2026 Nightlife & Dining Power List

Observer · October 27, 2026

The people who decide where we eat and drink, and who gets in.

Despite what the gossip sites and tabloids and, on occasion, this publication would have you believe, power in dining and nightlife is not measured by where Taylor Swift eats. (Several operators on this year’s list know her order. The point is that she wants the same tables as everyone else, refreshing a reservation app at 10 a.m.) Power in this business is the ability to decide where people go and what they eat and drink, and how far that control extends. A few honorees still hold it the old-fashioned way, by controlling the door. Most hold it through distance: their food, formats and brands now turn up in places they didn’t five years ago. Simon Kim debuted a gimbap stall at the U.S. Open, while Jihan Lee took gimbap from a West Village pop-up to Citi Field. The Corner Store, the SoHo room Eugene Remm and Tilman Fertitta turned into one of New York’s hardest reservations, opens at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas in November.

To build this list, we measured honorees against the same seven markers. They are: who controls access to the rooms people want into, and whether that demand outlasted the opening year; how far their food, drink and formats travel beyond their own four walls; the scale and quality of their portfolios; the formats they invented and who copied them; the talent they trained who now run rooms of their own; the capital they direct; and their momentum over the next 12 to 24 months. Every honoree had to show real evidence of access or reach, and every case rests on what happened in the past year. A legacy is not a qualification. Awards and Michelin stars count as evidence, never as credentials. Follower counts don’t count at all.

This is also, by design, an American list. The majority of operators here are based in the U.S., and the international names who made it did so by opening here. JKS Restaurants , the London group behind Gymkhana, is on it for Gymkhana Las Vegas and Ambassadors Clubhouse in NoMad, not for Mayfair.

A word on who isn’t here. Several operators who have appeared on this list for years are still opening restaurants at a pace most of the industry would envy, and their absence is not a demotion. But a list that ran the same names with the same blurbs every year would tell you very little about who is changing the business, and we suspect you’d stop reading it. So we held legacy operators to the same test as everyone else: what did they do in the past 12 months that they hadn’t done before? Another location of a proven concept, however well run, didn’t clear the bar. A new format, a new kind of market or a real reinvention did. That’s why Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten are here. Boulud folded three Lincoln Center restaurants into Brasserie Boulud, his first brasserie in New York, and took Tiffany & Co.’s Blue Box Café to California. Vongerichten merged his three Flatiron restaurants into ABC Kitchens, a format built to travel, and brought it to Dumbo for his first restaurant in Brooklyn, with Vancouver and Venice next.

Some of the most consequential players rarely appear on a menu. Johann Moonesinghe and Andrew Harris have raised more than $1.2 billion for inKind , which finances restaurants and steers diners to more than 10,000 of them through its rewards app. Moonesinghe’s RDM Hospitality also launched the Guest House at Turn 20 for Austin’s Formula 1 race.

At the top, nobody does just one thing. Shake Shack, which Danny Meyer founded, signed a licensing deal for South America. Meyer’s private-equity fund put $17 million into the workforce platform Shake Shack runs on, and he leased a prime space in Brooklyn Heights’ former Hotel Bossert for Union Square Hospitality Group ’s first sit-down restaurant in the borough. Meyer also published a business book. Major Food Group continues to run impossible-to-book restaurants and private clubs while betting big on jarred sauce and branching out into real estate and branded residences. Tao Group Hospitality plays to the masses with its expanded Omnia in Las Vegas and to the few at the members-only part of Crane Club. Exclusivity and accessibility are not competing strategies for the industry’s most powerful operators.

The best brands also travel well beyond the room. David Grutman ’s year included a bestselling book, a Netflix series and a turn in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. Sarri Harper reopened Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue in September, though in a sense it never left. She kept the pastrami moving through nationwide shipping and stands at Madison Square Garden and the Belmont Stakes.

The four walls are where influence starts. This list measures how far it travels.

Co-Founders | Major Food Group Mario Carbone , Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick served more than 3.2 million guests in 2025. Their Carbone Fine Food line did $101.3 million in sales last year, up 76.9 percent, and is now stocked in nearly 30,000 stores across all 50 states. “A restaurant can only welcome so many guests in a night, while our sauces can reach millions of people who may never have the opportunity to dine with us,” Carbone told Observer. They also took Major Food Group into three new countries. They opened Carbone in London last September and Dubai last October. This April, in Cartagena, Colombia, they opened The Grand Grill steakhouse and Bar Lelarge inside the Four Seasons’ Club Cartagena, a 1920s beaux-arts landmark—the group’s first concepts in South America. The Santo Domingo family invited them into the hotel, Zalaznick told Observer, and Bar Lelarge works lulo, mango and Colombian coffee into its cocktails. In June, they announced a deal with hoteliers Ira Drukier and Richard Born for an American tavern and steakhouse in the former Tribeca Grill space at 375 Greenwich Street, slated for 2027. It’s the latest in a run of storied New York rooms, after The Grill in the Seagram Building and the original Carbone at the former location of Rocco in NoHo. “When you take over a place with that kind of legacy, there’s a responsibility to honor what came before while creating something that feels entirely new,” Torrisi told Observer. Demand is steepest in New York. Torrisi and Carbone, which release tables 30 days out, remain the hardest to book, according to the company. Carbone and Torrisi met in culinary school and were roommates before they opened their first restaurant. “When we opened Torrisi, we had very little money, but we had a clear point of view about the kind of food we wanted to make,” Torrisi said. The partners are also building beyond restaurants: branded residences at Terra’s Villa Miami, a project in West Palm Beach with Stephen Ross, a redevelopment of Nikki Beach in Miami Beach’s South of Fifth neighborhood with the Boucher Brothers, and, with Palm Tree Crew and 8K Capital, the purchase and redevelopment of River Valley Ranch in Aspen, Colo. Zalaznick, who leads the group’s business, real estate, partnerships and global expansion, said the partners spent more than a year finding the original Carbone’s location. “We’ve never believed in forcing a concept into a location simply because it’s available,” he said.

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Owner, Fertitta Entertainment ; U.S. Ambassador to Italy and San Marino In May, Tilman Fertitta agreed to buy Caesars Entertainment for about $17.6 billion, including roughly $11.9 billion in assumed debt. Shareholders approved the deal on September 22, and it now awaits FTC and gaming approvals. Fertitta is also the largest single shareholder of Wynn Resorts. He has made those moves while serving as U.S. ambassador to Italy, with the executive team at Fertitta Entertainment in Houston leading the Caesars deal. “My focus is serving as Ambassador,” Fertitta told Observer. His great-grandfather emigrated from Italy in 1887, and Fertitta says the two jobs draw on the same skills: “Diplomacy and hospitality work hand-in-glove.” His restaurant portfolio, more than 60 concepts under Landry’s, is growing through acquisitions and openings. A Landry’s affiliate won the bankruptcy auction for Fireman Hospitality Group, whose nine restaurants include Café Fiorello and Bond 45, with a $22 million bid. Fireman had filed for Chapter 11 in August. Distressed restaurants have long been part of the strategy. “When companies get into trouble, it’s usually not because of the people in the restaurant,” Fertitta said. “It’s usually because of debt or poor leadership outside of the restaurant.” Fertitta has also agreed to buy Boston’s Union Oyster House, whose Italian American owner approached the family as stewards for its next hundred years. He has learned to wait for deals. “I am a patient buyer,” he said. “I waited years for Del Frisco’s, and I have found that if you wait long enough, the opportunity usually comes around again.” He opened Or’esh in SoHo in February, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Jacksonville, Fla., in March, and Landry’s Seafood House in Sugar Land, Texas, in August. In September, he opened Cafe Charmant with his Catch Hospitality Group partner Eugene Remm and chef Jake Tyler Brodsky. Fertitta saw in Remm someone who “knows how to make a guest feel like family instead of a customer.” “When you come across someone who is really great at what he does, you back him,” he said. Mastro’s in Atlanta is due in November, with Mastro’s in Weehawken, N.J., and Bubba Gump in Myrtle Beach, S.C., planned for 2027. In November, Fertitta and Remm will open The Corner Store at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas , extending their partnership with MGM Resorts. Catch Hospitality Group, which also runs Or’esh and The Eighty Six, told Observer the move is an exception for an otherwise New York-centric concept. The expansion comes with contraction. Morton’s closed in West Palm Beach, Fla., in May, Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse closed in Boston’s Back Bay in July, and Bubba Gump closed in Miami in August. Landry’s reports more than 600 properties in 36 states and more than 15 countries, and the company projects $4 billion in revenue for 2026. Fertitta is also directing capital toward Houston, where he owns the Rockets. Fertitta agreed in March to buy the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun for a record $300 million, with plans to revive the Houston Comets. It all traces back to Galveston, where he started as a teenager in his father’s seafood restaurant, peeling shrimp and clearing tables. “To this day, I am not too proud to pick up a piece of trash off the floor,” he said.

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Union Square Hospitality Group The burger stand Danny Meyer opened in Madison Square Park in 2004 now has more than 740 locations, about 265 of them outside the U.S. This month, Shake Shack, where Meyer is a director, recently added a location at John F. Kennedy International Airport. It also signed a licensing deal with Bold Hospitality Company , the Brazilian operator of Outback Steakhouse, for 40 Shake Shack locations in Brazil by 2036, beginning in São Paulo next year. Panama, with 12 planned, comes first. In May, a bullish Meyer bought about $2 million of Shake Shack stock. His capital reaches the tools restaurants run on, too. In May, Enlightened Hospitality Investments , the private-equity fund Meyer launched in 2017 with more than $200 million, put $17 million into Blink, a frontline-workforce app that Shake Shack now uses. Blink said it added more than 700,000 hospitality-sector users last year. At Union Square Hospitality Group, Meyer opened Pine Hall in Detroit in June, the group’s first Midwest restaurant, and has Ci Siamo and Daily Provisions in Boston and Daily Provisions in Bethesda, Md., due this quarter. In May, he leased 3,200 square feet on the ground floor of Brooklyn Heights’ former Hotel Bossert for USHG’s first full-service restaurant in the borough, due in late 2028. Marriott and developer SomeraRoad are converting the building into Ritz-Carlton Residences. In September, Meyer published What Could Possibly Go Right?: The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture , drawing on four decades of building restaurants and businesses.

