A Movable Feast: Danny Meyer on a Roll

Danny Meyer scaled the subway stairs two at a time, emerged on Lexington and 77th, lengthened his stride and called over his shoulder: “Have I told you about the Meyer Street-Crossing Method? Meyscrom.” He scanned traffic. “Cut off every possible angle without being killed.”

A car whipped by. Another stopped. He sliced off the last 10 feet of 75th Street (“That was a baby jay”) and reached the Whitney museum, home of his newest restaurant, in two minutes.

Meyer — 53, trim, salt-and-pepper hair — greeted me an hour earlier in his Union Square office. It was March, and the branches outside his windows were just beginning to blur green. He stood up from behind a desk, backed by a wall of books (sample title: “The Power of Nice”), took my hand and applied the ideal amount of pressure for the ideal amount of time: a better handshake than any I could recall.

It was 9 a.m., and he was reviewing final edits for “Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook,” a collection of recipes from his four-star restaurant. In the hall, his assistant, Haley Carroll, examined lunch reservations on a computer.

“I’m looking for notable people,” she said. Meyer would spend from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. visiting their tables. A prominent book publisher would be eating at Union Square Cafe. “He’s made 878 reservations and always sits at Table 38.” Onscreen a note said to give him 38 unless someone named Peggy wanted it.

“Does Danny do dinner visits?” I asked.

“He will depending on where.” She called out, “Danny, how often do you do dinner drop-ins?”

“Three times a week for Maialino” — the Roman-style trattoria across from his apartment — “two times a week somewhere else.”

Carroll told me: “If there’s a school play at 7:30” — Meyer is the father of four — “he can stop by the bar at 6:45 and say hello. It’s all about schedule.” To Meyer: “Adam Moss is at Maialino tonight . . . Angie is in the Modern’s Bar Room dining with Judy. They get together a couple times a year. Gramercy Tavern, Sy Sternberg is there . . . Vincent Ottomanelli, Jason Epstein for dinner. Jamie Niven.”

Carroll handed a printout to Meyer. He pointed to a name and asked, “Doesn’t she write us notes?”

“Danny caught one that I missed.”

After going over the cookbook manuscript (“They’re trying to get me out of the present. . . . I don’t want to be in the conditional”), Meyer made his way to the Whitney for a 10 a.m. meeting with his staff. The scheduled opening of the restaurant, named Untitled, was a week away. Meyer devotes unlimited time to his new ventures, tasting every item on the menu multiple times, suggesting alterations to such minutiae as the size of a sous chef’s dice and constantly consulting with the manager. I heard him instruct Untitled’s chef to alter a B.L.T. so the bacon would stick out on either side. “That’s called turning up the ‘home’ dial,” he explained.

In the museum’s basement, Untitled’s chef, manager and three dozen waiters, waitresses, busboys, runners and line cooks sat on uncomfortable chairs. Meyer greeted them and went into a speech — one of three he would give that day — calibrated to inspire. (His mother, Roxanne Frank, told me of his public persona: “That’s something that has evolved as he matured. He was a little bit shy growing up.”) “When an artist can’t decide a name it’s untitled,” he told the group. “When the name is Untitled, it’s underlined. We are underlining it. . . . I thought it would be refreshing — make of it what you want. Put it on yourself. ‘I’m Untitled.’ Put it on a coffee. Every coffee has a big brand on it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just serve really good food and make people happy?” He segued into the decline of the Upper East Side coffee shop, the ascent of boutiques, the economics behind corporate entities that can afford to pay almost any rent for exposure at a particular location. “We thought, Let’s do a New York farm-to-table coffee shop. Why is it that coffee shops aren’t that good with coffee? . . . When was the last time you went to a coffee shop that cured and smoked its own bacon? Right here at Untitled. We’re here for you and what you want to be.”

We left and walked up to the Upper East Side branch of Shake Shack, one of his five hamburger stands in Manhattan. On Park Avenue he was recognized by a pedestrian, and briefly stopped to talk. “Occasionally they’ll see me up here, and I’m like that doorman they can’t place,” he told me.

