Eric Papachristos

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Eric Papachristos. Eric, thanks so much for joining us today. How are you?

Eric Papachristos: I am doing amazing in this early summer up here in Boston. Love it.

SSR: So we always start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

EP: A little bit of an interesting story. I was born in Boston to immigrant Greek parents that they met in Boston, got married, had my brother, and as soon as I was born, they moved back to Greece or we all moved back to Greece because they didn’t have any family here. So I spent the first 10 years of my life actually in a little village in Greece.

SSR: Amazing. What was that like?

EP: Growing up in a village… I mean, then we moved on to a bigger city, but my grandmother… both my parents come from agricultural backgrounds or their families do, and it’s a simple way of life in a village where the first floor of the house is a barn and a livestock, your cow is downstairs. And the fondest memories that I have is with my grandparents, my friends in the neighborhood. And maybe because I’m a restaurateur, I never sort of decided to be a restaurateur. It just sort of came to me. But to your question, I always think about food when I think about my childhood in Greece.

SSR: So how long were you in that small town before you moved to a bigger one?

EP: I was young, so I don’t remember that well, but we were there about four years, and then we went to the larger town for about five years. So almost about 10 years I was in Greece. It was like a small, very living in an apartment versus living in a sort of a village house where there’s a farm and stuff. But food was always the center. And again, this is back in the ’80s, so food was always the center of the family and what we did, and particularly the economy of that southern Mediterranean was always based around food.

SSR: Love it. And what were you like as a kid? 

EP: I was super energetic. I was super active, and when we moved to America, [my mom] was always a phys ed teacher. So I think as a young kid, my brother and I would be playing sports. She’d have us go from one sport to the other, and she was also a lifeguard in the summers in Greece. So  we grew up on the beach with no suntan protection or whatever it’s called. And yeah, just very hyperactive.

SSR: So did you move back to the States at some point?

EP: In 1986. I was 10, and I didn’t speak a lick of English, and it wasn’t that hard of a transition because I think at that age, your brain can understand languages a lot quicker than I can now, but I just wanted to be American. My junior high and my high school years, I pushed away my Greek identity as far as I could because I wanted to be American. But I look back at it and it’s a beautiful thing because we sort of forget that America is the culture. It’s not just the melting pot, but we have our own identity and culture here as well.

SSR: So you were 10, so you did high school, and then how did you end up getting into the restaurant business? 

EP: So when we came to America, my dad bought a little diner, very quintessential Greeks coming to America, bought a little diner. No one in my family owns a restaurant, nobody cooks except for the mothers and the grandmothers. And here’s my dad buying a restaurant because that’s what all Greeks were doing. My dad had me on the dish room washing dishes. I remember I was like 10 years old and my friends would be playing soccer on the weekends and I would be washing. So I really learned early on about hospitality, particularly in that mom and pop environment where every guest counted, every dollar, every penny was so important. And really also my work ethic really began as not just because my dad had me working. And so that was really how I started in hospitality.

But I never really made it past the dish room until I graduated high school. I was always the dishwasher. And it wasn’t until college and I went and studied finance, so I couldn’t work at my dad’s because my dad’s was back in my hometown. And I started bartending when I was in college. So I started to get a little bit more experience, a little bit more front of house experience, A, from hospitality. It was just always kind of in my blood.

And actually my first career post-college. I have two graduate degrees. I have an MBA, and then I have a second master’s in finance, both from universities here in Boston. And I would be moonlighting, I’d be working my career at Harvard and then at a big, very prominent law firm doing finance. And I would still be bartending at nights. Nobody knew because I loved it. I just really, really enjoyed it. And so that’s how I kind of got into hospitality.

SSR: I love it. And had your dad done restaurants before or did he just decide when he moved over here?

EP: It was just when he moved here, and again, when the decision for us to come to America, I remember this, my dad recently told me the story. I’m 47, my parents are in their early 70s. He just recently told me the story. His answer was, “When you guys were growing up in Greece, knowing what we knew of America, I was going out to buy you guys Christmas presents. And I remember in 1986, the toys that we had in Greece were toys that were 20 years behind in America.”

