A Dying Breed in a World of Celebrity Chefs
The master French chef Guy Savoy recently told me, “The good restaurant is the last civilized area, because everything is done for [your] pleasure. Everybody smiles when you arrive. Everybody’s doing everything for your well-being. It’s important to, once a year, or once a season, take the time for dinner in a good restaurant because every time, it’s an exceptional experience. Because during one, two, three or four hours, many people are around you just for your pleasure.”
Savoy’s food, of course, is considered among the best in the world. But even he realizes that superb food alone isn’t enough to create the full dining experience that transforms a simple meal into a fantasy dining experience where every diner feels like a V.I.P. That’s the realm of the so called “front of the house” staff — everyone from the bread server to the busboy to the sommelier. And in every great dining room there is one guy (or gal), whose job it is to orchestrate that entire experience.
In decades past, these general managers, maitre d’s, or owners were the celebrities of the fine dining world. In the ’70s and ’80s, Le Cirque was the hotspot for New York power brokers. And it was owner Sirio Maccioni, not some celebrity chef from the kitchen, who greeted the countless kings, presidents, Wall Street bigwigs, pop culture luminaries, and movie stars who dined there — while other diners stared at him in awe, hoping he’d grace them with a stop at their tables.
But Maccioni’s son Mario, who oversees the operations of the family’s three Las Vegas restaurants (Sirio in Aria, and Le Cirque and Osteria del Circo at Bellagio) admits that these days, “it’s a chef’s world.” Mario says that front of the house superstars are a “dying breed.” He continues, “[Chefs like] Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, they get all the fame and all the glory, and the people in the front of the house are sort of the interchangeable cogs in the machine.”
While they may no longer bask in the limelight, Maccioni insists that the people running great dining rooms are just as important to a fine dining experience as their kitchen counterparts, and have a job that can be even more difficult. “You’ve got to do everything the guys in the back of the house do, but you have to do it with a smile and a polish, which makes it really, really tricky,” he explains. “Because if you’re a chef and you come in and you’ve had a bad day, everybody knows it. But if you’re a maitre d’, or manager, or owner, and you’ve had a bad day — nobody better find out.”
As a customer, managers, maitre d’s and owners are actually the guys you want to get to know. Meeting your favorite Food Network star might score you an autograph, or even a picture, to make your friends jealous. But the person running the front of the house is the one who’s going to ensure you have a great dining experience.
Among Las Vegas’ finest front of the house guys is Guy Savoy’s son Franck Savoy. With his father spending most of the year 5,000 miles away in Paris, Franck is his eyes, ears and smiling face at Restaurant Guy Savoy in Caesars Palace. He’s been working in his father’s kitchens since he was 12 years old. A shy boy with a severe stutter that made him barely understandable to anyone but his mother, he finally overcame the disorder and asked his father if he could move from the kitchen to the dining room where he says, “I loved it; I loved talking to the guests.”
Today, he describes his job in an unusual way. “I kind of compare my job to a massage therapist at the spa,” he says, smiling broadly. “People come in my place, they want to be pampered. They should not think about anything. They should not be worried about anything. We are, as a team, taking over all their worries and they just have to relax for two to five or six hours while they are here.”
And he says his hand-selected staff shares his love of the job and his dedication to perfection. “If something goes wrong at one of their tables, I tell them, and they don’t sleep all night.”
And if you have a special request (Editor’s note: this is for those who may be planning a special Valentine’s Day treat), whether it be a table inside the kitchen, an engagement ring discreetly placed on the restaurant’s massive desert cart, or an off-the-menu order of beef Wellington, Franck is the guy to call (a few days in advance if possible).
Just downstairs from Restaurant Guy Savoy, Frank Pellegrino Jr. runs the front of the house at Rao’s, while his wife Carla runs the kitchen. Their primary goal would seem daunting to most: recreating the members-only experience of their family’s legendary Harlem restaurant for the tens of thousands of guests that pass through its Caesars Palace sister restaurant every year.
Fifty people have owned standing weekly reservations at the New York original for the past several decades, and Pellegrino and his family know them all by name. So when you speak to him, you’ll notice he never uses the word “customer.” He’ll occasionally speak of “guests,” but just as often use the term “friends” or “family.” And as you see him work his dining rooms in Caesars, it’s obvious he wants the same relationship with the people who dine at Rao’s Las Vegas that he has with the ones in Rao’s New York.
“It’s so wonderful to be able to break the ice, with somebody you just met, who has an affinity for your restaurant,” he says with a sense of awe in his voice. “The relationships that are built are just incredible.
To that extent, Frankie (as he’ll inevitably ask you to call him) has an iPhone full of phone numbers of the guests who have dined at his restaurant, and freely offers his number in return. So, he says, “That one week a year that they come out to Vegas, they give me a phone call beforehand, or they just stop by, and we sit down and we have a drink.” And he promises all of his customers, “when you come here, you will be treated like family.”
