In the restaurant world, Stratis Morfogen is an iconic name, known for his successful ventures that have always been a favorite among the New York City and Hamptons most discerning dining patrons.
With several decades in the restaurant industry, Stratis Morfogen has seen it all and continues to create enticing places, making him one of the nation’s fastest evolving restaurateurs of our time.
Since opening his own restaurant years ago, his resume includes a number of notable ventures. His latest focus is on his Brooklyn Chop House, which he considers the first dim sum to chops type of steak house. Total Food Service caught up with Stratis Morfogen to talk about his background and new ventures!
Can you please share your background with our readers?
I’m a third generation restaurateur. My grandfather and his brothers owned Pappas restaurant from 1896 to 1970. My dad had 14 restaurants all through the metropolitan New York area. My brother Nick is a top-tier rated chef in the country. He won Food and Wine’s “Best Chef” in 1994, when he opened Ajax Tavern in Aspen. My uncle George was the buyer for Grand Central Oyster Bar, a best selling cookbook author and he was the foodie on the Dinah Shore Show.
How did you decide this was for you?
You know, it’s funny, I was just telling my daughters this story because they didn’t do well in a class. I explained how I wasn’t a great student, and my father one day came to class when one of the teachers said they were concerned about my study habits because I have ADD. My father said, “You know what, he’s nine years old. What I’d like you to do is to come on a Friday night to one of my restaurants.” He went on to explain how I might not be good at algebra, but that I was good at interacting with guests on the floor. It was a natural thing for me – I loved it.
You know I even finished high school in eleventh grade, just so you know, I doubled up my credits just to get out of school because I didn’t want to go to college and I wanted to just go right into the family business which was a few diners and restaurants at that time. I learned it from the bottom up – washing dishes, mopping floors, peeling shrimp and garlic, garnishing lemon and parsley on the dishes when I was six years old for a dollar a night. Busboy, server, bartender, you name it. I went right through the whole thing. I don’t remember having a weekend off in my teenage years because every Friday and Saturday I’d be working at the restaurant.
When did you decide to go out on your own?
I was 20 when I went out on my own. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bug. I got offered the opportunity to take over all of the food and beverage operations at a 27-acre amusement park on Medford, Long Island called Kid’s Kingdom.
I borrowed $25,000 from my father for the concessions and restaurant at the park. We featured birthday parties with hot dogs and hamburgers and teen discos that quickly turned a $5,000 a week business into a $35,000 a week one.
After a few years, I was done when the guys running the rides didn’t do anything about making it better.
Talk about your out of the box thinking at your Queens diner.
I then went back with my Dad, who had just opened the Hilltop Diner in Flushing. We took a very unorthodox approach to the menu by bringing in Gabrielle Moran, who was the chef at a three-star New York Times restaurant. There was this writer named Daniel Young, who just happened to stumble on Hilltop Diner but he couldn’t get a table on a Friday night without a reservation. That was so fascinating to him that he put me on the cover of Daily News Magazine. That helped Hilltop Diner become a big success. With that, I opened Gotham Diner in 1993 with Gabrielle Brand on 81st Street and Second Avenue. It was basically a copy of Fog City Diner. It was elevating the diner to a really edgy, cool concept. There we had a very good run. A year after I opened that, I opened Rouge Nightclub in June of 1994.
You were one of the very early Internet retailers, how did that come to pass?
I then took New York’s famous Fulton Fish Market to the Internet in 1996, with fultonstreet.com. I took that from just two employees to 185. I kept hearing this buzz about keywords, so I bought 150 of them. My vision was to take the Fulton Fish Market direct to the consumer sort of like Omaha Steaks. It was a huge success and a big lesson was learned. One thing I got out of it was the largest order for $140,000 and that was from Michael Bloomberg. When I closed down, Bloomberg said, “Those king crabs that you sent me at my house in Westchester, were so amazing I want you to keep Randall’s Island and I want you to do my whole employee appreciation picnic for 10,000 people.”