So he’s like, “I realized that I was raising my kids not in the best economic environment possible.” So he just didn’t have a choice. He said, “I’m going to go to America and I’ll figure it out.” So my dad was coming to America months before we ended up moving to try to figure out what’s he going to do. And he ended up buying this little diner, which became a restaurant. And it’s still open and running still to this day, 40 years later.

SSR: That’s amazing. Which town is it in?

EP: It’s in Weymouth. It’s like a half an hour away from Boston.

SSR: Okay, so you’re still bartending, you go to school for finance, you get your undergrad, you get your multiple degrees, what’s next?

EP: So I thought I was this super smart finance, saved some money, and these guys that I used to bartend for, I bartended for them all for about eight years, maybe even a little bit longer. I didn’t take a weekend off, I didn’t take a night off, regardless of what was happening in my personal life, my professional life, my social life, I always worked. And so I think these guys that I worked at a nightclub for, they saw me work really, really hard/

So because I was a finance brain, I put a business plan together and I said, “I want to open up my own bar, I want you guys to look at my business plan.” And I presented my business plan to them, and they were uber nightclub owners, uber wealthy. And I said, “I’m not looking for an investment. I saved a couple of bucks, but I just want to get your blessing on this. What do you think?” And they looked at me and they said, “You’re an effing idiot.” And I was like, my God, I gave these guys my blood, my soul, and they’re not even supporting me, not financially, I didn’t ask about financial support, I just wanted some moral support.

But I still ended up working for them. And then three months later, they actually approached me to partner with them in their newest club, nightclub. So things ended up working out at the end, and obviously they were much older. They were about 35 years older than I was. So they looked at me as sort of the young energy, he wants to come in, he’s committed, and boom, boom, boom. So I came in and we opened up a nightclub in 2004, and we were uber, uber successful. So I was 26 when I started that, and that really began my transition out of corporate life and my full head end…

SSR: Amazing. And with the nightclub, why do you think it was so successful? What did you create that really resonated?

EP: Again, being 26 and having partners who were very wealthy and experienced really gave me the opportunity to see how someone who is successful can open a business. And I think that was for me, a key pivotal moment in my career. A lot of people like my dad who are just trying to rub two pennies together to open up a restaurant, a bar, or nightclub. But I was extremely excited to be able to have these owners next to me, and they put a lot of thought into the concept, into the design, into the guest experience.

And again, my dad who I had my first sort of idea of what hospitality was, my dad was just focused on the guest, the guest, the guest. And these nightclub people were focused on the experience, the design, the atmosphere. And that was really sort of the two coming together for me, which is critically important because in a nightclub, there is no differentiator between a Tito’s and soda to the club next to you that has Tito’s and soda.

So what is your differentiator? So really for me, that was one of the big key factors. And the second one was really having an owner, me, there was two others, but they were jet-setting around the world, but I was an owner that was there on the ground floor and I was pouring my passion into it. And I have 10 restaurants now, and I do the same thing. I’m there every day. I’m passionate about what I do, and I’m able to really teach my staff how important that one-on-one interaction is to also how the design and the experience restaurant is particularly today post-COVID too.

SSR: So how long did you stay in the nightclub and what was kind of your next step or what did you want to do next?

EP: So we opened up the nightclub. We all made our money back in one year. It was uber successful and we had a 15-year lease. So we had 14 years of just sort of cruise control, theoretically cruise control. But to be honest with you, the nightclub business really burnt me from the hours that I was working. Not the quantity, but the quality of hours. And that was in my mid to late 20s. My friends are getting married, they’re going to weddings, they’re going to… they’re meeting their significant others, they’re raising kids. And here’s Eric Friday and Saturday night working the nightclub. Again, uber successful, but on a personal side, it’s a sacrifice.

So I said to myself, I need to transition out of nightclubs because my next place… Originally I was like, I’m going to do like 100 nightclubs. I’m going to go all around the country and I want to do nightclub, blah, blah, blah. But after a year of really having that tough lifestyle, I said, I’m going to transition into food. I remember a little bit of food from my dad’s place, which is diner food, which has nothing really to do with culinary to I’m like, I have to figure it out.

