Stephen Starr, a mega restaurateur, launches in Bal Harbour.
By Jennifer Rubell
STEPHEN STARR IS POISED TO CHANGE the restaurant landscape of Miami. This is the same Stephen Starr who singlehandedly invented the Philadelphia food scene and then went on to beat the naysayers by opening two hugely successful New York hot spots.
Next stop: Bal Harbour.
Come December, Starr will give our city its first taste of his magic at Bal Harbour Shops with a top-notch, health-conscious, Parisian-designed Japanese restaurant.
When I sit down with the restaurateur at his famed New York Buddakan—immortalized as one of Carrie Bradshaw’s favorite restaurants and now an actual destination on the Sex and the City bus tour—I’m expecting a polished pitch for his latest eatery. Instead, I’m shocked to hear that as of now most of it exists only in his head. No hard dates have been set. Only a few dishes are confirmed for the menu. And it still has no name.
Did I mention that, at the time of our interview, the opening was four months away? Anyone else would be in full panic mode at this stage. Not Starr. He relishes speaking in broad strokes about his latest venture—unable to share final decisions about any element of the food, service, décor—and it soon becomes apparent that this shockingly instinctual process is by design.
Whatever it ends up being named, Bal Harbour will be the site of Starr’s 20th restaurant, and by now he and the people around him have long learned to trust that the semi-formed ideas currently swirling around in his head will ultimately materialize as yet another mega-successful restaurant. Intuition is Starr’s most important contribution to his restaurant empire, and trusting it is the only formula he sticks to.
Long before he got into the restaurant business, Starr’s ambition was always to entertain, to put on a show, to offer people an escape from a ho-hum daily life. His first dream was to be a film director. Instead he ended up in the music business. He was successful, bringing acts like Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen and U2 to his Ripley Music Hall in Philadelphia well before they had become international stars. But restaurants would be Starr’s ticket to becoming a superstar in his own right.
Ironically, it was bringing tuna tartare to the city famous for cheesesteak that allowed Starr to be the director he was always meant to be. Eating at one of his restaurants is like living inside a movie for a night: The set designs, the soundtracks, the wardrobes are all conceived and executed down to the most minute detail.
Starr knows films and music well enough to compete on Jeopardy!, but he also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the most interesting, innovative restaurants in the world. What he’s done is to distill the best of the best into palatable, accessible offerings aimed at a far broader audience than a handful of foodie jet-setters. Starr doesn’t create restaurants for critics. He creates restaurants for customers.
And those restaurants have been wildly successful—over 15 years, in four different cities, across no less than ten different cuisines. When he opened The Continental, a retro-feeling martini bar with globally-inspired nibbles in 1995, Philadelphia wasn’t even a blip on the hip-restaurant radar. By 2005, with everything from Cuban to Mexican, Asian, American and Moroccan-inspired restaurants under his belt, Bon Appetit’s readers picked him for Restaurateur of the Year, and he found himself in the enviable position of negotiating the expansion of his empire to New York. There was almost no room left in the Philadelphia market for more Starr restaurants, let alone anyone else’s.
In 2007 Buddakan and Morimoto opened in the same month on the same block on the northern edge of New York’s hot meatpacking district. New York food snobs, awaiting their arrival, laughed at Starr’s chances of success in the epicenter of American gastronomy. But it turned out the joke was to be on them. The year these two mega-successes opened, Starr received TimeOut New York’s Readers’ Choice award for Best Out-of-Town Restaurateur. Shortly after that, everyone seemed to have forgotten that he had come from out of town at all.
After following up his New York success with two restaurants in Atlantic City, Starr began to test the South Florida waters with Steak 954 in Fort Lauderdale. He sees the region as a great market for his restaurants, as underserved and wide open as the Philadelphia he first set his sights on. And even as he’s being interviewed, he’s thinking a move or two ahead, peppering his conversation with questions about the best sites for a future Buddakan.
“We’re definitely closing in on Miami,” Starr says with a mischievous smile that should make other local restaurateurs steel themselves for an onslaught.
So what can Bal Harbour diners expect this December?
The details may still be mostly in Starr’s head, but his impressive team is firmly in place. Gilles & Boissier, the hot Parisbased design duo—veterans of Philippe Starck and Christian Liaigre—are creating a non-Japanese interior that promises to be simultaneously chic and inviting.
“Sexy but not uptight, with exposed industrial ceilings, concrete, really elegant furniture,” Starr says, describing it as what a sophisticated Japanese restaurateur would be doing in Tokyo right now. “I don’t want to make it super-hip and trendy and South-Beach.”
Three chefs from Starr’s organization, with extensive training under Iron Chef Morimoto, are working on the menu. In addition to top-level sushi, already confirmed items include chilled rock lobster with house-made silken tofu; stone crab claw tempura with curried Kewpie mayo; Wagyu beef with shishito peppers and ponzu sauce; and uni risotto with truffled Pecorino.
“We’re going to design the menu so you can eat there three times a week,” explains Starr. There will be healthy stirfries, plenty of grilled items, no MSG in sight, and a light hand with the oil. Almost everything will be in small-dish size, and the prices will be reasonable to boot.
And so where did Starr turn to be sure he’s delivering what people really need and want in Bal Harbour? Not a marketing firm, not the menus of competitive restaurants, not the usual food authorities.
“I went to all the stores here and talked to the storekeepers,” he confides. “I asked them what they wanted to eat. Everyone said there’s no sushi. They want to eat sushi and they don’t want it to be expensive.”
Starr looks at his watch and tells me it’s time for him to go to a meeting in the Financial District. It’s lunchtime, and I suddenly realize that not only am I starving but that it’s the only time I’ve ever sat with a restaurateur for more than 15 minutes without carefully considered food on the table.
Starr just might be the least pretentious, least self-promoting restaurateur I’ve ever met. As he gets up, I catch sight of a paper bag and Diet Coke an assistant has left for him. Catching me looking, he grins.
“Turkey on rye.”
With 20 of his own restaurants to choose from, he’s gotten it from the corner deli.