How did you create Philippe Chow?
In 2003, I got introduced to Mr. Chow. I loved the restaurant, but hated the customer service. At the time, I had just started dating the Accessories Director at Vogue Magazine Filipa Fino who would go on to be my wife. So anytime I would go to Mr. Chow, it would either be with Anna Wintour, David Bowie and those types of A-listers. I was at a table with all these people because of my wife. One night at Mr. Chow, I asked the manager for the menu and asked why every time I would order the same thing, my bill would be different. They were rude about it and said never come back here again. I was, like, really, after all the money I’ve spent? I took my business card I gave it to the busboy and said give this to your chef. The next day Philippe Chow called me. I basically said, “Listen, I want to make you my partner.” He said, “I’ve been offered many partnerships. I’ve been at this job for 25 years. What do you know, what can you offer me that’s different?” I took a page out of Tommy Mottola’s book, who was the former head of Sony Music. He told me whenever he had a problem signing a new artist, he’d send them a brand new Ferrari with a contract inside. It always worked. I gave Philippe Chow my offer to get 10% equity and 20% above his salary, but he wasn’t moved. Then I said what about if we go to Roslyn Porsche? He said, “If you show me a Porsche, I’ll be your partner.” So he picked out his new Cayenne and the moral of the story is that the $775 a month lease is what closed the deal and not the 10% equity, which was tens of thousands of dollars per month. So in 2005, we opened up Philippe Chow, which became the highest grossing restaurant per square foot in the country, exceeding $2,500 per foot in sales.
How did you accomplish that?
My entire worlds collaborated with my history, music, sports, celebrity, my wife’s fashion database and more! The opening party was the Met Ball after party, hosted by Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour so we became a phenomenon overnight. We went for my highest projection, which was $5 million. I expected it to be $3 million, but we ended up doing $10 million off the bat and our investors received their $1 million-dollar investment in 18 weeks.
How did you get to where you are now?
By 2015-16, I was out of everything. I just used those years to raise my two daughters Isabel and Beatriz. Then a former customer and partner of mine, Robert “Don Pooh” Cummins, reached out to me about a location he had in the Financial District. He wanted me to come up with a concept for it. I told him my dad owned six Chelsea Chophouses. What I wanted to do is create something like that or something that would marry my hospitality background and all my restaurant history in one place. It would be different from what other steak houses were doing. We were able to accomplish that with Brooklyn Chop House.
Tell us about the Hamptons pop-up restaurant and how that started.
I’ve lived in Southampton for 20 years. Last summer, I got a call from the landlord of the Capri Hotel and he wanted me to come in and take over since the guys that were operating it were running it poorly. So I decided to open a pop-up there for five weeks. It was super successful. I had a percentage lease so it worked out great and turned out to be really great marketing for the Brooklyn Chop House in the city.
What are the keys to success in the Hamptons?
I knew what it was going to take to be successful in the Hamptons because I owned Philippe in 2009.
It only works if you make the right deal with the right landlord. It’s very simple. If you want to open in the summer in the Hamptons it’s $150,000 for rent plus another $50,000 for staff housing so $200,000 before you turn the lights on. Then it’s all weather based with four or five bad weekends and you are done. We took over on July 27th, 2018 till Labor Day and had three days to get it right. It worked and we were able to run it into the first weekend of September.
So we pay 10% of the house to the landlord and the rest I keep. It worked out where I made money. The landlord is a celebrity in his own right, the famous LA attorney Mark Geragos. He represents everybody from Colin Kaepernick to Jussie Smollett and Michael Jackson before them.
The other key in a lease in the Hamptons is the operator and landlord getting on the same page in terms of being good neighbors. Most of these leases force the restaurateur to operate a nightclub later in the evening. So you end up in a scenario in which its 4 am and you are providing bottle service to what can become a very loud and unneighborly scene. So you need a landlord like Mark that “gets it”. I don’t need to blow this thing out, I don’t need to have a nightclub every night, I can have it as a restaurant driven lounge. That’s what got Mark’s attention.