Chef & Proprietor of Jean-Georges Restaurants | President & Co-CEO of Jean-Georges Management Jean-Georges Vongerichten has spent five decades opening restaurants. What’s new is a format built to travel. ABC Kitchens folds his three Flatiron restaurants (the farm-to-table ABC Kitchen, the Latin-inspired ABC Cocina and the plant-based ABCV) into a single room. He first tried it at Maybourne’s Emory hotel in London in 2024. Last October, it came home to New York: ABC Kitchens Dumbo, a roughly 200-seat restaurant at 55 Water Street, became Vongerichten’s first in Brooklyn. In April, it reached Italy at the Airelles Palladio hotel on Venice’s Giudecca island. On October 30, it reaches Asia, as ABC Kitchens KL opens at the new Waldorf Astoria Kuala Lumpur alongside two more Vongerichten concepts, JG KL and The Bar by JG. Vongerichten has said Houston, Texas and then Vancouver are next. Closer to home, Vongerichten turned his former Spice Market in the Meatpacking District into Chez Margaux, a members-only club, where the New York Knicks celebrated after their championship parade. “I’ve always wanted to bring late-night dining back to New York,” Vongerichten told Observer. “I wanted to create a place where people could spend the whole night.” His alumni, meanwhile, keep opening rooms of their own. Fumio Yonezawa, a Jean-Georges sous chef from 2002 who helped open Jean-Georges Tokyo and later ran the No Code omakase counters in Tokyo and Taipei, opened Shinka in San Francisco in October. Turning all of this into a business falls to Lois Freedman , who runs Jean-Georges’ Management. Freedman met Vongerichten in 1986, when she took a job in the pastry department in his kitchen at Lafayette in the Drake Hotel before moving onto garde manger and eventually poissonier. Together, they opened JoJo in 1991, where she ran the front of house. Today she oversees a portfolio of more than 49 restaurants worldwide, from his Columbus Circle flagship to Jean-Georges at the Connaught in London. She also hires the dining-room staff. As ABC Kitchens spreads, she keeps each one tied to its city through what it sources. “Each city gives us the opportunity to work with different ingredients, including some we may not have access to in New York,” Freedman said.

Founders, NA:EUN Hospitality In June, Na:Eun Hospitality founders Junghyun Park (“JP”) and Ellia Park backed their longtime director of operations, Ahris Kim, in opening her first restaurant as an owner. Somssi, a 50-seat bistro at 79 MacDougal Street in the former Acru space, cooks American food through a Korean lens: linguine with mustard-kimchi ragù, mushrooms and curried rice. JP Park and the Naeun Hospitality team collaborate with Kim on the culinary direction. Kim joined Atoboy three months after it opened in 2016. “We always believed she had the potential to become a great restaurant owner,” the Parks told Observer. In July, the Parks marked Atoboy’s 10th anniversary with ATO10, a 300-guest party at Radio Park, the rooftop garden at Rockefeller Center. The night featured culinary collaborations with prominent local and international Korean chefs, including Dongsik Ok of Okdongsik, Hoyoung Kim of the Michelin-starred Jua, Taesung Kim of Pono Buono and Yongwook Yoo of Imok Smoke Dining. The celebration also included Atoboy’s collaboration with Nongshim for the 40th anniversary of Shin Ramyun, Korea’s best-known instant noodle. “Although our approaches are very different, we share the same ambition of bringing Korean food to a global audience,” the Parks said. When Atoboy opened, the Parks said, “we really didn’t know much about running a restaurant.” A decade on, the flavors, interior and pricing have all changed. The goal hasn’t: to “introduce Korean food from a new perspective.” Atomix, the NoMad tasting counter they opened in 2018, remains among the most decorated restaurants in America. It holds two Michelin stars and three stars from The New York Times, and this year it ranked No. 12 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and No. 7 on North America’s 50 Best. “We’ve never considered awards or rankings to be our ultimate goals,” the Parks said. “Rather than repeating past successes, we’re always thinking about what we can create next.” The Parks also run Naro in Rockefeller Center and oversee culinary direction in partnership with Hand Hospitality at Seoul Salon. They also founded The Nanro Foundation, which brings chefs working in the U.S. to Korea to see its traditional markets, farmers and artisans, along with its best-known restaurants. “If we can bring a few chefs to Korea every year and give them meaningful experiences, imagine the impact in 10 or 20 years,” the Parks said, noting that “the financial realities of operating a restaurant” in New York have made culinary experimentation increasingly difficult. They want New York to make room for that kind of ambition.

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Founder | JK Hotel Group Jeff Klein took San Vicente to both coasts this year. In New York, he converted the public spaces of the Jane Hotel into San Vicente West Village, keeping part of the building as a budget hotel. The main dining room, once a ballroom, has a live jazz band and singer every night. “When the singer wears a black dress and long white gloves, I feel as though I’m in New York in the 1930s,” Klein told Observer. In Los Angeles, he opened San Vicente Santa Monica, a $40 million, 21,000-square-foot club with an indoor-outdoor restaurant, a rooftop bar and a 50-seat screening room. Members of the original San Vicente Bungalows get a year of free access before upgrading to a global membership. Revenue grew 30 percent last year, according to the company. The model began with San Vicente Bungalows, which Klein opened in West Hollywood in 2018 after a $50 million renovation of the former San Vicente Inn. The club is known for covering members’ phone cameras with stickers, Klein’s idea, which drew pushback at first. The rule extends to talking about what happens inside: Klein said the club once ended a membership after a member’s guest leaked details of a private meeting. “To me, privacy has become the greatest luxury,” he said. Klein is now adding a pool and cabanas there, and has said more than 9,000 people are on its waiting list. An anonymous committee decides who gets in, looking for curiosity, humor and good manners. “Being wealthy doesn’t give you an advantage,” Klein said. Getting accepted, by his own account, is the hardest reservation in his portfolio. It all grew out of the Sunset Tower Hotel, which Klein bought in 2004 and still considers his flagship. “I never want to own a place that’s ‘hot,’” he said. “Hot places are hot for a few years, and then they’re not.” Walk-ins at its Tower Bar wait 30 minutes to an hour, longer on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and tables there are also available through Dorsia. Across the street from the Bungalows, he runs the boutique Hotel 850 SVB. Klein owns all of his real estate except in Santa Monica, which is on a long-term lease, and counts Ohana Real Estate Investors as his key partner. This year, Klein reportedly turned down an offer from DIAFA, the Abu Dhabi hospitality company tied to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to buy the Sunset Tower and the San Vicente clubs for $700 million, a figure DIAFA’s side disputes. A source close to Klein told The Hollywood Reporter that Klein knew folding them into a larger company would dilute what he had spent years building.

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Partner | Catch Hospitality Group Eugene Remm is taking The Corner Store outside New York for the first time. In November, he and partner Tilman Fertitta will open the SoHo restaurant at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, a project announced in January. Remm isn’t treating Vegas as the limit. “I wouldn’t say Las Vegas is the only place Corner Store will ever go,” he told Observer. “But as of right now, it’s our next stop.” In 2017, Remm partnered Catch Hospitality Group, his bicoastal, multi-market operation, with Fertitta’s privately owned Landry’s. “Despite everything he has going on, Tilman is always available whenever I need him, which continues to surprise me,” Remm said. “He’s taught me structure, scale, and how to operate a proper business for the long run.” Remm’s portfolio now includes Or’esh, The Eighty Six and Cafe Charmant. He opened The Eighty Six, a 35-seat steakhouse in the former Chumley’s space in the West Village, in September 2025. “We often feel like we’re the custodians of this property, not its creators,” Remm said. “There’s an undeniable energy you feel the moment you walk in, and our responsibility is to preserve and protect it.” In March, the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants ranked it No. 12 worldwide and No. 1 in North America. Or’esh, a Mediterranean restaurant with chef Nadav Greenberg, followed in SoHo in February, and Cafe Charmant, a coastal French restaurant, opened in the West Village on September 15. Another standalone New York concept is set for 9 West 57th Street in 2027. “I think the world wants smaller spaces, more intimate experiences,” Remm told Observer earlier this year. “That’s where we’re at.” He came to that view by living in the city and watching how people’s dining habits changed, and by doing the math: building large-format restaurants, he said, “has also become incredibly challenging.” “We had to rethink our approach, moving from tables of eight, 10 and 12 celebrating birthdays and big occasions to more intimate groups of two and four focused on food and conversation,” Remm said. “That also meant completely rethinking how we manage the reservation book to maximize a smaller space.” The group, which runs seven Catch locations across the U.S., marked the 15th anniversary of its Meatpacking District flagship this year with a renovation and new food and beverage programs. The Eighty Six, The Corner Store and Or’esh are among the hardest restaurant bookings in New York, with long waits that began even before they opened, and they have drawn celebrities including Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter. Asked whether that comes down to the room, the food or something that can’t be engineered, Remm said: “All of it. The room, the food, and the magic that happens when you create special experiences and make people feel genuinely special.”