When we reached 86th Street, Meyer asked, “Smell it?” I did. Shake Shack makes its first impressions olfactorily. He breathed deeply, stepped inside, stood atop a flight of stairs leading to the cash registers and slowly scanned the scene. “My favorite thing is watching people enjoy our food,” he told me earlier. “I get sort of an insane amount of pleasure out of that.”

After a quick walk-through — Meyer spotted and comped a woman he referred to as “New York’s first celebrity woman chef” — we stepped back outside to ponder logistics. Could we hit the Upper West Side Shake Shack, and then the Modern, his restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art, and still make Eleven Madison Park, where he was expected to address a private party, by 2 p.m.? It was 11:50 a.m. Into a cab. Through the park. Out in front of the Shack, on 77th and Columbus, where Meyer was recognized by a slender woman pushing a stroller. He greeted her without breaking eye contact, then, as she walked off, turned to me and pointed out a damaged chair through the Shack’s window (“See that slat?”) that he somehow noticed without looking away from the stroller pusher. He went inside, had a brief word with the manager and descended a staircase to “the scrum” — a basement dining room with a flat-screen TV, packed full of kids and nannies.

Meyer told me: “One of my greatest moments was right here. A bunch of sixth or seventh graders were carrying their trays down. One said, ‘Yeah, I guess I’m glad we’re here — I couldn’t bear one more day of Chipotle.’ ”

He decided to add the theater-district Shack to our itinerary. After grabbing another cab, we stopped at 44th and Eighth Avenue. “Former Chipotle manager here,” Meyer said with satisfaction. We entered into the Smell. Now that Meyer had pointed it out, I was struck by its tactile qualities — the presence of more airborne grease than even the most advanced exhaust systems can dissipate. In the manager’s office, pictures of a multibranch Shack outing on a booze cruise covered a bulletin board. Meyer smiled and said, “That’s what I want to see — people goofing around and having fun.” As we exited, the staff waved, and Meyer told me, “This is management by walking around.”

To make it to MoMA he opted against a cab — we’d Meyscrom through parking lots and breezeways, cheating the Manhattan grid. Midblock in a hotel atrium, he stopped, shook his head and said: “If you can get joy out of this, life isn’t so bad.”

At the Modern, Meyer pulled a silk tie out of his jacket pocket, knotted it on and made for a grand cru Chablis tasting in the private dining room. He approached a young man in a thick-napped brown suit: Romain Collet, of the Jean Collet wine dynasty. Meyer introduced himself, in French, and began detailing the long relationship between his restaurants and the family’s vineyard.

Next, dining room visits: with a former neighbor from his home town, St. Louis; the chairman of the Sotheby’s board (which Meyer had just joined); and a gray-blond, very attractive businesswoman who, refusing the half-hug Meyer offered while she was seated, exclaimed, “That’s not enough; I need a full-body hug,” stood up and got it.

We took a cab to 26th and Madison, Meyer on a call all the way downtown. Then he hopped out and skirted the park, still talking into his phone while pointing out the first flowers of spring (yellow), crossed the avenue and stepped through the revolving doors of Eleven Madison Park. We walked to the back of the restaurant, passed through an upstairs kitchen where penny-size petit fours were being arranged, then into a room where a group of Tammanyesque men, the Country Club Chefs of Connecticut, had just pushed back their chairs. One stood and introduced Meyer: “He’s a man with a lot of ambition.”

Meyer delivered an effortless postprandial speech, insidery for the industry crowd, dropping the surprise that he was planning a Shake Shack for Connecticut. Huge applause.

After jaywalking across 23rd Street and making Union Square in six minutes, Meyer told me: “This is what I do. I couldn’t sit in a chair in an office all day.”

New York is a city of rooms. Most of them are tiny, dark, lonely and the wrong temperature. Meyer makes rooms that are exquisite — overlooking, in the case of the Modern, the greatest sculptures of the 20th century — and intimate. You feel at home. His goal, he told me, is for customers to make his restaurants their clubhouses.

