came from. And the original idea was it was going to be taco truck stuff. The original menu had tripe on it. It had a lot of sausages. And it was for the drunk kids coming out of clubs in Port Chester at 9 o'clock at night. It was a very sloppy filling menu. And churros, all the stuff you'd find on a taco truck. Daniel Tsentsiper (48:27.227) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (48:27.79) So that's what we opened. But the food was good and we had some weird Asian influences because Roy Choi was doing videos and we just thought that'd be kind of cool. And within a month it was just filled with all these women from Greenwich who'd pull up in Range Rovers and we had no idea. had no idea. Lines out the door, very high end clientele. So we got rid of all the... Daniel Tsentsiper (48:46.084) It. Andy Pforzheimer (48:57.518) messy stuff and replaced it with lettuce wraps. And to this day, I couldn't tell you. Couldn't tell you why. Daniel Tsentsiper (48:58.806) Right. Daniel Tsentsiper (49:06.796) So you, listened to the clientele, right? As soon as you saw that these are the people that are eating at this establishment, he kind of pivoted the, the menu, pivoted the approach. Andy Pforzheimer (49:10.437) yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (49:15.722) I am not in business to tell my customers what they should want. No. I'll make a suggestion. They'll respond. They appreciate the suggestion. Sometimes they'll take it. Sometimes they won't. Daniel Tsentsiper (49:29.664) And how has Bar Taco evolved over the years? Andy Pforzheimer (49:33.644) Well, we had a COO at the time, and he had two small kids, three and five years old, and he loved Bartaco because his kids loved Bartaco. And we basically, over time, of, you know, we made him a co-founder right at the beginning because he was so good and he had done so much for Barcelona. And we eventually kind of left it in his hands and he torqued the menu towards families much more than I think we would have. And that was a big step in terms of... it's evolution, it became healthy. It's very healthy food. And yeah, it turned out, this was odd, like somebody called us one day and said, I have a gluten allergy, is there anything I can eat on your menu? And it was me, I was going through the menu with them and going, well, you can have this, you can have this, you can have this. And was like, and there were like four things on the whole menu that I wasn't sure if they could have, and I called the chef and he said, Daniel Tsentsiper (50:28.064) Yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (50:32.206) Yeah, no, you can't have this one and this one. goes, but you know, we can make this one and this one with rice flour. So in the end, there were only two things that you couldn't eat. So we said, well, what the hell? Let's not waste this. And we put it on these gluten-free websites. Kind of an accident. Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (50:46.444) That's a great opportunity. Absolutely. And then at what point did you decide or did you know that it was a good idea to sell, to exit the business? Andy Pforzheimer (50:58.286) It came to us. We just got offered a crazy offer to buy the whole company. And I didn't think we wanted to sell. My partner didn't want to sell. But we had had a private equity partner now for seven years, and that is why they did it. And we thought, well, let's give them, let's tell them no and give them even higher price. So we did, and they said yes. And then. I didn't like the guy we were selling it to. And I asked my P partner, can we get the same price from someone else? And they actually hired a banker who went around and came back and said, nah, no way. Yeah, so we took it. And I was unemployed at 57. well, there's a lot worse things in the world. Daniel Tsentsiper (51:32.586) It's too good to be true. Daniel Tsentsiper (51:41.738) Amazing. We're running running close on time here, but I last last thing I wanted to ask you. I saw that you're teaching you were back at Harvard now teaching students. When did you decide to do that and what are the types of topics and discussions that you have in the classroom? What are you teaching? Andy Pforzheimer (52:00.642) Well, I'm teaching a course called Challenges and Opportunities in the Restaurant Industry, which is unique at Harvard Business School in that it's the only course devoted to a single industry. It used to be the way that school was taught, but it isn't anymore. And it was started about eight years ago by a woman named Lena Goldberg and a very accomplished lifetime restaurateur named Michael Kaufman. And Michael called me when he started the course and asked to write a case about of about Bar-Tecca. Daniel Tsentsiper (52:10.652) in Andy Pforzheimer (52:29.966) about what we had been through and the decision to take private equity money. So I said sure. And I would come up once a year to be the protagonist in that case. they would do the case, then I would answer questions, and et cetera. And a few years ago, Michael called me and said, hey, I've been doing this a long time. I'm not going to do it forever. You seem to like doing this. Would you be interested in teaching it with me? Daniel Tsentsiper (52:45.438) Yes, that's right. Andy Pforzheimer (52:57.742) And I said, yeah, sure. I had actually been doing guest spots at Columbia Business School at the time. And I had taught at ICE, the Institute for Colonial Education. And I said, sure. So I came up. then the next year, and this year full time, I'm talking to you from HBS right now. We just finished a case today on a chain of coffee places in Boston that got unionized in 2021, and what was involved in that. And then last week, we had Daniel Tsentsiper (53:05.994) Yeah. Daniel Tsentsiper (53:22.625) and Andy Pforzheimer (53:26.456) Thomas Keller came in and talked about the economic future of fine dining. Next week, I've got a terrific chef from Asheville, North Carolina named Marijuana Irani, who wants to start a chain of fast casual restaurants. And we'll talk about sort of what's involved in that. So it's all over the map. There's 27 classes, and each one has a different protagonist and a different topic. It's a lot of fun. Daniel Tsentsiper (53:57.538) And what are you trying to teach your students from, you know, from, this course? I'm assuming, so this is an HBS, so everyone here is getting their MBA. Is the first lesson you teach them to don't open up a restaurant or what are the sorts of, yeah. Andy Pforzheimer (54:06.487) Yes. we work that in there somewhere. would say most of them are not planning on opening their own restaurant, but some are. Some of them are just fast. Daniel Tsentsiper (54:15.782) Right, right. Yeah, I'm sure some of them will be good executives one day maybe working for for restaurant groups. Andy Pforzheimer (54:22.638) Some are pure voyeurs, they just like eating. Many of them have friends or relatives or sometimes parents who are in the business and want to be useful, want to be helpful, want to learn something. So that's kind of interesting. And then some of them actually actively want to be investors, work for PE, work for consulting companies in this field. So it's a mix. It's a mix. Daniel Tsentsiper (54:24.712) Easy. Daniel Tsentsiper (54:45.962) Amazing. Amazing. Well, no, go ahead. Andy Pforzheimer (54:50.857) I'm going to know I've got to cut you off. I've actually got a student coming in. Daniel Tsentsiper (54:52.617) Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Andy, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for joining the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm sure my audience has learned a ton. Andy Pforzheimer (55:03.36) OK, well, thank you for having me. All right, Daniel, bye. Daniel Tsentsiper (55:04.851) Thank you. Take care. Bye.