Founder & CEO | Gracious Hospitality Management In April, Simon Kim opened 550 Madison, a 15,000-square-foot, multi-level dining destination in Philip Johnson’s former Sony building in Midtown. It brings together Cote 550, his second Cote in New York, and Bar Chimera, a new concept with three separate bars for wine, whiskey and martinis. Kim’s favorite is the martini bar, which took a year of development. “We spent a year researching and developing the perfect martini, tasting hundreds of waters and working with chemists and a local ice maker to get the mineral content and pH exactly right,” Kim told Observer. That ice maker, in Queens, delivers custom ice every day. Nas is a partner in the project. The two met when Nas came into Cote soon after it opened. “What I love about Nas is that he keeps it real,” Kim said. “He’s never lost touch with who he is.” Kim is expanding further in New York with Sushi Yoshitake, due later this year on the mezzanine of 550 Madison. It’s the debut New York restaurant from three-Michelin-starred Tokyo chef Masahiro Yoshitake, bringing his omakase to North America for the first time. “His dream was to come to New York, and my dream was to bring the greatest sushi chef to New York,” Kim said. Kim’s Cote Korean Steakhouse, which blends Korean barbecue with an American steakhouse, earned a Michelin star at its Flatiron flagship within its first year. His first restaurant, Piora, was Italian; with Cote, he turned to the food he grew up with. “It wasn’t about whether Korean food was in fashion,” he said. “It was about staying true to myself and my story.” Since opening in 2017, the flagship has been the foundation for the brand’s expansion to Miami in 2021, Singapore in 2024 and Las Vegas, where Kim opened at the Venetian in October 2025. Reservations at Cote open 30 days in advance at 10 a.m., and the restaurant also books through Dorsia. Another notable restaurant in Kim’s group is Coqodaq, an upscale fried-chicken concept, gluten-free and fried without seed oils, paired with Champagne and caviar. “I believe in the power of ‘and,’” Kim said. “Taste and health can coexist, and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.” Coqodaq and its casual offshoot, CQDQ, returned to the U.S. Open for a third consecutive year, where Kim also debuted Kimbap, a stall selling gimbap, the Korean rice rolls traditionally filled with vegetables and meat. “Honestly, I was nervous,” he said of bringing such a personal dish to the Open. The stall sold more than 1,500 gimbap a day. His food also appeared at Formula 1 in Miami and Las Vegas and in a Coqodaq collaboration with Lucky Cat in London.

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Chef & Owner | Tatiana, Dōgon and Maroon In May, Kwame Onwuachi took his cooking west for the first time, opening Maroon, an Afro-Caribbean steakhouse, at Sahara Las Vegas. The restaurant is named for the enslaved Africans who escaped into Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. “The story of the Maroons is one of resilience, freedom and preserving culture, and that’s something worth celebrating anywhere,” Onwuachi told Observer. The menu draws on his Jamaican and Caribbean roots and on the mix of cuisines he grew up around in the Bronx. By September, Clark County had handed Onwuachi a ceremonial key to the Las Vegas Strip. Maroon is his third restaurant with architecture firm Modellus Novus, after Tatiana at Lincoln Center and Dōgon at Washington’s Salamander Hotel. Both Tatiana and Dōgon made North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list this year: Dōgon at No. 37, and Tatiana as a new entry at No. 39. Tatiana, which The New York Times twice named New York’s best restaurant, remains one of the hardest tables in the city to book. Washingtonian ranked Dōgon No. 8 on its 2026 list of D.C.’s 100 Very Best Restaurants. His food also reaches well past his dining rooms. Patty Palace by Chef Kwame serves patties at Citi Field and Barclays Center. In September, Onwuachi published his second cookbook, All Hours: Crazy Good Food for Whatever, Whenever . He launched it at Lincoln Center by hosting a one-night, Resy-presented late-night talk show, with guests and live cooking, then took it on a national tour that included a sold-out dinner at Maroon. “Food has always been about more than what’s on the plate for me,” he said. “It’s about storytelling, culture, music and bringing people together.” He has also moved back to Los Angeles, partly to be closer to Las Vegas. “Most importantly, being in L.A. gives me the opportunity to spend more quality time with my family,” he said.

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Co-Founder & CEO and Co-Founder & Chief Risk Officer | inKind In August, Johann Moonesinghe and Andrew Harris closed $414 million in financing for inKind, led by Citi and Cross River, bringing the company’s total capital raised to more than $1.2 billion. The round followed more than $320 million from Liberty Mutual Investments in July and a $450 million equity and debt round led by Magnetar Capital in February. They plan to deploy the capital to restaurants on the platform over the next year. The Austin, Texas-based platform now connects more than 5 million customers with more than 10,000 restaurants, bars and cafes, more than double the count of a year earlier, in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Miami. The model gives the founders influence over both restaurant funding and where customers dine. Inkind provides capital in exchange for food and beverage credit, with no loan repayments to a bank and no equity stake for an investor, then sells that credit to diners through its app, which offers up to 20 percent back at participating restaurants. The company counts Mina Group, José Andrés Group and Metallica among its partners and investors. InKind has deployed over $1 billion to restaurants on its platform. Their customer acquisition extends to live entertainment. InKind is the official dining sponsor of Metallica’s “Life Burns Faster” residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, running October 1 through October 29 with additional shows in early 2027, and publishes restaurant recommendations around Formula 1 in Austin. Moonesinghe also owns RDM, the hospitality group behind Guest House at Turn 20, the VIP restaurant at Austin’s Formula 1 race in October. RDM, led by Raj Kumar, is expanding into Aspen and Dallas.

Co-CEOs, Tao Group Hospitality Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss led Tao Group Hospitality’s expansion of Omnia at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to more than 120,000 square feet with Omnia Dayclub, which debuted in May. It’s Tao Group Hospitality’s largest ground-up development to date and draws on the beach clubs of Mykonos and Ibiza. At the opening, bottle service arrived by tiny boats while a Trojan horse paraded through the crowd. An even bigger entrance was considered: skydivers landing in the pool, an idea the FAA rejected “before I had the chance to even say no,” Tepperberg told Observer. The partners have also adapted to how Las Vegas now goes out. Social media lets guests see what’s happening at every venue on the Strip in real time, so they bounce around more, Strauss said, and Tao now sells a single pass that gets guests into five or six of its venues in one night. The past year marked a significant period of expansion and reinvention for the partners in their two most important markets, New York and Las Vegas. At Edge, atop 30 Hudson Yards, they reintroduced a 101st-floor restaurant space as Peak with Priceless and brought back Avenue, the nightlife concept they introduced in West Chelsea in 2009, as Avenue Sky Lounge, 1,100 feet above Manhattan. “Avenue was just too good not to bring back,” Tepperberg said; the original only closed because its building was demolished. The projects turned Hudson Yards into a nighttime destination where an evening can run from dinner to late-night DJ sets. In West Chelsea, they opened Bar CC, a cocktail and wine lounge, on September 25, next to their membership-based Crane Club. Crane Club runs as a separate business within Tao, with programming that ranges from chess and trivia nights to live music and comedy. Its restaurant is now among the most in-demand reservations in the portfolio, with tables released 30 days in advance. Tao’s restaurants served about 2.3 million covers in 2025 and its nightlife venues about 3.3 million guests, according to the company, which is majority-owned by Mohari Hospitality and reported a 45 percent improvement in bottom-line performance over 2024. The co-CEOs also took their brands on the road: the final Tao Park City at Sundance, a Boardroom x Crane Club house during Super Bowl weekend, Crane Club Privé at the Carlton during Cannes Lions, and Crane Club Out East in the Hamptons. They closed Lavo and the Fleur Room in Los Angeles at the end of 2025. Two major multi-concept projects are planned for early 2027, one in New York and one in Florida. In Tampa, the partners will run Lavo, the signature restaurant at Hotel Cala, a 281-room resort opening on the Riverwalk in January 2027, along with BarOnda, a waterfront bar. Tao remains one of the company’s most recognized and enduring brands, while Marquee New York, which the partners opened together in 2003, is the venue that established their influence on modern nightlife and hospitality. On opening night, the door got so hectic that Strauss went outside and worked the rope himself.

CEO | Soho House In January, Andrew Carnie took Soho House private again, completing a $2.7 billion merger with an affiliate of Yucaipa Cos. The deal for the members’ club operator nearly collapsed weeks before closing. MCR Hotels, which had led the investor group, pulled its $200 million equity commitment, and the gap was filled by a $50 million commitment from Morse Ventures, owned by MCR chief Tyler Morse, and by Richard Caring’s agreement to roll over more of his shares. It ended four years on the New York Stock Exchange, during which Carnie said revenue grew at a double-digit average annual rate. Carnie now runs 50 Houses in 19 countries, according to the company, along with Cecconi’s restaurants in 13 cities, The Ned, the Scorpios beach clubs in Mykonos and Bodrum, and standalone restaurants including The Allis in Chicago and Istanbul. Soho House counted more than 270,000 members as of mid-2025. Last year brought Soho Farmhouse Ibiza, Barcelona Pool House and Soho House Manchester, the brand’s debut in northern England. Soho Beach House Los Cabos opens this fall, and Soho House Venice Beach, the fifth House in Los Angeles, follows next summer. Houses in Milan, Madrid, Sydney and New York’s Flatiron are also planned, along with a third Farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. Carnie has also used outside restaurants to sharpen the Houses’ food. He brought Kian Samyani’s Persian restaurant Berenjak (part of the JKS Restaurants portfolio) from London into Houses in Oxfordshire, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and added a Nancy Silverton menu to the garden at Soho House West Hollywood. The brand travels, too: House 44, a Paddock Club space created with Lewis Hamilton, appears at Formula 1 races; The Hideout is a members’ lounge inside Coachella’s VIP section; and Soho House hosts events at the Cannes and Venice film festivals.