At Las Vegas’ only Michelin three-star restaurant Joël Robuchon, and its more casual one-star sister restaurant L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, general manager Emmanuel Cornet also understands the value of long-term relationships with guests. He explains, “People are different, they’re looking for different things. I think it’s important to know who they are and what they are [looking for].”
After four years at his restaurants, Cornet knows his clients well — particularly those who visit Las Vegas several times a year, and always make it a point to visit one of his dining rooms. He says the small staff at L’Atelier makes it easier to recognize his regulars. But he also keeps in touch with many by phone and email, going so far as to book their hotel rooms, get them show tickets, and secure them difficult reservations in his restaurants or anywhere else they want to dine. Perhaps the most personal thing Cornet has done for some of his best guests is invite them to town for a book-signing and cocktail reception with Chef Joël Robuchon himself when he was in town from Paris last February.
When I suggest the manager sounds a bit like a personal concierge for his most special guests, he doesn’t wince at the term. He goes on to say simply, “this is the reason why we get into this business; it’s really to please people.”
As I chat with Cornet, I’m reminded of another experience I recently had with one of this town’s great general managers. Tobias Peach runs the newly opened dining room Sage at Aria. But before that, he managed Fleur de Lys at Mandalay Bay. When I arrived there one evening for a drink in the lounge, Peach was just returning from a drive across the Strip to MGM Grand. Earlier in the night, a frequent guest had entered the restaurant whose wine of choice tended to be a $9,000 bottle of D.R.C. Romanee Conti, Romanee Conti. Knowing his restaurant had only one bottle in stock, the manager quickly got on the phone with fine restaurants around town, even traveling to their cellars in person, to locate a second bottle — just in case the guest wanted it. When I brought up the story to Peach a few months later, he shrugged it off saying, “to me it’s just kind of a simple story of things we do every day.”
When assembling his staff at Sage, Peach says he tried to impart a simple idea to his employees. He explained, “There’s food and there’s service, and they both have to be there. [They’re] very, very important parts. And they play off each other. And you have to get to be excellent at both. But there’s a third one. That’s hospitality. That’s an equal wing that people forget about. And it is your secret weapon.”
He says without that spirit of hospitality, an otherwise good meal can be ruined. “I’ll give you a very simple example,” he elaborates. “If someone walks up to the host stand and they get a cold shoulder from the hostess, or a poor feeling from the hostess, they get a poor feeling right away. And then later on in their meal, when their steak may be just a little bit overcooked, or a little bit underdone, it’s a bigger deal to that guest because of the way they were treated earlier.”
Of course, not all front of the house maestros cater to high rollers and out-of-town visitors on the Strip. For Italian born Giuseppe Magro, the clientele at his Italian restaurant Terra Rosa at Red Rock Resort consists primarily of local residents. That means he sees them walking around the casino floor all the time. They know his name, and he knows theirs — and they inevitably drop by to say hello, whether they’re dining at his restaurant or not.
Those relationships were built on two things. First, Magro is almost always on the restaurant floor, saying hello to each and every one of his guests. Second, he states rather emphatically, “I’ll never say ‘no’ to a guest, ever!”
Along those lines, he recently extended his holiday hours because he simply couldn’t accommodate the number of regulars who wanted to dine there. He says he wasn’t worried about working late because if his regulars want to dine in his room, “I’ll make myself available to them.” Along the same lines, if someone dining at one of his tables wants something that’s not on his menu, he’ll gladly walk to Red Rock’s T-Bones Steakhouse to pick up a custom-ordered steak or lobster.
Running the show in the dining room at Morel’s French Steakhouse and Bistro at The Palazzo is Shawn Heilman, who says he has two main rules for his staff: “to respect our house and to respect each other.” He explains, “If you respect the house, take the time to pick up a sugar wrapper that’s on the floor, that’s something that’s gonna be in the guest’s line of sight. And they’re gonna feel very confident that if you’re respecting the house, that the server will take care of the guest.”
As for personal touches, Heilman pays special attention to repeat customers — whom he tracks both through The Venetian/Palazzo reservation system and his own ability to recognize returning guests. He also takes particular pride in paying special attention to single diners, and “making sure that a single diner receives the highest level of care, and let them know we appreciate them coming in on their own.”
When it comes to special requests, the manager works closely with the other restaurants in his resort, often relying on neighbors like Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batali to loan him an ingredient or two. Several times a week he’ll bring in 40 or more ounces of the ultra-luxury A5 Japanese wagyu beef for guests of the casino’s V.I.P. hosts. And then there was the time he assembled a 30th birthday party for a guest, complete with blown-up pictures of the birthday boy, baked Alaska, and a custom-made cake shaped like the guest of honor’s pug.
Of course, at the end of the day, being a great front of the house manager isn’t about securing pug-shaped cakes, $9,000 bottles of wine, or show tickets. As Frank Pellegrino puts it, “It’s about embracing people, and you really can’t take that for granted.” And while that may no longer be a road to fame, it’s the hallmark of a truly great dining experience.