So I ended up actually opening up a diner after I opened up the nightclub, something that I knew. And I sort of married the two concepts of hospitality and design into the diner, and that started to become uber successful. But I was reaching a limit on culinary because again, at this point, I’m 30 years old, I’m like, I can’t go to culinary school. I don’t want to hire. I got to get deeper in the culinary side, and how do I do that? And that’s actually how I ended up meeting my current culinary partner, Chef Jody Adams, and we opened up our first huge restaurant together in 2011.

SSR: First, let’s talk, how did you meet Jody?

EP: Again, it goes back to hospitality and restaurants are really all about relationship management, even nightclubs are as well. So I had met Jody because someone that I bartended with when I was 17 years old ended up actually working at Jody’s restaurant, and he was the general manager. So as I had my nightclub, I would go to Jody’s restaurant because my buddy was a general manager, and I would sit at the bar and enjoy a really, really great dinner. And I got to know Jody really on a personal level, on a friendship level. And at that time I wanted to open up another restaurant. So I started talking to Jody. I was like, “I want to open up another restaurant.”

And Jody’s restaurant, critically acclaimed, Jody has two James Beard, she’s best chef in the country, food and wine, all of these amazing things. I didn’t even know who she was. I legitimately didn’t know who she was, so much so that once we decided to open up a restaurant together, because we were just having casual conversation, we just said, “Oh, I want to do a restaurant. You want to do one? All right, let’s do one together. Let’s see what happens.”

And so we open Trade, and I remember opening day, opening week, people are just… the restaurant’s full all day long. And I’m like, “Why are they…?” And they’re saying, “Jody, we’re here to see Jody. We want to see Jody.” And again, I sort of visually remember and I was like, “Who is Jody?” And I didn’t google her until after we were partners, after we opened. And even still today, Jody and I have been business partners for close to 15 years, and the presence and the power that she has in the culinary world is really, really amazing and inspiring, which again gives sort of credence to what we really do. It’s not just about smoke and mirrors, which nightclubs are so it’s hospitality, it’s real authentic food with chefs and the design, particularly our latest restaurant that we just opened, design had to be on the forefront of what we were doing.

SSR: So we’ll get to that in a sec, but why do you think you and Jody have worked so well together for the last 15 years? What is it about your relationship that has stood a decade and a half?

EP: We have the same temperament. Kitchens are very much known or restaurants or nightclubs are known to have… Obviously with The Bear, those kitchens are real. That stress, that energy is real. And Jody and I are very much not that. We find ourselves in environments like that, but we are the first ones in our kitchens, in our restaurants to just say, “Cool it, calm it, relax, slow everything down.” And so we know at the end of the day, it’s just dinner. It’s just dinner. There’s a line at the door, the chicken is 10 minutes late, it’s just dinner. We can manage this.

And so we really have that temperament first. Second is we respect each other’s lanes. Obviously with my background in finance and operations, I carry that side of the house. Jody carries the culinary, so I trust what she’s going to put forward. She trusts what I’m going to develop next as a concept and whatnot.

We do have now a third partner. He’s actually someone who I had met and he was working for me back at the diner that I opened, and he’s younger than me, and he dedicated his life very similarly to how I had dedicated my life to the partners prior. So there is this very much respect in the workplace, but more so complimenting skill sets and understanding when to stay out of our lanes. We all have very big personalities. We’re very sort of type A, but we respect each other and I think that’s very important.

SSR: And this third partner, what is his lane if you say?

EP: Yeah, his lane is actually, he’s our COO. So now I don’t handle any operations. My job is really development and vision for the company, sort of true CEO style. But because I am an entrepreneur, I do sometimes like to get down to the details and say, we’ll change this and change that and change that. But John really handles all of the operations, handles all of our general managers. Jody handles the food, and I’ll handle the business.

SSR: So talking about being an entrepreneur. So you open Trade as your first one, and then now you said you have 10 restaurants. I mean, well, you do diner and then Trade was your first one with Jody, and then now you have 10 restaurants total?