Chef-Owner | The Dinex Group This fall, Daniel Boulud replaced three restaurants with one. Across from Lincoln Center, he folded Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud and Épicerie Boulud, which closed last year after two decades on the block, into Brasserie Boulud. The Rockwell-designed room has 320 seats indoors and out, a speakeasy and an épicerie-café. It’s his biggest restaurant in New York and, notable for a Lyon native, his first brasserie in the city. “I never had the right physical space to truly express the spirit, scale, and atmosphere of a traditional brasserie the way I envisioned it,” Boulud told Observer. Combining the three restaurants gave him one. In September, he took Tiffany & Co.’s Blue Box Café west for the first time, creating the menu for its new location at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. His relationship with Tiffany began years earlier, when he catered the company’s events. In California, he kept some signature dishes from New York and built the rest of the menu around Southern California produce. A Café Boulud in London is next, on the top floor of Admiralty Arch with a terrace overlooking Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery, in partnership with Waldorf Astoria. It’s a return for Boulud, who spent more than a decade in London. Boulud has also built a business beyond his dining rooms. Cuisine Boulud New York handles bespoke catering across the region, and he now runs two prominent event spaces: Le Jardin Sur Madison on the One Madison rooftop and Summit Events atop One Vanderbilt. His portfolio, run with Dinex CEO Sebastien Silvestri, stretches from Daniel and Le Pavillon in New York to Palm Beach, Miami, Toronto, Montreal, Singapore, Dubai, Riyadh and Hong Kong. His alumni run kitchens of their own, among them Gavin Kaysen in Minneapolis, Melissa Rodriguez in New York and Aaron Bludorn , a fellow honoree, in Houston.

Executive Chef & Partner, Founder& CEO and Executive Chef& Partner | Unapologetic Foods Chef Vijay Kumar ’s Semma remains Unapologetic Foods’ hardest table. In early October, the West Village Indian restaurant had no tables for two anywhere in its two-week booking window. Semma holds a Michelin star, placed No. 9 on The New York Times’ 100 Best Restaurants in New York City for 2026, a year after topping the list, and ranked No. 41 on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants. Kumar told Observer that he noticed the drop, “but for us it was never about a ranking because we never thought we belonged on these lists at all.” The dish people know Semma for is nathai pirattal, snails Kumar foraged as a boy in the paddy fields near his grandparents’ home in rural Tamil Nadu, where they were a food of poverty. He didn’t think New York would order it. “It sells out most nights,” he said. Dhamaka, one of the group’s restaurants, placed No. 66 on the Times list. Asked what New York isn’t ready for, he said, “New York has never been the problem. If something’s not on the menu, it’s because I’m not ready.” Founder and CEO Roni Mazumdar and executive chef and partner Chintan Pandya now own nine concepts, averaging 5,000 covers a week. The company’s name dates to 2018, a few months after they opened Adda in Long Island City, when a guest told Pandya he owed her an apology because the food was too spicy. Pandya told her that was how the food is supposed to taste. “Being unapologetic isn’t defiance,” Mazumdar said. “It’s being exactly who you are and trusting that’s enough.” In May, they opened Sanwits, a 10-seat Filipino sandwich shop, with chef-partner Eric Valdez, in the First Avenue space that previously housed their Rowdy Rooster. Valdez, who rose to chef de cuisine at Dhamaka, first opened Naks with the partners, the group’s first restaurant that isn’t Indian, two blocks away. At Sanwits he puts lechon, bagoong and caldereta on a hero roll. “Somebody comes in for lunch and leaves curious about the whole cuisine,” Mazumdar said. This winter they take Adda, which moved from Long Island City to the East Village last year, to Fishtown in Philadelphia, close enough, Mazumdar said, that he and Pandya “can be on the floor, not running it from a distance.” In early October, Adda’s prime weekend tables (in New York) were full across its seven-day booking window. They also changed how diners get in. In April, the partners moved their reservations from Resy to the DoorDash-owned SevenRooms, announcing the switch on social media on April 6. Mazumdar said he was optimistic that SevenRooms’ Channel Connect, which syncs reservation data from different sources into one platform, would streamline how the group manages bookings. His reasoning is about the diner more than the table. “Someone who eats at Semma on Friday might grab Rowdy Rooster on Tuesday and bring their family to Adda for a birthday,” he said. For a group like theirs, “that’s not a tech decision, it’s a hospitality decision.”

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Co-Founders | Noho Hospitality Group Over the past 17 years, Andrew Carmellini , Luke Ostrom and Josh Pickard have built NoHo Hospitality into 23 venues in New York and Detroit and launched a range of trends along the way. The run nearly didn’t start. At the end of 2008, with the market in free fall, Carmellini and Ostrom scouted the former Ago space at the Greenwich Hotel and came close to walking away. “I think I literally saw a tumbleweed blow across North Moore,” Ostrom told Observer. They took the space anyway, ripped off the white tablecloths and opened Locanda Verde in 2009, with Pickard joining as the third partner. Those trends include the ubiquity of whipped ricotta, a day-one Locanda Verde staple, according to the group. Carmellini doesn’t claim to have invented it; he traces the dish to a picnic the team put together in Abruzzo in the ’90s, with ricotta imported from Sardinia. Then there’s the viral New York roll, a circular, cream-filled croissant that began as the Suprême at Lafayette in April 2022 and has since been copied by bakeries from Singapore to London. Copies surfaced in California within about 30 days, then in Japan and Korea, and Carmellini once found one on vacation in Costa Rica sold as a “Lafayette donut.” “At first, we were upset about it,” the partners said, before conceding that someone else invented the muffin, too. This year, the partners expanded their presence across New York and Detroit while keeping up the restaurants that made their name: Locanda Verde (co-owned by Robert De Niro) since 2009, all-American oyster room The Dutch since 2011, Lafayette since 2013 and pasta-focused Bar Primi since 2014. Their flagship is Café Carmellini at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which opened in 2023 as Carmellini’s first namesake restaurant. After years of building casual rooms, he designed it as a return to the fine dining he trained in, and the name honors his family’s coffee importing business, which operated in Tuscany for 120 years. Opening night, he said, was “chaos, fun and utterly terrifying.” Detroit came through Pickard, a native of the city. “In Detroit, you have to work harder to earn people’s loyalty, and that loyalty is everything,” he said. There, where they already run four venues at the Shinola Hotel, they added Saksey’s, a speakeasy cocktail lounge and Gilly’s Clubhouse, a sports entertainment venue. In September, they partnered with Authentic Hospitality to open Ray’s Detroit, a local watering hole designed with an emphasis on welcome. In New York, two new spots at the Public Theater showcased the co-founders’ determination to extend successful brands while developing new ones: a second location of all-day Italian café Bar Torino, and The Astor, a downtown tavern that replaced The Library on September 15. Both extend a relationship with the institution that dates to Joe’s Pub, and the partners describe their role there as part of a bigger evening, with dinner or a drink serving as “a natural extension” of the show. And they’re keeping busy, with about 35,000 covers a week across the portfolio and a line at Lafayette’s bakery that can run half an hour. Carmellini still prefers to be on the floor; he once figured the group could hold its meetings in the private dining rooms, and it was Ostrom and Pickard who pushed for a corporate office as the portfolio grew. Carmellini’s kitchens have also trained some of the industry’s biggest names, among them Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and David Chang, who all worked for the man many call AC when he was executive chef at Cafe Boulud. “Those are only three names out of 10,000 that have passed through the ranks,” he said. “It’s not for the weak at heart.” Ask where he’d take his toughest critic, and he names Tetou, which closed in Golfe-Juan and recently reopened in Cannes, “so he could understand what a real bouillabaisse actually is.”

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Founder | Groot Hospitality On February 8, David Grutman danced in La Casita during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show, one of a handful of friends the singer invited onto the set. The friendship goes back to the singer’s early days. Grutman said that when Drake was in Miami recording Scorpion and asked him who the most exciting new artist was, he named Bad Bunny on the spot, then handed Drake the phone to persuade the singer’s skeptical manager. The two are business partners: they co-own Gekkō, the Japanese steakhouse Grutman opened in Miami in 2022. Grutman runs nine restaurants and clubs through Groot Hospitality, all in two cities. Miami is the base he built from LIV, which he opened at the Fontainebleau in 2008, adding Komodo in 2015, Papi Steak in 2019, Gekkō in 2022 and Casadonna in 2023. LIV traces back to a bar. At 22, unable to get hired on South Beach, Grutman mixed cocktails for mall owner Don Soffer, whose son Jeffrey later needed a club for the Fontainebleau. “No agenda, and that’s exactly why it lasted,” Grutman told Observer. Las Vegas is the export. In 2023 and 2024, he took Komodo, Papi Steak, LIV and the LIV Beach dayclub to Fontainebleau Las Vegas, four concepts in one resort for Jeffrey Soffer. His team said two Middle East venues will open within the year. What looks effortless at 1 a.m. is planned hours earlier, down to a printed run-of-show and lighting cues timed to the beat drop. “You don’t get the magic of 1 a.m. without grinding at 10 a.m.,” Grutman said. This year he also put his relationships into print and on screen. Take It Personal , his book on building them, with a foreword by Kim Kardashian, came out in April and became an instant New York Times bestseller.

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Co-Founder | Sushi Nozawa Group Jerry Greenberg , a former technology executive who entered the restaurant business because of one sushi chef, had a busy year. In May, Sugarfish opened in San Diego’s Little Italy, adding to the collection of “Trust Me” sushi restaurants in Los Angeles, Orange County and New York. It was the brand’s first new market since New York a decade ago, and a deliberately close one. “Being just a couple of hours away allows us to manage quality, which is always our highest priority,” Greenberg told Observer. This summer, Uovo launched in New York’s NoMad. The Matū team created the newest concept: Cheesesteaks by Matū, a casual offshoot of the group’s wagyu steakhouses Matū and Matū Kai, in response to guest demand for their cheesesteaks. The sandwich goes back further than the steakhouses. Greenberg grew up in South Jersey and started making cheesesteaks with First Light Farms beef about a decade ago, and Matū later offered them as a pop-up item at the bar. “We never could have imagined how much people would connect with it,” Greenberg said. It opened in Pasadena in January, drew lines down the block and added a Calabasas location in July. HiHo Cheeseburger and KazuNori, the original hand-roll bar, also opened in Pasadena and Calabasas. Greenberg has watched competitors imitate KazuNori, with mixed feelings. “I don’t recall who it was, but it was a 100 percent copycat,” he said. “That doesn’t feel great.” Others opening their own versions of a hand-roll bar, he said, show the idea “has made an impact.” Greenberg co-founded Sushi Nozawa Group in 2007 with chef Kazunori Nozawa, Nozawa’s son Tom, Lele Massimini, Cameron Broumand and Clement Mok, after years as a regular at Nozawa’s Studio City sushi bar. The idea came up on a cooking trip to Italy, Nozawa’s first vacation in 30 years. “Over mushroom risotto and a glass of red wine, or maybe a bottle, he just asked me if we could do sushi together,” Greenberg said. The first Sugarfish opened in Marina del Rey in 2008, built to make Nozawa’s style more accessible while honoring and never compromising it. The partners even worked with a robotics company to engineer a machine that combines the seasoning with the rice to Nozawa’s standard, which took “hundreds and hundreds” of attempts before Nozawa signed off. HiHo was founded in 2015, Uovo in 2017 and Matū in 2021. Next year, Uovo, KazuNori and HiHo Cheeseburger will open in Beverly Hills.

