ENTREPRENEUR 

Coral also worked for Jim Rouse, and working side by side our relationship grew. In early 1975  I asked her to marry me and we formally tied the knot. Our combined experience and Jim's example eventually led us to step out on our own, and in 1976 we left the Rouse Company to launch Sarabande, a small French/Spanish influenced restaurant. We bought a defunct crab house and did all of the renovation ourselves. By opening day we had enough funds left to operate for 3 months, but we both felt it was an ideal opportunity to challenge the status quo. I was back in the kitchen! Sarabande's combination of a casual atmosphere and high level culinary positioning was unique to the Baltimore dining scene and recognition came with positive reviews in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post newspapers. Then Self and Gourmet wrote about us,  It seemed we had arrived until a short visit to see my parents in New York City and a dinner at Le Coup de Fusil. this restaurant was red hot, appearing in every major magazine as a must go dining destination. Yannick Cam, the chef, had recently come over from the Michelin three star restaurant Le Taillevent, in Paris. He was doing a new style of French cooking called Nouvelle Cuisine and the experience turned me on my head. I saw the way he combined classical recipes and reimagined them with a new, clean executional approach and I wanted to be on that same innovative culinary path. As soon as I got back to Baltimore, I began to experiment with my own repertoire.  It was a crazy time but over the next few months I  successfully changed my entire approach to cooking.

 

Sarabande became the first restaurant outside of France and New York to embrace the principles of Nouvelle Cuisine.  It was a hard sell to the conservative Baltimore food community. Positive reviews continued but not everyone understood this lighter approach and the deconstruction of classical dishes.  Then Michael and Ariane Batterberry, who had recently launched Food and Wine Magazine, came to Sarabande. They lived in New York and were highly respected food authorities, and as we talked  I discovered that Michael and I shared a the same international expatriate father experiences, albeit a generation apart.  He had lived in Europe and South America. After I cooked for him and Ariane the conversation got serious. Michael shared their plan to create a media platform for a new generation of regional American chefs and help them get recognition, and break an out of date perception that only the French could understand and execute great food.  Their first step was to be the introduction of Alice Waters and Paul Proudhomme to the national press at a full blown PR event at Tavern on the Green in New York. Although it was too late for me to be a part of that - it was two weeks away -  Michael told me he wanted me to be one of this group of chefs, and invited me to visit Food and Wine headquarters in New York City.  A few weeks later Coral and I re-created our food in the kitchen at Food and Wine for a feature article in the September issue. 

 

Over the next year Michael tried to convince me I needed a larger and more sophisticated audience than Baltimore to make my mark. He urged me to relocate to New York City.  I was conflicted. We now had two restaurants and I was consulting on several more. I was also fearful of trying to open a restaurant in New York and the risk of such a huge financial undertaking. Then Yannick left Le Coup de Fusil and Michael called me to tell me that the French owners would offer me the helm of the restaurant with a clear mandate to do my own food. It was a huge opportunity, big enough for Coral and I to decide to sell everything and move to NYC. 

 

NEW YORK CHEF

Coming to New York was a bold decision and it gave me a new audience on a larger stage and a set of connections in the business, publishing and art community of a major restaurant city.  Everything seemed on track but I had no idea just how much more transitional that move would become.

 

A year later the owners of Le Coup de Fusil had to return to Paris. The majority partner was a high level executive with Hermés and the decision was made to sell the restaurant to Jean Georges Vongerichten.  It became JoJo's, his first New York property.

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It was not a setback. Running the kitchens of Le Coup de Fusil had given me the credentials and the reputation I needed to break into the majors and I took the executive chefs job at the Rockefeller family's Rainbow Room. Once again with Michael's recommendation. Sixty five floors above Rockefeller Center the facility included the Rainbow Room, The Rainbow Grill and a destination cocktail lounge. At the time it was reputed to be the largest grossing restaurant property in the world. It was glamorous and high profile but underneath all that was a monster with every operational obstacle in the way - navigating the union, poor staffing, equipment deficiencies; you name it and it was there. It was a necessary step for me make the transition from smaller operations onto a national stage successfully. So I put my head down and overcame each challenge.  On the positive side I was able to include my own culinary focus and bring in some of my own team and we elevated their entire approach to another level.

