In the world of New York restaurants, Danny Meyer and his Union Square Hospitality Group stand out. Not just for their restaurants—Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, Shake Shack—but also for their hospitality (it is in the name) and general goodwill. As Meyer and co. are set to be honored by City Harvest this year we talked to the man himself this week to discuss restaurant charity work, fine dining in a tough economy, and how you'll never see a club sandwich at Shake Shack.
When did you guys start working with City Harvest? We've been working with City Harvest about as long as I can remember. I think going all the way back to the very early days of Union Square Cafe, which was born in 1985. We've never opened a restaurant that did not donate its leftover food to City Harvest.
The thing that's been really gratifying for our employees has been to participate hands on over and beyond donating food and funds, to coming up with ideas that can help City Harvest broaden its mission. For example, in the 1990s, we helped City Harvest to launch something called the Honor Roll Truck. It was an opportunity to address a big challenge that it had back then, which was that it cost $60,000 a year to keep a refrigerated City Harvest truck on the road—including all the expenses of the truck like the gas and the driver—in order to connect leftover food with hungry New Yorkers. We didn't have the opportunity to write a $60,000 check, but we helped them with an idea to solicit New York restaurants to use these moving trucks as a rolling advertisement. A whole bunch of restaurants contributed a smaller amount of money each to have their logo on the truck, which would roll around the city. The restaurants associated their restaurants with a cause they believed in and it really helped patrons to say, "Well, those are the kind of restaurants—given three places that have great roast chicken—I want to go to the one that's giving their leftover food to City Harvest."
We've also done a number of active things throughout the years, one being a program City Harvest does in collaboration with Share Out Strength. "Cooking Matters," where our chefs have helped to be involved with teaching New Yorkers how to take a fixed income...it's basically a Home Ec. class where if I have X number of dollars I could either go buy a bunch of processed food and get empty calories and whatever the consequences of that are or I could learn to shop and learn to cook from somebody who can teach me how to eat better, healthier food.
We've also done promotions through the years. When the recession hit initially—I'm still not sure if we're in our out of the recession—back in the beginning of 2008 and through 2009 we had a promotion with all of our restaurants, which we called "What this town could use right now is a good bowl of chicken soup." Each of our restaurants created its own signature chicken soup and we donated $2 of each bowl of soup sold to City Harvest. Then we did that again the next season with eggs—chicken then the egg!—so we challenged each of our restaurants to come up with an egg dish to benefit City Harvest.
I remember that promotion. And what are you doing with them now? In the coming weeks we'll be working with City Harvest Mobile Market in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Mobile Market is an opportunity to bring fresh foods into under-served neighborhoods that we may or may not take for granted. A lot of them don't have green markets and a lot of neighborhoods don't necessarily get access to this fresh food and City Harvest is helping to change that. Still, it takes people to volunteer to weigh the food, to distribute the food, so I'm excited to get a chance to do that with members of our team.
Then we're doing something that I'm incredibly excited about during the month of March. We are doing a promotion throughout all of our restaurants—except for Shake Shack because it's a different beast—and we intend to raise a lot of money for City Harvest. Sometimes what we do is hands-on work with City Harvest's recipients, whether it's Cooking Matters or of the Mobile Markets. Sometimes we come up with promotional opportunities for them to raise money. So that's why we're laughing "Feed Yourself, Feed a Neighbor" and inviting our patrons to join us in this effort. When people make a donation to City Harvest on their check, in addition to the money they spent on food and drink, we will match it.
Will there be a maximum amount on the check they can fill in? That's a really good question. I don't know if it's open-ended or what. I have to find out about that and I'll get back to you. If we happen to get some titan of the universe who decides to donate a million dollars I don't know what we'll do about that!
Since you mentioned the recession, I know you've just opened up two restaurants downtown. How are they faring so far? They're doing great so far. Blue Smoke you gotta basically peel people off the walls it's so busy. Not only people who work in Battery Park City but people who live there all week long. And North End Grill is really off to a great start, which is our new American bar and grill. It's been incredibly busy as well. People seem to be very, very happy—especially people who work and live in that neighborhood—that we chose to open there.
I went to high school down there and I wish there had been a Shake Shack there then! Did you go to Stuyvesant?
Yeah. I would have been there every day... It seems like a great school community. That Shake Shack's been open for six months. We got it open before any of the others—and that Shake Shack has been incredibly busy. We opened it on a corner that is closest to Stuyvesant and closest to the ball field and closest to the residential part.
So you placed your three restaurants down there with customers in mind? I think we opened the right businesses in the right place. We got looked pretty closely and wanted to have no more than one on any side of the building and we said that Shake Shack should really tip its hat to schools and ball fields and neighbors and kids. Blue Smoke should tip its hat to people who like drinking—i.e. Merrill Lynch, American Express, Goldman Sachs. North End Grill should really be completely for the residential community—not that it's so far away you can't have a nice business lunch there.
Speaking of the planning for Shake Shack and looking closely I have to ask: Any chance of ever revisiting the East Village/SoHo for one? I know we don't have a plan to do it right now. I think we want to go to neighborhoods that are sort of begging to have one and that neighborhood wasn't! [laughs] At least where we were thinking about opening it. But we'll see how it goes. We don't have any plans for that right now.
My last question fits in with some of the things you guys are doing with City Harvest. There has been some commotion recently about the city's advertising trying to persuade people to eat less fatty foods and eat healthier. Do you have an opinion about how those ads present themselves? With the amputees and such? You know I'd have to see that, and I haven't. I'm out of the loop on that.
Fair enough. Then one last question! Any thoughts on some of the single, very focused trend restaurants that have been popping up? Like the meatball trend? I love it!
Would you ever open one? Well we've come about as close as we can with Shake Shack because it's an incredibly focused menu. Not a day goes by where we don't get someone asking if we can put a chef's salad or a club sandwich on the menu. We really try to be very focused in terms of burgers and frozen custard and hot dogs and fries. I think we've come pretty close to saying Shake Shack does a couple of things very, very well. We have two businesses that we've opened in sports facilities—one being El Verano, which is just tacos. We did that at Citi Field and we also did that at Washington Nationals Park. We also have one called Box Frites, which we've opened in three places, which is just french fries with dips and sauces. Anyway, to answer your question, I love the trend. I think that if you're in a city that has 26,000 restaurants there's absolutely space to have some places that don't do everything for everybody and what they do do is one or two or three things incredibly well. I think it's exciting.
