Tom Colicchio just might be one of the busiest men in the hospitality industry today. The James Beard Award-winning chef is constantly in motion, whether he’s on set in New Orleans filming the 11th season of the hit Bravo show Top Chef; tending to his newly opened inn in The Hamptons, Topping Rose House; preparing for the opening of his new Las Vegas restaurant, Tom Colicchio’s Heritage Steak, which should begin welcoming diners in August; or sneaking in a moment to spend time with his family.
Forbes Travel Guide recently caught up with the man of many talents to discuss his new ventures, what it takes to provide a great guest experience and how he plans to use his steakhouse to make a statement about the food industry.
How are you handling the stress and excitement that comes with opening two restaurants so close to each other?
At Topping Rose House, the restaurant opened last September. A lot of the heavy lifting with the food is done; now we’re just getting the rooms open. Heritage Steak doesn’t really open until mid-August. I have a great team of people there doing training and working with the staff on the menu description and wine list. I’ll get there for the opening and probably spend three or four weeks there, then go back and forth after that.
I learned a long time ago not to stress out over this stuff. The restaurant’s going to open, it’s going to be fine and I’ve put together an amazing team of people to do the projects, so I’m very confident in their ability. That’s the only way to do multiple operations. You have to build a team — a great team.
Why did you decide to expand into the hospitality realm with Topping Rose House? And is your method to selecting hotel staff different or similar to how you hire employees for your restaurants?
I got a call from the owners [of Topping Rose House, Bill Campbell and Simon Critchell] asking if I’d do the restaurant. I thought it was an amazing project, but the restaurant portion is very small. And I also thought, for a property that small, it didn’t make sense to have someone running a 22-room inn and someone else running the restaurant because you may have different philosophies and you may focus on different things. And so I said, “I don’t mind doing it if I can run hospitality.”
From a hospitality standpoint, I wanted to run it the way I run a restaurant — making sure that people are well looked after and taken care of, and that if they want something within reason, you get it for them. We may not have Raisin Bran on the menu, but if someone comes in and is staying for four or five days and the first day they say, “Oh, there’s no Raisin Bran on the menu?,” you better believe that the second day, it will be there.
As far as hiring, you hire the same way: You hire people who you feel have a real desire to provide hospitality. And quite frankly, I’ll hire that over someone who has technical skills but walks around with a frown on their face all day.
Let’s shift gears and talk about your new Las Vegas restaurant, Tom Colicchio’s Heritage Steak. The emphasis there is going to be preparing meals over open flames. What inspired you to take that approach?
At Gramercy Tavern, I designed a wood-burning grill for the tavern area. But it wasn’t a main feature, because we didn’t want it to feel like a fireplace. But recently, especially last summer, I’ve been cooking a lot outside, and cooking a lot over wood or wood and charcoal. We put a gas-fired- and wood-burning oven at Colicchio & Sons. I thought about the grill that I designed for Gramercy, and I missed cooking over real, live wood. So, I found a different grill from a company called Grillworks. It makes these amazing grills. They’re like nothing you’ve ever seen before; they’re based on South American grills. So, we have that, and I also have a Japanese charcoal robata grill. So, we have charcoal there, wood in the grill and wood in the oven.
At Craftsteak, everything’s really pure. The meat has salt and pepper on it, and that’s it — there are no sauces, no marinades. If there’s a sauce, we serve it on the side. This is going to be a little different. There will be more marinades, more spice and more international things, like chimichurri and various sauces from around the world, whether it’s Japanese dipping sauces or Spanish romesco.
Has the menu been finalized yet for Heritage Steak?
No [laughs]. I should have one ready — I know that the hotel is looking for it and my team is looking for it. Every day, I get a call from my director of operations, saying, “Where’s the menu?”
You know, menus are funny for me. I have a hard time just sitting down and starting to work on it, so I write down a bunch of ideas. I have a notebook that I started. Eventually, it gets to a point where dishes just start to come. It’s a very difficult process. The lunch menu at Topping Rose? I did not have it until the night before our first lunch. It’s not something that I’m purposely doing; there’s no method behind the madness. Sometimes, it just doesn’t come. I’ve learned over the years that if you try to force it, it just doesn’t feel right, but when it comes and it’s time to do it, it will take me 15 minutes and it will be done.
What else should people know about Heritage Steak?
I have been pretty outspoken about the need to get antibiotics out of our food system. And in my New York restaurants, we are about 99 percent antibiotic free. I say “99 percent” because we’re always waiting for that one person to come in and find one little thing and call us a liar. In Las Vegas, we’re getting there. But with this restaurant, from day one, I want to be 100 percent antibiotic free. And this idea of using heritage breeds — I’m not using commodity meat — is making a statement about food and the way it is processed. My feeling is that if I’m going to go out there and tell people that antibiotics are really bad and we need to get them out of the food system, I need to get them out of my restaurants.
Photo Courtesy of Tom Colicchio