Meyer’s track record is near perfect: one closing (Tabla, a 283-seat Indian place that lasted for 12 years), 25 openings and counting. And for most of his career he has expanded without repeating himself. He has created new restaurants as though they were each his first and only — the singularity of a place always as important as the food. His looseness and precision are qualities more reminiscent of an athlete or an artist. Whatever Meyer is engaged in — jaywalking, French-speaking, grease-inhaling — receives his complete attention.

Some of this is hereditary. Meyer’s father, Morton, owned hotels and had a gift for hospitality. As Meyer told me, “My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking, and to enjoy consuming good food and wine.”

After college, Meyer apprenticed in European kitchens, worked as a successful salesman (of plastic shoplifting-prevention tags) in New York, became an assistant manager at a Manhattan seafood restaurant, got to know chefs and critics and one of his future partners, and met the woman who would become his wife, Audrey Heffernan, who was working as a waitress. In 1985, he withdrew his savings and opened Union Square Cafe. Anticipating that The New York Times was going to review the place, he came down with Bell’s palsy. The left half of his face was paralyzed, and the left half of his tongue lost its sense of taste. Symptoms abated after two weeks. The review was a rave. And Union Square Cafe went on to critical and popular acclaim. The natural next step was to try to repeat his success at another restaurant. But Meyer had seen his father overextend and fail. Morton Meyer was in the travel-tour business before jumping into owning two hotels — in Rome and Milan — and spending much of his life on an airplane. Unable to balance ambition and finances, the elder Meyer went bankrupt at 42, destroyed his marriage, went bankrupt again and died at 59, when Danny was 32. Meyer told me his father’s notions of hospitality were always “right on the money,” but his weakness was “business disciplines” and “team-building.”

The son has managed every aspect of his career to avoid repeating the mistakes of the father. It would be nine years before his second restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, opened. Other restaurants followed, approximately one every four years, each requiring vast investments of time to meet his standards. It has taken Meyer 26 years to go from the owner-manager of a single place to C.E.O. of a company — Union Square Hospitality Group — that employs 2,200 people and oversees the operations of all his restaurants. His mother calls the company “his business family.” Its core is a tight-knit group of five general partners whom Meyer has known for an aggregate of 102 years. Together they oversee three places that are in the Zagat Guide’s Top 5 (Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Union Square Cafe), plus the Modern, Maialino, Blue Smoke, the two cafes at the Museum of Modern Art, the newly opened restaurant at the Whitney, a jazz club, a handful of seasonal stands including one at Citi Field and a catering and events company. Meyer is on the board of Open Table, the Internet restaurant reservations service that not only allows him to materialize midlunch for a full-body hug but also tracks the eating habits of his 3,500 or so fine-dining customers each day. (Shake Shack feeds more than 12,000 daily.) This has all taken decades. And Meyer might have remained an incrementalist were it not for Shake Shack, which began as a hot-dog cart that he told the staff of Eleven Madison to set up in the park across the street in 2001. The cart was such a sensation that he expanded the menu to include burgers and milkshakes and opened an actual 400-square-foot shack in the park in 2004. Eleven Madison owned Shake Shack from 2004 to 2009, when it became its own company — but the mobbed burger stand provided the capital required to hire the Swiss chef Daniel Humm away from a restaurant in San Francisco, reduce the seats in his new dining room, double his staff and establish a venue so elevated in its pursuits that it’s less a restaurant than a graduate program in taste. Four stars from The Times ultimately followed.

Shake Shack began spreading throughout Manhattan in 2008, along the Eastern Seaboard in 2010 and 2011 (Miami and Washington) and now overseas, with branches newly opened in Dubai and Kuwait City. The total number of Shake Shacks now stands at 13 — in three years, Meyer has doubled his restaurant holdings.

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In “Setting the Table,” his memoir cum manifesto on hospitality, published just after Shake Shack opened, Meyer describes his mood upon opening restaurant No. 2, Gramercy Tavern: “I had the sense of being close to a dangerous outcome. Was I now treading down the same path my father had taken — expansion to bankruptcy?”