EP: Correct. So Jody and I, after the success of Trade, we took that partnership and we opened up our second full service restaurant called Porto. We opened that in 2016, very successful, very much off the beaten path and very low budget. This is early in our careers and we didn’t have the budget to build really, and the resources and the understanding of who to hire to help us design and vision this place out. There’s been a lot of changes to the actual physical space of the restaurant. The menu has stayed very consistent and very successful, but we are always going back and thinking about how does design play into what we do? So we opened that in 2016 as our second full service.

We also then opened up a chain of fast casual restaurant, Greek fast casual, again, which is very different than full service. We have a much smaller footprint, sometimes 12… Some of our stores are 1,300 square feet to 3,500 square feet. When we think about the fast casual, what is our guest looking for? What is that guest experience like? How quick is it? What are the seats like? Do we care about the seating? Do we want a lot of seats, little seats, acoustics, all of that?

So we opened up five of them, and John, who’s our COO, he’s also our partner. And that came to be because I’m Greek, I go to Greece every summer, so my partner started to come and hang out with me in Greece, and they ended up meeting my family, and we’ve done culinary trips around Greece. So they all fell in love with Greek food, and it was a bit underrepresented when we started the journey with the fast casual. So that’s seven restaurants.

My eighth restaurant is down in the South Shore in Weymouth where I grew up. It’s across the street from my dad’s restaurant, it’s called the Venetian. And it’s very near and dear to me because my father and my mother are the godfathers of that little part of town. Everyone knows him. If you’re in the South Shore, you’ve been to my dad’s place for breakfast, you know who he is. And so I ended up opening up a full service restaurant across from his, so his is breakfast, lunch, and mine is dinner.

So it’s a really fun little neighborhood that we’ve built down there. And so much so that I’m actually in the process of developing neighborhood. I bought 13 buildings over the past three years down there, and so I’m building these apartment buildings. And again, very focused on what I’ve learned in hospitality and how the experience plays into you coming and spending money to buy chicken parm. And I think about it now from a real estate standpoint, what do I need to do to bring you to come and pay rent and that you want to live here? What is your experience here and what is the brand that I want you to experience? And then we just opened up La Padrona literally five weeks ago today. It’s our full service Italian restaurant at the Raffles Hotel here in downtown Boston.

SSR: So good idea not to compete with your dad, right? Because that would’ve been poor form. What does he think about…? What is he and your mom…? Is your mom still a phys ed teacher? Is she retired?

EP: My parents are still there in the neighborhood. Well, to get into the details, my dad was actually selling his restaurant. And so he asked me to help him sell the restaurant. So I brought in the brokers, and as we were meeting there to help my dad sell the restaurant, the broker said, “Hey, Eric, you know the restaurant across the street, you can put a restaurant there.” And once I examined it, I said, “Dad, hold on, don’t sell yours yet.” So my dad still owns his restaurant, and again, it’s all in the family. So my dad’s got his place and I have the rest there. And because this one is down in Weymouth, it’s a half hour outside of Boston, my dad has become sort of my surrogate eyes and ears, and he’ll pop into my restaurant and everyone knows him because everyone in that community knows him.

So it’s a very, very special experience. My dad’s place was a breakfast and lunch traditional diner. So my parents never went out to dinner. My parents were never dinner people. Up until I opened my restaurant, my parents were never dinner people. Now my parents are out three, four nights a week. Granted most of it is at my restaurant. And in their early 70s, I feel like they have found a different aspect of their life. So it’s a wonderful thing.

SSR: That’s amazing. Okay, and then so what made you decide to expand and develop this, buy 13 buildings and create? So is it kind of a residential community that you’re trying to build? Tell me a little bit more about that.

EP: Yeah, it was actually, I hate to use this phrase, it was my pivot, my COVID pivot. And I remember I had hired Lettuce Entertainment out of Chicago to do a consulting engagement for my company back in 2019. And I had an unbelievable awesome experience with them. I love, love that company, those principles. They have been amazing.