What is the Hamptons guest looking for on a menu?
There were a lot of good places to eat in the Hamptons so I needed to find a niche for our menu. There was no table on Earth where you could get a three pound, 45 day dry aged Porterhouse steak by Pat LaFrieda, a seven pound roasted Long Island Peking duck and a four pound salt and pepper lobster on one table.
We added special fun touches including pastrami dumplings, bacon cheeseburger dumplings, gyro dumplings and even French onion soup dumplings as well as an amazing chicken satay. So it’s been a lot of fun, it’s just the reaction of people saying wow; we can have the experience of dim sum and steaks in one sitting. The dumplings have taken this place viral on the Internet and have created yet another business.
We heard that those dumplings are about to make their way across the country and that you have a pretty famous partner in the new venture?
It’s very exciting, that we’re working with the one and only Patti Labelle. Most people know her for her music. Patti has record breaking cooking skills too! Her cookbooks and TV cooking shows are big hits.
We are looking to sell our frozen dumplings, French onion soup, pastrami, lamb gyro, and bacon cheeseburger dumplings in the largest retail chain in the country. Patti has already created a big success with her famous sweet potato and buttermilk pies in Walmart already.
If every restaurant has a Pat LaFrieda steak then how do you make yourself different?
What you need to understand is that they have a $14 a pound product but we buy a $22 a pound prime dry aged and marbleized product. The difference is the dry aging. I would never say that I have a better steak than Peter Luger or the Palm or Old Homestead. We all have the same great steaks. The only difference is when they serve lobster and fish; it’s usually a broiled piece of a fish and a steamed lobster or a broiled lobster. I’m serving salt and pepper lobster and steamed sea bass in black bean and garlic sauce.
With all of this talk about steak, I always think of the Hamptons as a bastion of healthy eating?
We are adding a Juice for Life program. It’s both fun and getting lots of attention with cocktails that feature fruits and vegetables.
We worked with radio DJ Angela Yee from The Breakfast Club on Power 105 to create an exciting cocktail menu. It’s all fresh squeezed juices blended together with ginger and apples and I said wow.
You’ll find a kale cucumber margarita with Casamigos tequila and a cayenne salted pepper rim. We have a Cucumber Collins instead of your regular Tom Collins. At $18, we picked a price point that creates value. The truth is in the Hamptons you can go to $19 or $20 a cocktail with cheap vodka and juice out of a gun, but we’re using Grey Goose and fresh juices.
One thing that’s interesting about you is that you usually don’t see an owner who’s this involved from a culinary standpoint. But that’s not the case when it comes to you.
I always build my restaurants from the consumer out. So I build the restaurant based on me sitting down at a table as a consumer.
You have a big “Page Six” personality. Do the folks who work for you like working for you?
They must because they have all been with me for like 15 years. Once I know you understand what we are trying to do, I leave you alone. I’ve adopted Chinese culture from many of the folks that have worked with us. If they trust you, they trust you with all their hearts. But if you break that trust, in any capacity, it’s over. They love me because I’ve always taken care of them, and they’ve always taken care of me.
You have also returned to your roots this year with a venture at Camden Yards. How did that come about?
John Angelos, whose family owns the Baltimore Orioles, heard about us through a mutual friend. He reached out to me and said he heard about these satays we were serving at the ‘Chop House. He sees it as the “next hot dog.” We’ll make some chicken pops as well out of the same recipe. We launched Jade Satay on opening day, and it’s been a big hit. It gives us a concept that you could see in a number of concession venues. We see peanut sauce as the new ketchup and true to our point we have a sign that says #noketchupallowed at our three kiosks.
Your story would make a terrific book.
It’s so funny you said that. My book “Damn Good Dumplings” has just been completed and will be released by my publisher, Macmillan/Page Street Publishing this fall, at the same time our frozen dumpling line launches coast to coast.