These fears have been definitively put to rest, and Meyer has embraced what he described to me as “the profitability edge” of Shake Shack — an edge that is sharpened by volume and expansion, in contrast to the world of white tablecloths. According to the National Restaurant Association, profit margins in “full service” restaurants, with an average check of $25 or more per person, range from -2 percent to 6.8 percent, with a median of 1.8 percent. Meyer, having perfected fine dining, may only just be beating 30-year Treasurys. Shake Shack changes that, with margins in its category, “limited service,” as high as 13 percent. Of course, odds are that Meyer is beating all these markers. But for the first time in his career, Meyer finds it impossible to visit all his restaurants in a single day. Ubiquity and hands-on attention — essential to his success — are incompatible with expansion.

Union Square Hospitality Group has begun to produce some Shake Shack ingredients in a Louisiana factory (instead of in an auxiliary kitchen at Eleven Madison Park). In the walk-in fridge of one branch, I handled a gigantic plastic pillow of cheese sauce: designed to travel. A day earlier I wondered about a sticker on a bag Meyer was carrying: MSY, the New Orleans airport code. I imagined him flying in, sniffing the cheese vat, recalibrating machinery. It was a reassuring vision. But I had to wonder if Meyer — without being present to indulge customers, tweak recipes and notice every broken chair — can perpetuate the dining experience that is expected of him. Later I walked past Union Square Cafe and saw that it had been given a Health Department grade of “B,” indicating 14 to 27 sanitary violation points. (It now has an “A.”) In a non-Meyer place this would barely be worth noting. But how can Union Square Cafe and his other inimitable restaurants preserve their essence without constant infusions of Meyerness?

This past winter, in Miami, Meyer participated in a mass grill-off called Burger Bash. Shake Shack, past winner of the event’s People’s Choice award, was a returning champion. Meyer opened a Miami Shack in 2010, and he wanted to use this trip to scout for a second location — with a management group in place, he needed to give it more to do.

In South Beach, under a huge oceanside tent, American celebrity chefery was prepping to sear hecatombs of flesh. There for the weekend were Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray, Emeril Lagasse, Martha Stewart, Anthony Bourdain, Giada De Laurentiis — the gods and demigods of an industry that generates an estimated $1.7 trillion.

Shake Shack would produce a few thousand burgers and chorizo cheese fries. As we dodged front-end loaders and harried interns, Meyer took a call and said, “I’m walking the grounds of Burger Bash the way they take a racehorse to the paddock before the race.”

Shake Shack competes with “better burger” chains — Five Guys, In-N-Out, etc. But the scale and execution are different. Those chains have hundreds of locations and exponential expansion plans. In-N-Out operates two meat-processing plants. Meyer told me the vast majority of Shake Shack’s management “began their careers with us in our fine-dining restaurants,” and the meat comes from Pat LaFrieda, a third-generation butcher who produces a blend of sirloin, chuck and brisket designed by Richard Coraine, former general manager of Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio in San Francisco and now one of Meyer’s partners. As Meyer put it: “There are a zillion variables to a hamburger. What part of the animal went into it. What coarseness. What temperature.” Coraine spent months “tasting and modifying the blend to hit the right chord.” Coraine explained the details in an e-mail: “You can also factor a few other elements . . . the amount of butter brushed on the bun before griddling it (there is fat in butter, so the brisket was taken down a level) the composition and amount of ‘Shack Sauce’ (flavor in there as well) and the type and ‘slice width’ of the American cheese.”

The critic Oliver Strand told me — hyperbole be damned — that the meat was “every bit as excellent as what you’ll find in Peter Luger’s or Keens’s.” Beyond the exalted flesh, the Shake Shack aesthetic is unintimidatingly midcentury, the marketing is cheeky (if you want cucumber, tomato and relish on your hot dog, the kitchen will “drag it through the garden”) and each branch supports a local charity.

At the Shake Shack booth I was introduced to one of Meyer’s partners in Union Square Hospitality, David Swinghamer, a straw-haired Wisconsinite so tall he stooped. Swinghamer fed me a Shack burger: cooked-through, barely a suggestion of pink at the center, as they are in every Shack. Then I sneaked off to Umami Burger, a five-unit Southern California chain coming to Miami in 2012. The competition. Umami’s meat was capped with a mushroom, but it was raw on the inside. I got a sample for Meyer. He and Swinghamer devoured it, communally — ripping it apart with their hands.