And the reason that I mentioned that is because I have a good rapport, good relationship with them. So when the pandemic came in March of 2020, I had to close all my restaurants, laid off 500 plus employees, myself included, never been on unemployment, didn’t know what that was like. And granted, the whole world had experienced that, every restaurateur had to go through the same, and I remember calling LEYE, Marc Jacobs is the partner, are people ever going to eat again? I’m like, they’re never going to go to a restaurant again. People are going to want to eat at home. They’re going to have robots cook for them.

We’re going to be germaphobes. This thing is never… I just had this doomsday thought, and all the neighbors next to my restaurant was a dry cleaner, a funeral home, a hair salon, a yoga studio, and another small little diner. They all went out of business because of COVID. So my COVID pivot was, shit I own this property, my dad owns his, this neighborhood is dead, it’s going to die. I’m like, I had this idea, I’m going to go bankrupt too because all my restaurants in the city are closed, and in the suburbs, business picked up a lot faster than in the city, even still today actually.

So I just ended up, I had this vision of you know what, if my restaurants never open again, I’m just going to pivot into real estate and I’ll see what happens. And these were all old buildings. So I ended up working with the town and with the mayor. I changed the zoning in my neighborhood. I entitled my properties to have multifamily living, where before it was all commercial, and the train station is literally 150 yards away. So it was sort of like a win-win. In Massachusetts, we have huge, huge housing shortage.

So it all started to evolve in that way. So it was never in my head, I want to become a real estate person. And I use the experiences again of a restaurateur because at the end of the day, I have to work so hard to have you get in your car and come to have chicken parm and you end up realizing that that’s what apartment buildings are. Developers have to build a product for people to come and spend a year of their life there. And I was like, well, I can do it in food, which is very more temperamental than housing, that I applied a lot of the same principles and logic that I do to hospitality into my real estate portfolio.

SSR: That’s really cool. I love that. And what has it been like that pivot and trying to figure this out?

EP: I got to tell you, I feel like real estate is 100 times easier than restaurants. Restaurants have a lot of moving parts, and I have to… using chicken parm as the example, as an entrepreneur, we always have a lot of people come and ask me, “Hey, I know how to make this muffin. I have the best muffin recipe. I want to open up a muffin shop.” And what you end up realizing is that having a successful muffin shop doesn’t have to do with how good your muffin is. That’s part of the equation. But the bigger part of the equation is can you make that muffin but someone else make that muffin for you every day, rain, snow, or shine that this muffin shop can never close whether you’re sick, whether you’re traveling or whatnot? And that is really the intricacy or the challenges that we have in our business in hospitality.

In real estate, again, I don’t want to say that it’s easy, but in real estate, once the building is built, you don’t have that many moving components, particularly staffing that you have to worry about. As long as you’re building is good, the hot water’s working and the AC is working and it’s a safe and clean property, you’re great. But I already have to do that in the restaurant. It’s got to be safe, it’s got to be clean. You have to make sure that you pay and that the product is really good and that I can replicate it tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And so it’s a different skillset, but it’s not so far removed from what we do as restaurateurs.

SSR: Yeah, no, that’s really, really interesting when you say it like that. And you said that some of the challenges recreating that special sauce every single day at the restaurants. Do you think that’s the most challenging part of a restaurant, of owning a restaurant?

EP: I think the challenging part is that no one has figured out the equation and trillions of dollars have been spent into this equation. And what I mean by that is Starbucks has closed locations. As smart as they are, and as they have every college graduate, MBA, whatever, all these analysts, tons of industry experience, they’ve even had to close location. So that means they got the formula wrong at times as well. They’ve obviously got it right more than they’ve got it wrong.

So the hardest thing for us is as good as you may think that your muffin is, it’s the operational challenges, but also you got to know, are you in the right town, the right part of town, the right block, and on the right side of the block, because is someone going to cross the street to go get your muffin? Maybe yes, maybe no. Are people driving into the city and they’re driving in a different route? All of those things is what makes hospitality so challenging.