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NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & MANUFACTURING

Coral and I bought a house in Connecticut and I became a "strap hanger". Everything continued to progress at the Rainbow Room until the two-hour commute and a seven-day work week started to erode my relationship with Coral and our growing family. Two little girls, a third on the way and Coral now holding everything together on the home front was not a good balancing act. The answer came in a call from Sylvia Schur, a consultant for General Foods.  She was working for James Ferguson, the CEO of GF, with the goal of developing new "real food" business opportunities for the company. She had his mandate but she had to build her case with the front line executives. She decided the first thing she needed was a strong culinary resource with business experience. My Rainbow Room affiliation helped her to sell that. She arranged the interviews and GF offered me the job.  It would still be challenging work, but I now after 15 years of 60 hour workweeks I would spend evenings and weekends at home.

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My transition to the corporate world was not easy. The salary was half of what I made at the Rainbow Room and the Research and Development arm of GF, where I would begin, was a community of almost 2,000. Most of them were food scientists or PhD’s with scientific or engineering degrees . A corporate chef was an anomaly and they had no idea of how to interact with me, nor I with them.  They were so entrenched in the world of dry mix foods that they could not see the changing consumer horizons or the need for a progressive focus. Within a year I was ready to leave the company, but a discussion with Sylvia re-engineered my reporting structure so that I would be part of marketing.  Marketing really ran GF and it was there that I found respect for my experience. Most importantly, it gave Sylvia and I unimpaired access to the key decision makers she needed to move everything forward.

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Within a year we were on track.  I was promoted to vice president of techniculinary development for a special team charged with creating three new "real food" brands for the company. True to Sylvia’s strategic goals, we would combine a culinary focus with freshly prepared foods and new packaging technologies. Our first brand Culinova was  groundbreaking. A new product line that defied the norms by leading with culinary vs. traditional food science product development.  To execute production I partnered with the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York and we created a new technical chef externship model for the school. We moved the entire team away from General Foods’ headquarters and their research center and built a new facility with offices, clean rooms and an in-house microbiology lab. The young externs from the CIA prepared the food working with our team of microbiologists, engineers and marketers to develop a fresh, high quality cuisine for the masses using modified atmosphere packaging to extend the freshness and shelf life of each menu item.

 

Culinova had its debut in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut markets, and our products raised the bar of possibilities. Sylvia's technological vision revolutionized the retail food industry and you can see the results today in every supermarket refrigerator case.

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PUBLISHING & RETAIL CONSULTING

Shortly after the launch things started to change at General Foods. We were acquired by Phillip Morris and they purchased Kraft within a year and merged the two companies. It was my first experience with a Wall Street style hostile take over. The three cultures clashed and the inevitable downsizing was on the horizon.  The future stopped looking rosy. Then Michael and Arianne Batterberry launched a new food and beverage magazine called Food Arts. and invited me to be a founding member of their team. I would have the responsibility for the culinary mechanics of the recipe columns, write targeted articles, and do public speaking on food trends at major food and beverage forums.  I took the role as culinary director, knowing that the publishing industry was  not a place to go for big salaries. I had a family and a mortgage to take care of. There was a small cushion from my General Foods stock, but if I wanted to work with Michael to build Food Arts I had to find a way to supplement my income.  The answer came in consulting.  I had developed a solid friendship with Art Koch, who had led the Culinova advertising agency team at Benton and Bowles, and with Stuart Feigenbaum, a foodservice financial consultant with Laventhal and Horwath. Through our association, an idea took shape to start our own company.  Stuart, Coral and I launched it, and within a year Art joined us. That association eventually evolved into McDonnell Kinder and Associates. I was able to continue with my role as culinary director of Food Arts from their first  issue in 1988 to the publishing of the last issue in late 2014; a twenty six year span.