Meyer, mouth full, declared, “It’s not cooked, but the beef is mighty good.”

Swinghamer: “I like the shiitake.”

Me: “Maybe I should tell them the meat’s not cooked.”

Meyer, solemnly: “If they asked, I would tell them. But as Napoleon said, ‘Part of brilliance is winning and part is leaving your opponent alone when he’s losing.’ ”

A line formed for Shake Shack burgers. A Frenchman jostled up to say: “Hi, Danny. You look great.”

Meyer said: “Laurent. You left Chicago. You got your Michelin stars and — ” He pantomimed a goodbye wave then handed him a burger.

The Frenchman devoured it.

After he’d gone, Meyer said: “Laurent Gras. Incredible chef. Three Michelin stars.”

An 11-person band started cranking out covers. A man hollered at Meyer: “I e-mailed you! We met a couple years ago!” Then he was swallowed up by the crowd.

I took a walk and came upon Bobby Flay, standing in a cloud of smoke surrounded by young women in “Get Crunchified” T-shirts, all screaming to INXS’s “What You Need,” while fans’ camera flashes lighted up billowing explosions from the grill. I got a burger and brought it back to Shake Shack.

Meyer grabbed Swinghamer, and we all withdrew to a stainless prep table.

Regarding the offering, Meyer said, “This is Bobby Flay.”

A dissection ensued. He removed the top bun. Something white jiggled to the bass line.

“Is that an egg?” Swinghamer asked.

“Goat cheese,” Meyer said.

He broke it up and began to eat.

“It’s good,” he conceded.

Then, with a vulnerable gleam in his eye, Meyer asked, “How long is their line compared to ours?”

At the end of the night, Meyer left the tent and sat down, wearily, on the boardwalk. “There were some slimy people there,” he said. “Just picking at me. Pick, pick, pick! . . . ‘I e-mailed you.’ What kind of greeting is that?” He continued: “I can’t believe how many people tried to get me to sign a lease in Las Vegas. We’re the only ones who haven’t gone into Vegas yet.”

Most of these people want to recreate one of Meyer’s marquee restaurants in a casino. In an e-mail later, Meyer provided three reasons that this won’t happen:

1) “I . . . cannot imagine spending my life in an airplane for the purpose of visiting a fine-dining restaurant. . . . Saw my dad try that . . . and saw a very unhappy family outcome.”

2) The impossibility of bonding with customers in a city “built upon so much transiency.”

3) Chemical sensitivity: “I actually have a bad reaction to . . . the synthetic deodorizers they pump through to eliminate smoke. Really, those smells almost sicken me.”

But he’ll leave the door open for Shake Shack: “We never know who’s eating there day-to-day anyway,” Meyer wrote in an e-mail. “There’s no reservation sheet to scour; no dining room to host.” In an interview with Business Insider, he said: “Think about a business where each one does not have a chef, or a pastry chef, or a dining-room manager, or a maître d’, or a florist, or a linen company, and you start to notice that a lot of the cost structure that goes into a fine-dining restaurant is missing. . . . From a cost-structure standpoint, it’s a good way to go.”

Swinghamer found Meyer on the boardwalk and invited us to join Dan Tavan, general manager of the Miami Shake Shack, for drinks at a Japanese gastropub.

Over sake, Meyer asked Tavan, “What was tonight, six in sales?”

“Nine, almost nine.”

A $9,000 dinner rush. Everyone drank to that.

The next morning, Meyer, Swinghamer and I drove to Shake Shack, which is in a Herzog and de Meuron-designed building, just off a pedestrian mall (Meyer sniffed and said, sadly, “It smells different before it opens”), then on to south Miami to scout for a new location. As we crossed Biscayne Bay, Meyer admired the palm-covered islands, with their 1920s architecture. But as the traffic got thicker and the buildings blander, he said: “This strip is so antiseptic. Needs to be cool. ” Then, “This whole area just gets me nervous.”