Founder & Chef | The Mina Group Michael Mina , who co-founded The Mina Group with Andre Agassi, runs 33 restaurants and bars, almost all of them as operating partner inside someone else’s building, from the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton to Bellagio and the Westin St. Francis. Mina takes on a hotel’s entire food-and-beverage program: the restaurants, the three-meal service and in-room dining. The one thing he won’t compromise on, he told Observer, is “our systems and standards.” It’s all backed by Recipe Exchange, a library of more than 30,000 recipes from every Mina Group restaurant that all cooks in the company can use. “No recipe is truly anyone’s at this point,” Mina said. Eleven of his rooms are Bourbon Steak, the steakhouse brand he started in 2008, which added Delray Beach, Orlando and San Francisco locations in 2025. San Francisco, where Mina made his name with Aqua in the early 1990s, is where his year started. In October 2025, he opened The Eighth Rule, a bourbon bar, with Stephen Curry at the Westin St. Francis. In January, he brought Acqua Bistecca to Salt Leaf in Estero Bay, Fla. In July, with Ayesha Curry, he opened Sweet July Cafe at the Ritz-Carlton in Charlotte, N.C., the first piece of a hotel program that adds Bourbon Steak and a second Eighth Rule this winter. This month he takes over all food and beverage at the Heathman Hotel in Portland, Ore., starting with Bar Sprezzatura. Abroad, he runs Mina Brasserie in Dubai and is culinary partner at Taleed in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, where cooking Hijazi food taught him techniques, he said, that his mother never used. His kitchens have also produced names of their own, among them James Beard Award winner Michael Rafidi in Washington, D.C., and winemaker Rajat Parr. “The best thing that anyone that has ever worked for me has done,” Mina said, “is to go and become successful at what they do.” One day, he said, he’d like to open a street cart serving koshari exactly as his mother made it.

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Co-Founder & Managing Partner | MML Hospitality Larry McGuire has spent the past year turning MML Hospitality into as much a hotel company as a restaurant group. In August 2025, he and his partners, Tom Moorman and Liz Lambert, bought Nine Orchard, the 113-room Lower East Side hotel in the former Jarmulowsky Bank Building, for $92 million. “It was really just a lot of coincidence and luck,” McGuire told Observer. “Right place, right time and the right people involved to make it happen.” The deal included its restaurants (Corner Bar, Swan Room and Blue Room) and gave MML its first East Coast project. Rather than reinvent them, McGuire has focused on execution, service and the team, and on events and parties, which he calls the most profitable part of hotel food and beverage and which had been underused. At home in Austin, MML took over all food and beverage at the Driskill Hotel, which dates back to 1886. “It has been pretty dormant for a while now, so it feels like we are just kinda waking it up,” he said. With April Bloomfield, who joined MML as executive chef, McGuire reopened the Driskill Grill as a 250-seat steakhouse modeled as much on Peter Luger and Keens as on Texas tradition, alongside a new bar, The Victorian, and the 1886 Café. “I think the most surprising thing about April is that, even at her level in her career, she’s just in the kitchens every night,” he said. MML now runs 32 restaurants, including six Clark’s Oyster Bars; two hotels, Nine Orchard and Hotel Saint Vincent in New Orleans; and retail shops in Austin, where it recently added Westside Market. McGuire is candid about what Clark’s has become. “I think we have to be honest that it is a bit of a chain and that’s OK,” he said. “We just have to be a really good chain and grow for the right reasons.” Expansion in Dallas, where MML opened Neighborhood Sushi in June, comes next: June’s All Day in December, then two Swedish Hill locations and a Clark’s Oyster Bar in early 2027. The challenge in a new market, he said, is that locals “eat at the same few places,” and an outsider has to break that routine. McGuire is also opening the 59-key Mountain Chalet in Aspen next winter. In Austin, he’s building a 57-key hotel, members’ club and retail space at Sixth & Blanco, a 200,000-square-foot development MML is co-developing, which will be anchored by a 6,000-square-foot ByGeorge flagship.

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Co-Founders | The h.wood Group Ten years after opening the original Delilah in West Hollywood, John Terzian and Brian Toll are taking their supper club national, and finally to New York. “We built a place most people in the city needed and wanted without them fully knowing,” Terzian told Observer. “We filled a void.” In January, they opened Delilah Dallas, the brand’s fourth location after Los Angeles, Wynn Las Vegas and Miami. It’s also the largest: a 15,000-square-foot room in the Design District with a full band and dancers. That wasn’t the plan, Terzian said; they fell for the building and its location. This year, they announced additional Southern California openings, led by The Nice Guy’s Orange County debut in Newport Beach, plus new venues in West Hollywood, Pacific Palisades and Brentwood. Alphabet Bar & Grill opened August 15, and Little Luck in West Hollywood opened October 19. Next comes Lady Delilah, their first New York venue, due November 3. “New York is the epicenter of the restaurant world,” Terzian said. “We always said that when it’s the right time to open in New York, it had to be a major move.” New money is behind the expansion. The h.wood Group took a strategic growth investment from DIAFA, an Abu Dhabi luxury hospitality company, at a nine-figure valuation, and became its first hospitality partner. Terzian said the deal supports aggressive expansion over the next three to five years. Terzian and Toll have also taken their rooms on the road. For two peak-summer weekends in July, they brought Delilah back to Montauk with Chase Sapphire Reserve, following last summer’s debut, and the group produces dining and events at Coachella, F1, Cannes and Art Basel. Its portfolio, which also includes Harriet’s and the members-only Bird Streets Club on the Sunset Strip, runs to roughly 15 concepts worldwide. Across the rooms, privacy comes from a strict no-photos policy and discreet entrances, exits and seating.

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CEO | Best Buddy Hospitality Lawrence Longo wants to build America’s next great national pizza brand, and he’s betting it can taste like SoHo everywhere. A 2019 pop-up in Los Angeles turned him onto the demand for Prince St. Pizza, the New York slice shop founded by Frank Morano, and he has since taken it across the U.S. and Canada, from Las Vegas’s Durango casino-resort to Toronto. Morano agreed to the first Los Angeles shop on two conditions, Longo said: “as long as we don’t change the recipe and never lose the human touch.” Six locations opened in the past year: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the chain’s first franchise location, opened in October; Nashville in June; Brooklyn in April; Miami last December; Dallas, its first in Texas, last October; and a third Las Vegas location in T-Mobile Arena in September. Baton Rouge has been the biggest surprise, he said, and Miami the biggest struggle. That brings Prince St. to 21 locations and over $50 million in projected annual revenue, Longo told Observer. To scale it, Longo partnered with Lawrence Kourie, the founder and largest franchisee of Dave’s Hot Chicken, who, Longo said, called him every single day until he said yes. Every shop outside New York follows a system that replicates New York City water for the dough. “It was never about proving the myth,” Longo said. “It was about protecting the original recipe.” A Disney collaboration that recreated Little Nero’s Pizza from “Home Alone” won a Clio Award in May. Prince St. anchors Longo’s Best Buddy Hospitality, which also revived Irv’s Burgers, the West Hollywood burger stand founded in 1946, and expanded it to Las Vegas with locations at Durango and Miracle Mile in 2024 and 2025, respectively. In July, Longo brought Irv’s Burgers to Green Valley Ranch. “You can expand a restaurant’s footprint, but you should never outgrow its soul,” he said. He also runs Bar Next Door on the Sunset Strip, No. 4 on Food & Wine’s 2026 list of the top 10 bars in the U.S., and Sparky’s Sports Bar in Malibu. With pastry chef Bradley Ray, formerly of Eleven Madison Park, he built Henry’s Secret Ice Cream, which sells about 2,000 pints a week in drops that regularly sell out in minutes. Longo used the drop model to build a cult following before opening a shop, and he has now signed a lease on a larger space in Beverly Hills, set to open next year. He also co-created Tenderfest, a chicken-tender festival that sold out in Los Angeles and then Chicago, drawing 10,000 people across the two events. Longo grew up in an Italian family in Toronto, came to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood, and got into the restaurant business through Off the Menu, the app he founded around secret menu items at popular restaurants. He’s now bringing the two worlds together with Delivering Happiness, a comedy series starring Nick Turturro as a pizza delivery driver, which he’s developing with TikTok and iHeartMedia. “The ultimate goal is to make content so entertaining that people forget it’s marketing,” he said. Some in L.A. still remember him as the man who ate a burger every day in 2018.