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BRAND DEVELOPMENT

MKA's first major project was the development and launch of Plugra Butter for Borden's. It is still a market leader for Keller's who has since acquired the brand from Borden's. Takashimaya and Cheeseborough Ponds followed and then ConAgra with the product development phase of their new Healthy Choice brand. The culinary demands of the ConAgra association quickly became so complex that David Scherpf ConAgra's head of research and development offered me a role within the company. It would require a hiatus from MKA operations but he agreed to let me to continue with Food Arts and consult with MKA when needed. Taking on a leadership role for new product development in a crack team and helping to build a new brand was a heady opportunity and within 3 years Healthy Choice was doing a billion dollars a year in sales. Over the next year  David added the Banquet, Butterball, Patio and Marie Callender brands to my new product development focus. He also charged me with developing a new Culinary and Consumer center for the company, establishing a national nutritional database and leading the team to expand Healthy Choice into Europe and Asia. On top of all that I represented the Healthy Choice brand on the equity committee.

 

PUBLIC RELATIONS

While I was at ConAgra I also became the national spokesperson for the brand, starring in commercials and doing public relations work under the guidance of Fleishman Hillard in St. Louis. One of my favorite PR roles was developing the Healthy Choice Performance Nutrition partnership and corresponding food operations for the US Olympic Ski Team, and in 1998 I went to Japan and executed the program at the Nagano Olympics. It was a monumental endeavor and the independence and scope took me out of the corporate treadmill long enough to realize that I was approaching saturation with ConAgra. When I returned I talked to David and we worked out a slow downsizing of  my role so I could eventually return to MKA.

 

MANAGED SERVICES

In the midst of the transition Aramark contacted me through Paul Berry, their consulting head of recruitment. Aramark has run all the foodservice operations for the winter and summer Olympic Villages for decades and our small teams efforts had come to their attention in Nagano. Paul asked me if I would be interested  in a transitional role as corporate vice president of culinary development for the company. My task would be to reorganize their entire approach to culinary services and concept development, and to staff the new department. It was a chance to get back into the restaurant side of the business and update my experience. My contract was for 18 months with a large bonus at the end of that period.  I took on the challenge. 

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ADVERTIZING

During those 18 months at Aramark I was able to refine my foodservice consulting skills, working with companies like Boeing, Goldman Sachs and American Express, and the US Navy and Marine Corps, I learned the ins and outs of managed services and how to execute pitches and develop custom concepts, but I also realized that I was deficient in the actual marketing side of the foodservice business.  Then I connected with Bob Noble, the founder and owner of the Noble and Associates advertising agency. Noble was the industry leader in foodservice advertising and consulting and Bob had built his 100 million dollar company from the ground up. A brief telephone conversation with him evolved into a visit to Springfield, MO, and an offer to join the company and create their new culinary strategy. I would work with the agency teams on the Sara Lee, M&M Mars, Campbell’s, Haagen-Dazs, French’s and Tyson Foods accounts. It was a wonderful opportunity and Bob proved to be a consummate leader and a generous mentor. Today I look back at my year with him with great respect and as being pivotal to my career. 

 

McDONNELL KINDER REDUX

When I left Noble MKA was in limbo. Stuart, an academic at heart was pursuing a doctorate that would take him into a full professorship in Holland, and Art had retired. Coral was ready to stop as well. I did some foodservice project work and that market proved to be healthy enough for Coral and I to decide to re-build the company focusing our combined experience on foodservice.  While I had been working for Bob, I was commuting to Noble's offices in Springfield and Chicago from Philadelphia,   Philadelphia was an ideal city but high leasing costs and triple taxes were not conducive to building MKA into a healthy company. After some discussion, we decided to relocate to Kansas City, MO. KC had been a weekend escape from Omaha during the ConAgra days and it was affordable on every level. Best of all it would be central to clients on the East and West Coasts and Canada. So in 2001 we made the move, and soon after that we leased a 5,000 square foot loft in the Westport district of Kansas City and developed a new culinary center there in partnership with Wolf and Panasonic. We staffed it with some excellent young chefs and added a full service photography studio with Nikon. That was 15 years ago and today we are still in business and thriving.

 

The rest, as they say, is about making each day a great one.