Of the 13 Shake Shacks, a majority are in parks or areas with lots of pedestrian traffic. Such locations create a boutique quality Meyer calls “Shackness.”

Credit here goes to Swinghamer, who Meyer told me has a “sixth sense” for real estate. “The ideal doesn’t just come up for rent,” Swinghamer said. “You need to have inside knowledge. People on the ground.” He explained that they had “inside information about the place we’re going.” He added, “It’s not on the market yet, so nobody else really knows about it.”

We were following a commuter rail line, boxed in by strip malls. As we passed a corner Chipotle, Swinghamer said, “Reliable sources say they do $2.7 million there.” Pause. “We do a lot more business than a typical Chipotle.” He looked hard at the corner. “Gotta do a lot . . . and be in a place that expresses Shackness.”

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Meyer was only getting more nervous. Financial upsides aside, he seemed unable to tune out the surroundings. “It’s a sea of dreck,” he said, and began reading the names of businesses: “Puritan Cleaners. Hookah Lounge.”

“Meyer Mortgage,” I pointed out.

“Saw that — I’m looking for signs.”

We arrived at the place they’d been tipped to: a barbecue joint with good parking, straddling the highway and a bland residential district, within walking distance of the University of Miami.

“Can this be a Shack?’ Meyer asked.

Contemplative silence.

“I see something looking back real far to the iconic hamburger/hot-dog stands,” Swinghamer said. “We’ll put our modern twist to it.”

“Modern retro,” Meyer said.

They began refining a concept. Every Shake Shack is nominally tailored to its presumptive clientele: the TV room for kids and nannies on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, communal seating for tourists in the theater district, site-specific “concretes” (frozen custards with various mix-ins), like the vanilla, fudge sauce, peanut and shattered-sugar-cone “Nut-Thing but Amazin’ ” for Mets fans at Citi Field.

Here the clientele would be undergrads. “Should have a lot of TVs, and ultra-cool music so the students come over,” Swinghamer said. “This is an alternative to going to a bar.”

“You’d want some neon that said something about ice-cold beer,” Meyer said.

“Yeah,” Swinghamer said. “A touch of a roadhouse. That would work for college.”

“I like the tree,” said Meyer, indicating a banyan up against the building. We pulled alongside, and Swinghamer lowered the windows.

Meyer mused, “We could name a concrete after it.”

For years the question of how to expand has been something Meyer struggled with. Then he met Susan Reilly Salgado, a doctoral candidate in business at New York University. She’d been eating at the bar at Union Square Cafe, getting to know the staff, listening to waiters say things like, “When I found this job, I felt like I’d come home.” In 1998 she saw Meyer “working the room” on the opening night at Tabla, introduced herself and said she wanted to do her dissertation on his restaurants. He agreed, provided she work as a hostess for six months.

Five years later she informed Meyer that his company was too dependent on him. “There’s no system for opening restaurants without you,” she said, “and the more you open, the more diluted your impact becomes.” Salgado proposed forming a curriculum “to make explicit everything that Danny . . . intuitively knew.” Practically speaking, this would allow for succession (part of avoiding his father’s mistakes is ensuring the business can continue without him) and, in the shorter term, for the company to open new restaurants not just in Miami but anywhere in the world.

Meyer has often been approached with the idea of franchising Shake Shack in the United States, which he has never wanted to do — “How can you franchise hospitality?” But in 2008, after Shake Shack opened its second branch, an international franchiser, Alshaya, approached him. They operated Starbucks, Estée Lauder, Dean & DeLuca, Pinkberry and H&M outlets in the Middle East. Meyer, flattered by the interest, went to Dubai, noted that Alshaya’s Starbucks were “as well run if not better than the ones on Union Square”; he told Business Insider he decided to “get a master’s degree in replication . . . but so far away that our audience wouldn’t watch us doing it, and at the same time give us a chance to grow.” Shake Shacks in Dubai and Kuwait are the first phase.