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Founder & CEO | Quality Branded In May, Michael Stillman took Bad Roman west , opening a 3,570-square-foot Beverly Hills location on North Canon Drive in the building that once housed The Palm. Asked what he had to change for Los Angeles, Stillman told Observer, “We needed valet.” The expansion came three years after the first Bad Roman opened in New York and put the maximalist Italian-American concept in a neighborhood already saturated with fine dining and Italian restaurants. Like in New York, it has had a warm reception in Los Angeles: in early October, prime weekend tables were booked nearly four weeks out. Of the restaurant’s style, Stillman said, “People wanted something fun and warm. We were like, ‘It needs to have a sense of irreverent humor.’” Irreverent humor, he said, “is the truest form of earnestness.” Back in New York, Stillman has built a strong presence by continuing his father’s legacy at Smith & Wollensky, partnering with Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli on Don Angie, and running Quality Meats, now 20 years in business. His father, Alan Stillman, founded T.G.I. Friday’s and Smith & Wollensky. “Those rooms taught me guests forgive almost anything if they’re having a good time,” Stillman said. His own rooms have less flair. Quality Meats paired turn-of-the-century butcher shop materials with dishes like corn crème brûlée and edamame with mint salt, and Stillman sees its influence across the city’s newer steakhouses. Asked who has followed its lead, Stillman said, “Everyone, and I’m flattered. Some of them even tip their hat.” He met Rito and Tacinelli 18 years ago, when she was a server and he was a line cook at Park Avenue Autumn, one of Stillman’s first restaurants. He handles design and development, and they handle food and beverage. “And we all fret about everything. Often,” he said. Nine years after opening, Don Angie is still tough to get into: in early October, its books, which open a week ahead, were all but full. Stillman continues to grow at a rapid pace. He opened San Sabino and Twin Tails in 2024, then Limusina, his first Mexican restaurant, last fall. He and chef partner Craig Koketsu had talked about a Mexican restaurant for 20 years. “After an exhaustive 18-month research process involving 72 versions of mole, we said, ‘OK,’” Stillman said. At Twin Tails, he reworked La Grenouille’s pistachio soufflé with pandan. “Thank you, La Grenouille,” he said. “I owe you a pandan.” Stillman now operates twelve restaurant concepts under Quality Branded, with more planned in New York, and Bad Roman Beverly Hills is his second location outside New York, after Quality Italian in Denver. His alumni have opened rooms of their own, including beverage director Bryan Schneider’s Quick Eternity at the Seaport and former development director Alex Pfaffenbach’s Markette and The Argyle in Chelsea.

Founder & CEO | Altamarea Group Ahmass Fakahany now runs 20 restaurants across five countries. The former Merrill Lynch president and founder of Altamarea Group said Wall Street taught him to treat talent as the business’s lifeblood. “There is a tremendous human capital arbitrage in the restaurant business,” Fakahany told Observer, arguing that high turnover elsewhere lets a group that retains its people win on consistency. Fakahany opened Piccolo Morini in SoHo this year, a younger, more casual take on his Morini brand. In 2025, he brought Marea, his Central Park South flagship, to Beverly Hills, where Tim Lu now runs the kitchen. Through Atelier House Hospitality, his international operator, he added another Mohalla location and Tezukuri in Dubai—where his 11 Woodfire holds a Michelin star—and SoBo 20, a New Orleans-inspired restaurant in Mumbai, alongside Camillo’s and INJA in New Delhi. He is opening Scarpa next in Gurgaon, India, and licenses Morini in Istanbul and Riyadh. Marea New York remains the group’s hardest table, in what Fakahany calls his hardest market. “The hardest market we operate in is New York City,” he said, citing its fragmented licensing and permitting. Prime 6:30-to-8:30 p.m. reservations often book weeks out, according to the company, and seats are also sold through Dorsia at a $185-per-person minimum. An earlier plan to expand Marea with Major Food Group became an informal alliance rather than a commercial partnership, he said. Fakahany ran a seasonal Marea residency at The Snow Lodge in Aspen from December 2025 through August 2026. He’s also the operating partner for Crazy Pizza in New York and East Hampton.

Chairman & Chief Research Officer | Fundamental Hospitality Group In April, Gaia opened in Miami Beach , the sixth city for the Greek restaurant. Chairman Evgeny Kuzin and chef Izu Ani , now the group’s chief research officer, launched in Dubai in 2018, and the first U.S. venue for their Fundamental Hospitality Group. Miami guests’ one distinctive request so far, Ani said, has been an even bigger wine list. Kuzin built his early business bringing international brands to Dubai. Gaia reversed the direction. “When we created GAIA in 2018, our ambition was never limited to Dubai,” Kuzin told Observer. “The location may change, but the standards, identity and philosophy must remain the same.” By the company’s account, it was among the first Dubai-born luxury concepts built to export under a single identity, a model since followed by Sunset Hospitality Group’s Ammos and Isola, now in Ibiza, Marbella and Bodrum, and by The Maine, which went to London and Ibiza. Kuzin and Ani hosted more than five million guests in 2025 and expect more than 10 million this year, according to the company, across 30 venues in eight countries. Those range from the 100,000-square-foot Sirene by Gaia beach club to the 44-seat Kigo at the Four Seasons in Dubai’s financial district. “Whether we serve 20 guests or 1,500, our philosophy never changes,” Ani said. The two divide the work cleanly. “Evgeny can’t cook, and I can’t do what he does in business and investment,” Ani said. According to the company, Kuzin and co-chairman Maxim Vlasov have grown the group’s capital commitment from the $140 million program announced in 2023 to $200 million this year and are moving toward $400 million, with about 15 openings planned for 2026 and an IPO under discussion. Over the past 12 months, Kuzin and Ani also moved beyond restaurants. In May, they signed a portfolio-wide partnership with Stoli Group. In June, they announced the UAE’s first Cipriani Lido, at Dubai’s J1 Beach, slated for the fourth quarter of 2027, and in July they took Scalini to Beirut. Gaia arrives in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain by year’s end and in Mykonos in 2027, a homecoming of sorts for a restaurant inspired by Greece. “For me, opening GAIA in Mykonos feels like coming full circle,” Ani said. The same year, La Maison Ani opens in Monaco and Riyadh. Also due in 2027 is the group’s first real estate venture: with Egyptian developer Palm Hills, Kuzin and Ani are building a Sirene by Gaia, a luxury hotel and branded residences at Hacienda Heneish on Egypt’s north coast.

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Co-Founders | Park Hospitality With five venues across three Los Angeles neighborhoods, Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser opened their latest, Vandell, in December 2025 with partners Shawn Lickliter and Vay Su. Francesconi and Glaser handle the space, mood and culture, while Lickliter and Su, they say, “are defining the cocktail category in real time.” The 2,000-square-foot cocktail bar opened in Los Feliz, an area that’s currently being called the hottest neighborhood in L.A. In early October, Vandell’s weekend reservations were gone for the rest of the month, though Vandell primarily caters to walk-ins, and Park Hospitality said weekend waits can run 30 to 60 minutes. Within four months of opening, Vandell placed No. 68 on North America’s 50 Best Bars extended list. It was also nominated for Best New U.S. Cocktail Bar at the 2026 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards, an annual industry event that draws the world’s most prominent bartenders and operators, and received a glowing review from the Los Angeles Times’ Bill Addison in September. Just last week, Vinepair named Vandell its U.S. Bar of the Year. The bar has also held pop-ups at True Laurel in San Francisco, Cry Baby in Toronto and numerous New Orleans venues during Tales of the Cocktail. In early October, prime-time tables at Donna’s, the Italian restaurant that is Park Hospitality’s flagship, were booked three weeks out. Donna’s turned Park from a bar group into a restaurant group, and taught its founders the difference. “Bars forgive you,” they tell Observer. “A kitchen forgives nothing.” Donna’s has 64 seats, including 10 at the bar, and sits on an Echo Park block that Francesconi and Glaser bought in 2017 and spent two years redeveloping. They saw it as a campus of interconnected concepts at a time when others were shrinking their footprints, and the delays nearly sank them. “We were on the edge of bankruptcy before even opening our doors,” they say. Donna’s shares a kitchen there with their bars Lowboy and Bar Flores, which they co-own with partner Karla Flores-Mercado. Eater lists all three among the best restaurants in Echo Park, and The Infatuation lists Donna’s among the best Italian restaurants in Los Angeles. The company, which also runs Wolf & Crane in Little Tokyo, projects $18 million in revenue for 2026, up from $13.52 million in 2025, thanks to the addition of Vandell and growth across the portfolio. Four of their former staff now own bars of their own, including Flores-Mercado and the team behind Florentin and Spring St. Bar. What they look for, they say, is “vision and appetite.” The partners are circling three projects in East L.A. Asked what kind of room that part of the city is missing, they would say only: “Just you wait.”

Founder & CEO and President, Merchants | Bilt Ankur Jain built Bilt on rent: members earn points on what’s usually their biggest monthly bill. Since 2023, he has been steering that spending toward the neighborhood around them, restaurants included. “When you think about what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood, it’s the restaurants, coffee shops and local businesses you go back to again and again,” Jain told Observer. Jain raised $250 million at a $10.75 billion valuation in July 2025, and Bilt now counts more than 7 million active members. In January, he relaunched the Bilt card with a new issuer, Column, after previously partnering with Wells Fargo. In February, he extended rewards to mortgage payments through United Wholesale Mortgage. The restaurant side now belongs to Sam Bakhshandehpour , who joined Bilt full-time after two years as an adviser. As global CEO of José Andrés Group, Bakhshandehpour took the chef’s food well past his own dining rooms: to Formula 1 in Las Vegas, Capital One’s airport lounges at LaGuardia and Reagan National, Simon malls in Palo Alto and Las Vegas, and hotels in Nashville, New York and Miami. Bakhshandehpour also licensed the Andrés brand into media and consumer products, building a business meant to succeed financially while protecting what he calls “the heart and soul of the creative vision.” At Bilt, as president of merchants, he oversees partnerships across dining, travel, hotels and fitness, using offers and loyalty to bring restaurants new guests and keep them coming back. One Lower East Side dining partner, Bakhshandehpour said, found that Bilt members spent double digits more per check than other guests in their first month, many of them people who had just moved to the neighborhood. “I saw an opportunity to help the entire industry,” Bakhshandehpour told Observer of his decision to join Bilt. “After 15 years running hospitality businesses, I know the headwinds: tighter margins, more competition and changing guest expectations. Even the best restaurants have to pivot around a rainy Monday.” Next year the two will put Bilt’s name on a room of its own: a café and event space at Bilt’s Meatpacking District headquarters, designed by Rockwell Group and run with an operator partner the company has yet to name.

