Burying the Hatchet Job, Part II

TRAVERSO: You had Isola [on Martha’s Vineyard] before that, right?

ENGLISH: I was trying to save it. It kind of came out differently, just to set the record straight. I mean, I went down there not knowing a lot about the issues. We were the hottest. We were a booming business. It was unbelievable. But it’s hard to do business down there. I needed another year or two to get it right, but they didn’t want to do it, so…

RICHMAN: What was this?

ENGLISH: This was a restaurant that a bunch of hockey players from Boston…Cam Neely, who else?

TRAVERSO: Michael J. Fox.

ENGLISH: Michael Fox, Glenn Close. Yeah, anyway, so they asked me to go down. So I went down to try to fix this thing, Olivia and I did. Olivia was 8 1/2 months pregnant. We opened this thing up, and it was just a beast. We opened, and the party was one of the greatest parties I’ve ever thrown. We gave everybody a tattoo and that was the only way you could get in. You had to be wearing the tattoo to get in. All the Boston…everybody was there. You should’ve seen where some of the tattoos were. The party was just off the charts. The cops shut us down. And then we went through the whole summer and it was just every night, packed, six weeks we were open, six weeks of summer. It was the first year that Clinton went down. Dicky Friedman was bringing him in all the time. It was one of those wild summers. But my daughter was born, Isabella, was born, one of three babies born on the island that year. So she has a birth certificate from Martha’s Vineyard.

RICHMAN: That’s like being born in a foreign country.

ENGLISH: It is. And I’ll never forget, we were at the hospital and the doctor looked just like Chevy Chase. Exactly like Chevy Chase.

My point being, that I thought when I got into this expansion idea, [I hoped it] would help make my life not be like the craziness of the chef who was burned out. Really. And Rachou was burnt. He was burnt. You felt bad. I thought, Maybe there’s another way to do this. You know? And obviously I’m not the only one. Look at all the chefs that are doing it.
 
RICHMAN: But let’s pound on you a little bit.

ENGLISH: I was definitely one of the first.

RICHMAN: Yeah, you were one of the first. And let’s pound on you a little bit. You have more…nobody has that many concepts as you do. I think you have 10 different concepts.

ENGLISH: Yeah, at least.

RICHMAN: Isn’t this just a little problem? I mean, not many people can run 10 restaurants. You have 10 concepts. How can you expect them all to succeed? How are you able to do it?

ENGLISH: The only thing that makes it work, the most important part, is a decent management team within the hotel that’s running it. Bellagio hotel has great management. Now I have my chef and my manager. But the rest is based on what Bellagio can provide in the support. It’s [the case with] all of them. My restaurant at Disney, it’s the seafood concept. The team there is great and they really do a great job of supporting the restaurant. It’s all about fish cooking. We do this technique of cooking the fish where it’s a sear on the fish on the plancha and we have a special rack with a circulating heat and steam that actually sits on the rack and steam-cooks the fish. So it’s all about simple fish cooking. It’s a steakhouse of fish cooking. So you can order a red snapper filet or a wild salmon or Coho salmon and it’s seared and put on and there’s a couple of very simple garnishes and a choice of four or five sauces or vinaigrettes. It’s really trying to cook fish to perfection. Sort of my take on a Le Bernardin idea.

RICHMAN: So let’s just take that simple one. How much better is that place going to be if the old Todd English is in there cooking?

ENGLISH: It’s not going to be what Olives was, but it’s going to be something different. I go back to my music theory. I love listening to the Police. I love classic musicians. I love listening to the Beatles. I’m not comparing us to that. I love the classic stuff.  Things that were classic and original. And yet those musicians grow and change and try other things, and you learn and you try. And those are part of the journey.

And this is a journey; this is a lifestyle. This is not a job. This is not a punch-in and punch-out. This is about every day waking up and looking at something in a different light and thinking, Wow, let me see how I can try my hand at this? I don’t think you can ever stop that part of it. And Olives—how many restaurants stay hot for 20 years? Stay on top for 15 years? It’s very hard to do that.