Salgado now leads a new company, incorporated last year under the name Hospitality Quotient (H.Q.), that franchises not food but Meyer’s style — franchises, in effect, his eye contact, handshaking, infectious capacity for pleasure. As Meyer put it, hospitality is “the degree to which it makes you feel good to make other people feel good.”

Salgado told me of Meyer’s feelgood style, “We decided the model was sustainable, the concepts transferable.” And many were the companies that could benefit.

The abbreviation comes from Meyer. As he put it, an I.Q. is native and can’t be taught; so, too, is an H.Q. “But it can be identified. . . . Someone with a high H.Q. is at their best when providing happiness to someone else.” And with H.Q., “we’re working with companies that . . . want to be the best in the world at how people feel.” To this end they’ve trained staff at Beth Israel (“A hospital should be hospitable,” the head of orthopedics told Meyer), a Broadway theater company and a supermarket chain.

Alshaya’s management teams for Dubai and Kuwait came to New York for a sort of kindness boot camp, months before opening. Then Meyer sent a group of his high-H.Q. staff members to Dubai and Kuwait for on-site training.

The businesses that Alshaya franchises are the exact sorts H.Q. hopes to work with. Should all proceed as planned, the profitability edge will be unbluntable.

Floyd Cardoz, the chef of Tabla, which closed last year, was waiting in Meyer’s office on a clear March afternoon. The decision to shutter Tabla was, Meyer told me, “excruciatingly hard.” He resisted for years, losing money, laying people off for the first time in his career.

“I always genuinely believed we could turn Tabla’s fortunes around,” he told me in an e-mail. “I was hanging on to the false pride of being able to say we had never closed a restaurant in our first quarter-century of doing business.” He continued, “But I was ultimately convinced by my partners that — counterintuitively — the cruelest thing we could do for people’s careers was to keep it going.”

Now Meyer and Cardoz embraced. A new tenant had just taken over the Tabla lease, and the chef said, slowly, “I have a lump in my throat. . . . I handed my keys over today.” Tears were in his eyes. Meyer’s too. “It was a very good 12 years,” Cardoz said. “I learned a lot about myself. I don’t know what the outcome was.”

“It was good, Floyd,” Meyer said. “You’d like to think that a restaurant will go on forever, like you think your life will go on forever.”

Soon they began to leaf through a stack of menus from the ’20s and ’30s (Meyer has a collection), looking for ideas for a new Battery Park City restaurant that U.S.H.G had just announced. It would serve seafood and grow its own vegetables. Cardoz would be in the kitchen.

Meyer mentioned that the shrimp at Blue Hill, where he ate for his birthday the night before, were cooked on hibachis, with charcoal made from the bones of animals raised on an upstate farm affiliated with the restaurant.

“That’s a gimmick kind of thing — it’s not going to flavor the food,” Cardoz said.

Meyer countered that it was smart recycling and good marketing.

Cardoz: “Lot of carbon emissions making charcoal. Not that green.”

Meyer ended the argument by pointing out that the farm used the emissions to heat its greenhouse. (He turned out to be wrong; the farm used the heat generated by composting.)

They started debating what they’d serve at the new place. Cardoz had been to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central: “Bad food for high prices, paper cups for sauce and full of people.”

Meyer leafed through his menus.

Cardoz: “A whole section on eggs.”

Meyer: “Anchovies on toast. How long ago was this? Broiled lobster, $2.50.” He pointed — 1939.

“Vegetables are an important part of this restaurant,” Meyer continued. “What if vegetables were the main course? Not just to keep vegetarians happy, but to make the restaurant a destination.”

Cardoz was jotting down menu categories. “Lose ‘sides’ and call it ‘vegetables,’ ” he said.

They moved on to seafood.

Meyer said: “It’s become totally cliché to have a big platter of raw stuff. . . . At the Oyster Bar, how many oysters were there, 20?”

“And the waiter didn’t even know what they were,” Cardoz said.

“I want to have the best oyster you can have in New York today, opened perfectly.”

Half an hour later Cardoz got up to go.

Meyer said, “Peace be with you, baby.” It was time for dinner.