Restaurateur | King, Jupiter, Lei & Dean’s In October, Lei, Annie Shi ’s 28-seat, 700-square-foot wine bar at 15-17 Doyers Street in Chinatown, had no reservations anywhere in its two-week booking window, 16 months after its June 2025 opening. Lei won the 2026 James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant, and Esquire and Bon Appétit put it on their best-new lists as well. “In a tiny room, small decisions are amplified; every detail matters,” Shi told Observer. Since no one can know every guest in the room, she said, “we just treat everyone as if they’re the most important guest of the night.” Shi was named the Michelin Guide’s Northeast Cities Sommelier of the Year last November and, this year, to the Time100 Next list. Shi is also a partner and beverage director at Jupiter and at King, the West Village Italian/Southern French-influenced restaurant she co-founded with chefs Jess Shadbolt and Clare de Boer, which marked its 10th anniversary in September. King’s menu changes daily, but one dish has never left it: the chickpea panisse. The team tried dropping it early on, she said, “and our guests complained. Loudly.” In March, she and Shadbolt opened Dean’s, a British pub next door to King, where Shi built the wine list around British bottles. “There’s this reputational idea that pubs don’t need to have a great wine program, which we’re having so much fun countering,” she said. Dean’s and Lei both received two-star Critic’s Pick reviews from New York Times co-chief critic Ligaya Mishan within six months of each other. Lei has also traveled. It popped up at Miaodong Wine and Bites in Taipei in November 2025, where Shi sent chef Patty Lee and sommelier Arthur Hong, and hosted Bastard Shanghai at Lei in New York City for two days in February. Chef Patty Lee was a special guest on opening night of Mister Jiu’s 10-year anniversary events in San Francisco in March. In September, Lei teamed with Mister Jiu’s for a one-night pop-up in New York presented by Resy.

Global CEO | JKS Restaurants Pavan Pardasani , who became global CEO of the Sethi siblings’ JKS Restaurants last fall, has led the London group’s U.S. expansion. In December, he opened Gymkhana Las Vegas inside Aria Resort and Casino, the first American outpost of the group’s two-Michelin-starred Gymkhana London. The Las Vegas room is on one floor rather than two, and some proteins on the menu were swapped for ones more familiar to Americans, but “the experience is intact,” Pardasani told Observer. In February, he opened Ambassadors Clubhouse in Manhattan’s NoMad, leading with Punjabi cooking rather than a pan-Indian menu. Many of the most popular Indian dishes worldwide, he said, “originate from or are heavily influenced by Punjabi cuisine.” In 2024, the original Gymkhana London became the first Indian restaurant in the U.K. to receive two Michelin stars, and in August, Gymkhana Las Vegas joined the Michelin Guide’s new Southwest selection. Ambassadors Clubhouse New York, spun out of the Mayfair original, which earned a Michelin star of its own in February, recovered from a fire in August after becoming a New York Times Critic’s Pick and, according to the Times, one of the hardest reservations to book in New York. It reopened six days later, with managing partner Rob Rawleigh on-site through the cleanup. “The genuine love for the restaurant throughout the NYC community was probably the most heartwarming outcome of the fire,” Pardasani said. Alongside the two new U.S. restaurants, Pardasani opened the group’s first U.A.E. restaurant, Gymkhana Dubai, in the DIFC in September, bringing JKS’s total to over 30 restaurants globally. Gymkhana Fine Foods, JKS’s consumer line of sauces, marinades and chutneys, launched in the U.S. in April and won four awards at the U.K.’s Great Taste Awards, the world’s largest food and drink accreditation scheme. Pardasani recently put seven JKS restaurants on Dorsia, including Gymkhana London and both Ambassadors Clubhouses. Reservations go so fast, he said, that Dorsia gives diners who don’t plan ahead a chance at a table. The brands also travel. Gymkhana cooked at the Bellagio Fountain Club during Formula 1 in Las Vegas last November (and returns this November) and at the James Beard Foundation’s Platform pop-up in New York in June. Ambassadors Clubhouse popped up at the Chef’s Table Festival in Park City in August and at Yes Chef in New York in September.

Chef/Owner & Owner | Corima Fidel Caballero and Sofia Ostos , the duo behind progressive Mexican fine-dining restaurant Corima, have been quickly expanding their footprint in New York with two openings. They built a strong foundation with Corima, which opened in January 2024, earned a Michelin star 11 months later and continues to see high demand. Caballero learned of the star at the ceremony itself. Hearing Corima’s name announced, Caballero told Observer, “was surreal.” The restaurant built its name in part on the flour tortilla, a staple of Northern Mexico where Caballero grew up. “When we opened Corima, flour tortillas weren’t getting the same recognition they do today, and we wanted to change that,” he said. The restaurant opens its books two months in advance, and reservations during peak dinner hours are snapped up quickly. On October 4, the first available prime-time table at Corima was October 28, and the most-requested slots were already gone on December 1, the far end of its window. Corima holds the No. 36 spot on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list and No. 37 on The New York Times’ 100 Best Restaurants in New York City 2026 list, and Caballero was a 2026 James Beard finalist for Best Chef: New York State for his work there. In the past year, Ostos and Caballero followed up Corima’s success with two openings just five months apart. In November 2025, they opened Vato in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a four-way venture with Caballero’s childhood friends Paco and Erica Alonso, which he calls “the easiest way to do business.” Vato operates as a tortilleria, burreria and bakery, with 30 seats split among indoor seating and an outdoor patio. “Tortillas deserve the same recognition and respect as a French baguette or a really good sourdough loaf,” Caballero said. Bar Chucho, a Northern Mexican cocktail bar, opened in April 2026 with partner Jesse Kranzler. Located in Two Bridges, just blocks from Corima, Bar Chucho accommodates 75 to 90 guests and has an elevated mezzanine for groups and private events. Initially walk-in only, it began taking reservations on Resy on September 30. While the pair did not disclose plans for their next restaurant, they are focused on maintaining Corima as their flagship while expanding into new formats and neighborhoods, including, Caballero said, “getting our tortillas onto more tables and into more homes.” Ostos handles the numbers, keeping the business financially sustainable. “Sometimes that means being the ‘bad guy’ who said no when the numbers don’t make sense,” she said. With three successful openings in three years, Ostos and Caballero have quickly established a strong influence in the New York culinary scene.

CEO | Din Tai Fung North America Under Albert Yang , Din Tai Fung is opening restaurants in North America faster than it ever has. In 2024, two new U.S. openings set a company record. Since then, Yang has added five more: Santa Monica and Vancouver in 2025, then Irvine in March, Scottsdale in April and Brea in August. That brings the Taiwan-born chain, famous for its xiao long bao, to 21 locations across California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, New York and British Columbia. Brooklyn is due in late spring or early summer 2027, and Chandler and Topanga in the fall. The restaurants are among the most productive in American dining. In 2024, the most recent year the company will share, Din Tai Fung’s U.S. locations averaged $27.4 million each, the highest of any U.S. chain, according to Technomic. The Manhattan flagship at 1633 Broadway covers 25,000 square feet. Last October, Din Tai Fung brought its dumplings to Overstory, the cocktail bar atop 70 Pine, for a ticketed preview of an “After Dark” menu that paired its classics with cocktails inspired by them.

Partners | Bludorn Hospitality Group Reporting 38.9 percent year-over-year revenue growth, the three founders behind Bludorn Hospitality Group are launching two new restaurants this year, bringing their total to six. Bar Bludorn, which opened in The Woodlands on October 2, is a neighborhood-style spin-off of the group’s Houston flagship. A forthcoming project in San Antonio, which they will run as operating partners, will offer the group’s characteristic Texas Gulf Coast cuisine with French-inspired touches. Two more restaurants will follow in 2027. Chef Aaron Bludorn, his wife, Victoria Pappas Bludorn, and their business partner Cherif Mbodji also teamed up with the Houston Texans to offer a gameday experience for members of the BMW Lone Star Ballroom and BMW M Club Blue at NRG Stadium, where they provide a curated menu. “The roar of the crowd is like the roar of the dining room,” Aaron Bludorn told Observer. “They both signal happiness.” Their food has also appeared at the LPGA’s Chevron Championship and the Waldorf Astoria Pedregal in Cabo San Lucas, and they license Perseid, a restaurant in a Bunkhouse hotel. The founders say their format, fine-dining service in a relaxed room without tablecloths, has been followed by other operators launching restaurants like Zanti (2024), Credence (2025) and Latuli (2025). Aaron Bludorn said that after leaving a celebrated New York kitchen, Houston gave him the freedom to rethink what guests want. “Luxury is about giving the guest what they want, when they want it,” he said. Dropping the tablecloths was part of it: a white tablecloth signals formality, while a bare wood table lets guests relax and “get rid of pretense.” Victoria Pappas Bludorn, who grew up in her family’s Pappas Restaurants , brought its obsession with consistency. “Great hospitality doesn’t happen by accident,” she said. “It’s the result of getting the little things right, time and time again.” Bludorn Hospitality Group’s alumni now run kitchens and programs elsewhere, including Chase Voelz, executive chef at Scoundrel, and Darryl Chan, beverage director at Nolita Hospitality.