Now, what I love is when you have an obscure location and people will trek and come and find you. And that was a dream that I had in high school, and I feel like some of that has come true in my career. I don’t have the best locations, but I worked really hard on having a great product because I want you to go out of your way and say, “Wow, what a gem this place is.”

SSR: Yeah, no, and I think you strike an interesting cord. It’s like you could have a restaurant that’s packed next to one, that two doors down is completely empty. And it’s like, what is that and why? And what fuels people to come and find it? And I don’t think there is a perfect formula, it’s just when you get it right, you get it right.

EP: Correct, correct. I think the sad thing is, and this happens not just in hospitality, but we certainly see it in hospitality a lot, a restaurant can be uber successful and then a year later it’ll close, two years later, it’ll close. And as an entrepreneur, that’s what you’re working so hard for that day to not come. And again, for someone who’s very quant based, I get very neurotic with my numbers. As soon as I start to see a pattern in the numbers, I know where I have to go focus and where my team has to go focus, so we don’t see sort of a dip, or even a plateau gets me nervous. Growth for me is critically important, and I feel that you either grow or you die. And in our business, you can die pretty quickly.

SSR: Do you always have that in your back of your mind?

EP: Always, always. I feel that… And it’s because happened in my career. I’ve never closed a place, but every time I feel that it goes down, this sort of like things are slowing down, I have to put my heart and soul back in for six months and turn it around. It’s a heavy, heavy lift. I sometimes really enjoy it because I get to sort of get in tune with my guests again, because having 10 locations, I can’t be at all places at all times. So I can sit at my desk in the mornings, which I do, and look at all my numbers, and then I know where I have to go and who needs a little bit more attention. But every one of my restaurants has, besides the newest, the one that I just opened, every one of them has hit that peak and started to turn. And I’ve had to go in there quickly enough to turn it around, and it’s been successful, but I’m dreading the day that I may not be able to do that, and it’s sad.

SSR: And turning it around, is that maybe a menu tweak or a operation tweak or a design tweak or maybe a multitude of all three?

EP: I think what also is interesting about our business is that the intellectual property of what we do is not so intellectual. You come in and you have my chicken parm, this is good chicken parm, and I bet you this is what everyone’s ordering because I can see everyone ordering the chicken parm. Great. My competitor across the street now knows chicken parm, make it better. And if you don’t know if it’s better, just keep going back to Eric’s place and keep eating it until you make it better.

I mean, we don’t know the code or the algorithm behind Instagram. If we did, there’d be a lot more. So the IP in our businesses is not so intellectual. So you always have to watch your back and you always have to be very forward enough, but not too forward, forward-looking, forward-thinking, but not too far where a market doesn’t really understand.

SSR: Right. And how do you always come up with the new concepts? Is it the building? Is it the project that comes to you, or you have an idea, or the building comes to you, or you have an idea and then you go search out the building? Or does it sometimes change and alter?

EP: I think for me, my background professionally and academically is finance, I have to find the right deal. And so the deal is not just the relationship that I have with the landlord. It’s not about my lease, because the deal also, I have to think about, as I mentioned earlier, the location. So what’s my revenue going to be here and how does that affect my finances? How does that affect my partners? How does that affect my staff? So once I can quantify a deal, then I’ll start my travels.

I was in New Orleans last week for a week. I’m headed to Barcelona on Sunday for a week. I’ll be in Greece later on, and then I’ll be in Italy at the end of the summer, and I’ll just go around and go eat at some grandmother’s houses, if I know friends, stuff like that, or I’ll just randomly knock on a grandmother’s house, then go to some Michelin, go to some popular neighborhoods, and what are they doing? Why are they so busy? And so I’ll start to cultivate some of those ideas and then I’ll bring them back to my deal. No, I’m negotiating in that location, which is that part of town, and does this type of food work there. So it’s a very iterative process. I’ve never said I need to do Spanish because I love Spanish. I have to be inspired by Spain. And then when I come back, I have to be inspired enough that that location, that neighborhood, that community wants Spanish food.

SSR: So your newest one is in the Raffles, Boston, as you mentioned, La Padrona, what was attractive about that deal, and is that your first one in a hotel?

EP: It’s my first deal in a hotel. It’s not Jody’s first deal in a hotel. So we could get some info from Jody about what are some of the pros and cons of being in a hotel. But we were very much excited to be picked by Raffles. It was a very long courting process. I think they interviewed about 16 restaurant groups, most of them out of New York. And we are their anchor tenant, their anchor food and beverage tenant of the hotel. So there’s a lot of responsibility there, and it’s a beautiful and unbelievable brand and hotel. They were very much design-forward. I had gone to their Paris location to see what a Raffles brand looks and feels like.

And so that kind of began my process of what I needed to do with La Padrona, our restaurant at the Raffles Hotel. And Jody and I had taken our chefs to Italy sort of almost at the same time. We took them for a two-week tour where we cooked at Michelin restaurants one night, and then the following night we cooked at a grandmother’s house. And we would do that for two weeks straight.

So we got really this amazing scale of food, fine dining to extremely rustic. And so that kind of began a lot of the thought processes, like, okay, I want to bring this at Raffles, and how do I bring it at Raffles? And I’ve been wanting to work with a really international design firm my whole career. I just didn’t have the project and the budget for it until this project came about. And so we were extremely lucky to work with our designers on this project.

SSR: And that was AvroKO, correct?

EP: They did an amazing job.

SSR: And why did you pick them, and did you go through a long process as well?

EP: I really liked their diversity in their portfolio. In my travels, I’ll always look at the architect and the designer through the website, and I think AvroKO had a really wide range. I had a really good introductory meetings with them, went to their studios. I knew almost for the last 15 years that I wanted to work with AvroKO somewhere somehow and took the shot. And it was a really, really… I learned a lot through the process. It was a really great process, and I learned a lot, which I thought was just as important for me, not just for my guest, but for me as well.

SSR: How involved did you get in the details since this was such a big, big project for you?

EP: Still to this day, I mean, every finish, every fabric, everything that was tactile, I really wanted to see, feel. Went to their offices plenty of time. I think I sat in 20 different chairs to see which one I wanted in the bar, which one I wanted in the dining room, which one I wanted in the private dining room. Again, it was a really, really wonderful experience. And everything that we did was custom with them, which I’ve never had the opportunity to. I didn’t even know that that really existed. I thought you just bought from a catalog and it was like, “Yeah, I like the blue chair. Put the blue chair in.” And it was here it was like, okay, we like the style of the chair. We’re going to change this back fabric to this, the front fabric to this, the seat fabric to this, we’ll put some piping on it, so on and so forth.

And I mean, even to this day, like I said, I was there earlier this morning. AvroOo was in town. We’re just doing some… We opened five, six weeks ago. I’m still finalizing my styling pieces. “Oh, I got to move the vase here. I want another plant here. I got a picture here. I don’t like the art here.” Because at the end of the day, it’s what is that experience? What is that wow factor when a guest is seated? And I want them to think that the owners have really thought about every seat in the house. It wasn’t just, I like this design, make it happen.

SSR: And what have you done for your other restaurants then design-wise? Have you used more smaller design firms, have you used in-house, have you done it?

EP: Yeah. A mixture of both. Typically, we’ll start the process with local designers, and they’ve done a really good job. But Trade, for instance, which is 14 years old, I went through a redesign process coming out of the pandemic two years ago. And again, I did most of that on my own. I get enough subscriptions to Hospitality Design and go to the trade shows. And I love, love looking at images. And I know what, again, sort of the intellectual property, I can go to a really beautiful hotel or a lobby or a restaurant, say, “Wow, I really like that light fixture. I’m pretty sure I can find out where they bought it,” and then bring it into my restaurant. So I’ve done a little bit of both in my past projects. Most of them have been started by local designers. And then when the redesign needs to happen, I think I have enough experience that I’ll go and put my own touches in it.

SSR: Mentioning Trade 14 years ago, how has the Boston dining scene changed, and how do you think you and Jody and your partner, John, have had an impact on that?

EP: I don’t know how we’ve had an impact on it, but we’ve certainly seen… Again, I was bartending in the city 30 years ago, so I’ve seen Boston change and grow. I’m overseeing right now, not overseeing, I’m overlooking the Seaport district in Boston, which 10 years ago did not exist. And I’m looking at all these brand new high rises in office and whatnot.

So Boston has definitely matured. One of the ways that we saw that was we were one of the first four cities in the world to have two Four Seasons Hotels. Raffles picked Boston as their first American property. We have obviously the academic institutions here. We have pharma and we have bio and so on and so forth. So I know that Boston has matured, that people want to stay here, companies want to be here. And from a restaurant standpoint, when we opened up Trade 14 years ago, it was very much that farm to table. We were sort of in the forefront of the farm to table, small plates, really fine dining, small plates.

Whereas today, 14 years later and opening of La Padrona, we know that food is so, so important and the quality and the sourcing. But we also know now that the experience that the guest wants is not just farm to table, they want to go out and have a full experience, and they want to spend two, three hours at a restaurant. It’s not just, this is really great food. Now they want this is really great food and great atmosphere, and I want to stay here for a little bit longer and spend a little bit more money.

SSR: Yeah, for sure. And is there one project that you still have on your bucket list, or I guess too, what’s next for you and your company?

EP: We are working on a couple of new deals here in Boston. I can’t really talk about them, but I’ll say they are just as big and powerful as the one that we just did at the Raffles Hotel. It’s another global elite hotel brand. I think that will sort of probably… people can figure out what that is. So we’re working on that deal, working on another really gorgeous, gorgeous, super high design restaurant and lounge in downtown.

So those are my real first two immediate projects that will probably will kickstart them sometime after Labor Day this year for a late 2025 opening. And I think that’ll bring us up to 12. I have my real estate project in Weymouth, and that’s 200 apartments that I’m building, and I’m doing that solo as well. So that’s a lot on my plate. So that’ll be my interim.

I’d love to go to a different state. I’d love to go to Florida. But I’m also going back to the original part of our conversations, talking about my dad and what I learned from him about being in front of your guest. Something that gets me nervous about crossing state lines is am I going to be able to spend enough time in front of my guest to really know who they are and give them experience that I want? And maybe as my company grows, we’re around 700 employees now, maybe as my company grows, that’ll give me the opportunity to travel more because they won’t be relying on me. So I don’t know what the future holds, but certainly I have two really, really big projects in food and another one in real estate.

SSR: Yeah, that is super exciting. And we can always talk here. I mean, we keep it under wraps, just saying, do you want to share anything? And what does A Street Hospitality Group mean, or what was the background behind the name?

EP: The funny thing is Jody has always talked about having a restaurant group or a restaurant name with the word acme, A-C-M-E, which sort of means top, the best. And for me, acme reminds me of cartoons. I just remember old cartoons would always use the word acme in whatever restaurant or something along those lines. And then we realized using the letter A, you’re the first in Google searches as well. But the formal A Street Hospitality came from my first condo when I first started getting in hospitality was on a street called, and still is called A Street.

So a lot of my development, a lot of my brain came when I was living at my condo on A Street. And through the pandemic, I now don’t live at A Street, but we use it as our corporate office. I still have the condo, so we go there at A Street for the corporate office, so that’s where A Street Hospitality comes from.

SSR: Love it. Okay. And then we always end this podcast with the title of the podcast. And I think you mentioned some of the things from your father, but after all these different restaurants, after having to open and close and reopen after COVID, what has been your greatest lesson learned along the way?

EP: Don’t get too ahead of yourself. We have to stay humble. We have to work hard. That recipe, we have to make it every single morning. We don’t take anything for granted. Every penny that comes into our company, we’re extremely grateful for from our guests. And I think that that for me is the most important, is really staying humble. And because every time we are successful at something and we sort of slow down and say, “You know what? I’m going to relax now. I’m going to work a little bit less because this place is humming.” Before you know it, it’s not humming anymore. And so keeping our pedal to the metal is sort of a thing for our company.

SSR: Yeah, well, seems to be working. So congratulations on all. Can’t wait to see what you all do next. And thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us today.

EP: Awesome. Appreciate it.