Founder & CEO | Golden Age Hospitality Jon Neidich has opened six venues in two years. Le Dive, his walk-in-only natural wine bar in Dimes Square, where waits on peak days often run past two hours, expanded to a second location when Le Dive West Village opened this May. “As with all of our projects, I listen to the location,” Neidich told Observer. The original, he said, has the grit of Paris’s 11th arrondissement, while the new one sits on a broad avenue that called to mind the boulevards of the 6th. So he built a classic French terrace with benches and chairs from Maison Gatti. In September, he opened Saint Denis, a Parisian wine bar and bistro at LaGuardia Place. “It offers much more of the classic downtown New York restaurant experience than our other venues,” he said. It’s the first project from chef-partner Marjorie Meek-Bradley, formerly of Pastis, and beverage director-partner Sarah Morrissey, formerly of Le Veau d’Or, who now oversee food and drink across all 11 of his venues, which serve 5,000 to 7,000 covers a week. Revenue is up more than 30 percent year over year, according to the company, and at least two more openings are planned for 2027. Neidich’s venues tend to become templates. The Nines, which he opened in NoHo in 2022, brought the piano-bar supper club downtown, and Le Dive’s walk-in, aperitivo-to-late-night formula has since become a common model for New York’s new neighborhood bars. In 2025, he created the cocktail bar Monsieur with Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin. Luhrmann was already a regular at The Nines and Le Dive, and Anna Wintour threw his 60th birthday party at The Nines. That year Neidich also reopened Lucy’s, an East Village dive bar dating to 1987. “I promised, and kept my word, to keep as much as we absolutely could,” he said. The renovation even turned up a vintage sign in the basement, which now hangs over the bar. His alumni are now opening places of their own. “I believe anyone who wants to be an owner in this business and take that on should,” Neidich said. Willem Hock and Lukas Canan, formerly of The Nines and Bar Bianchi, opened Recente in the East Village in August, and former head bartender Ray Sakover runs Paradise Lost. Golden Age Hospitality is opening Le Petit Journal in Paris in two phases, in partnership with Simonez Wolf. The wine bar and café opened earlier this month, and about six months later, a piano bar and lounge will open downstairs, in the same vein as The Nines in New York.

Co-Founder, Chef and Owner | The Bartolotta Restaurants Chef Paul Bartolotta ’s newest restaurant is already hard to book. High Stakes by Bartolotta, a European-inspired steakhouse with Las Vegas flair, opened in downtown Milwaukee in September. In early October, the next table for two was a month out. “It pulls from my years in Las Vegas, my European apprenticeships, the aesthetic of London’s Mayfair, and the Art Deco period,” Bartolotta told Observer. The menu leans hard into luxury, from caviar and langoustines to foie gras crème brûlée. “Milwaukee has surprised me,” he said. “We’re offering more luxury products on one menu than we ever have, and people are embracing them.” The restaurant includes the Peacock Lounge, a cocktail destination serving small plates and drinks. High Stakes by Bartolotta joins eight other Bartolotta restaurants in the Milwaukee area, including the flagship Ristorante Bartolotta dal 1993, Joey Gerard’s and two Mr. B’s steakhouses. At 33, the flagship is having the best financial year in its history, according to Bartolotta. “They say restaurants don’t get tired, owners do,” he said. “Our best work is still ahead of us.” Bartolotta Restaurants co-owns The Commodore with HF Hospitality, which was featured in Wine Enthusiast’s list of the 50 Top New Restaurants in 2025 and received a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence last year. His catering arm became the exclusive caterer for the lakefront event venue Discovery World in 2006, and in October, the group opened Bartolotta’s Bar & Ristoro, a contemporary Italian restaurant at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. “An airport restaurant may be someone’s first or last impression of our restaurant group,” Bartolotta said. The group serves about 17,350 guests a week, according to the company. Chef Bartolotta built the business with his late brother, Joe, starting in 1993, after a career that helped establish Italian cooking at the top of American fine dining. “Joe believed in Milwaukee before I did,” he said. When Bartolotta doubted the city had a market for his cooking, Joe told him Milwaukee was “starving for something better.” He was chef at San Domenico in New York and executive chef and managing partner at Spiaggia in Chicago, then spent a decade at Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare at Wynn Las Vegas before leaving in 2015. He came home at Joe’s request to plan a transition so he could take over the company. Bartolotta won James Beard Awards for Best Chef: Midwest in 1994 and Best Chef: Southwest in 2009, and chefs Scott Conant and Michael White both came up under him. What Bartolotta looked for in them, he said, was palate over technique: “When I teach flavor, I invest my energy in cooks who actually taste what I’m teaching, beyond the mechanics.”

Founder & President | Rockwell Group If you ate in one of this year’s most talked-about new rooms, there’s a good chance David Rockwell and his firm designed it. Rockwell Group drew Simon Kim’s 550 Madison, which opened in April, and Cote at the Venetian in Las Vegas; The Corner Store’s Las Vegas outpost for Tilman Fertitta and Eugene Remm, opening in November at the Cosmopolitan; Hotel Cala in Tampa, where Tao Group runs the restaurants, due in January; Brasserie Boulud across from Lincoln Center; and Bilt’s planned headquarters restaurant in New York. Beyond those, Rockwell designed the Skywalker Grill at the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Osteria Centrale and Mercato Centrale in Grand Central Terminal, a redesign of the W New York–Union Square, Keli in Madrid, and three premium clubs at Northwestern University’s new Ryan Field. His most personal project opened April 18 in Chicago. The Hand & The Eye is a $50 million, 36,000-square-foot magic venue in the 1895 McCormick Mansion, which was the longtime home of Lawry’s The Prime Rib. Backed by entrepreneur Glen Tullman, it operates as both a private members’ club and a ticketed dinner theater, with each room built for close-up magic. Rockwell, who grew up performing magic tricks at children’s birthday parties, called it “a total first for Rockwell Group” in an interview with Wallpaper. His firm now employs 350 people, and this year he also earned a Tony nomination for his set for the Broadway revival of Fallen Angels .

Chef and Owner | Indienne In May, Sujan Sarkar opened Indienne New York in Hudson Yards, a 34-seat version of the Chicago tasting-menu restaurant that earned a Michelin star the year after its 2022 debut. In June, Sarkar put his fast-casual Butter Chicken Social into Shaver Hall, the food hall in the former Lord & Taylor building. It’s the harder business, he told Observer: “My background is in fine dining, so that’s where I’m most comfortable.” In August, he opened Elder, a roughly 100-seat contemporary British-Indian chophouse, downstairs from Indienne in Henry Hall. Elder draws on his years cooking in London, and Indienne on the regions of India he grew up eating and working in. “Both restaurants are very personal to me, but they tell different parts of my story,” Sarkar said. The run came less than a year after Sarkar closed Baar Baar, his East Village restaurant of eight years, when its lease expired in September 2025. Since then, he said, New York has developed “a much greater appetite today for Indian-inspired cuisine, cross-cultural cooking, and restaurants that challenge people’s expectations.” Sarkar now owns 10 restaurants in five cities, including Nadu, which he expanded from Chicago to Phoenix this year. He serves about 6,000 guests a week. His role varies by restaurant (sole chef-owner at some, co-chef or partner at others), and each is backed by its own private investors, though in most, Sarkar said, he is the only operating partner. He is now working to bring them all under one restaurant group. Seven more openings are scheduled by March 2027. They include Indienne in Abu Dhabi in November, at the Galleria on Al Maryah Island with local private investors, where Sarkar sees an opening for progressive Indian fine dining “in a market where I feel it’s still missing.” Also coming are Ayra in Chapel Hill, N.C., new Swadesi cafés in Chicago and New York, Anan in Chicago, Nadu in New York, and the cocktail bar Apas at Henry Hall. Apas was first slated for this summer and is now due in February, a delay Sarkar said lets his team establish Indienne and Elder first. Meanwhile, the space hosts private dining and events. Michelin and Disney+ also brought him to Paris, with Kasama’s Tim Flores and Genie Kwon, to cook a dinner ahead of the final season of The Bear. Sarkar’s kitchens have also produced operators of their own. Vamshi Krishna Adi, who cooked under him at Baar Baar, went on to open ISHQ, now a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and Zamindar’s Clubhouse in Charlotte, N.C. Jaspratap “Jassi” Bindra, from Sarkar’s opening team at ROOH in San Francisco, now runs Texas-based Kahani Social Group. The lesson he passes on to younger chefs is confidence, plus a warning: “If you want to open your own restaurant, make sure you have a good accountant and attorney by your side!”

Co-Founders, Dante Over the past year, Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson grew Dante on both sides of the Atlantic. In October 2025, they opened Dante Aperitivo, an all-day seafood restaurant and aperitivo bar on Bank Street in the West Village. In June, after a year-long residency, they made Dante Mayfair a permanent restaurant and bar in the former Claridge’s Restaurant space in London, Dante’s first location outside the U.S., with interiors Hudson designed with Bryan O’Sullivan Studio. “Claridge’s embodies so much of what we care about: an unwavering focus on the guest experience, elevated simplicity, and a real sense of heritage,” Hudson told Observer. “When we did the pop-up, we realized how much we had in common, right down to sharing many of the same guests from New York.” This September, they brought Dante Elizabeth Street to Nolita with three bars, a wood-fired grill and oven, a private Spritz Garden and a Tokyo-inspired record bar in the basement. The record bar is personal. “My grandfather was a radio broadcaster in Australia for 70 years,” Pride told Observer. “He filled our home with incredible music, great stories (and personalities) from the golden age of rock and roll, and a very particular sense of hospitality.” The husband-and-wife team, who came to New York from Australia, now counts six Dantes: four in New York, one at the Maybourne Beverly Hills and one in London. “Australians are about building a team and working together to achieve their goals,” Pride said. “All levels of hospitality can be elevated, regardless of the price point.” It began in 2015, when they took over Caffe Dante, the Greenwich Village café that had served the neighborhood since 1915, and turned it into an all-day restaurant and cocktail bar. Some longtime locals pushed back. “Nathalie and I worked every shift,” Pride said. “When they met the ‘Australians who ruined Caffe Dante,’ we were able to build a relationship with them.” In 2019, it was named the World’s Best Bar by both The World’s 50 Best Bars and Tales of the Cocktail. Its Negroni Sessions menu and famously fluffy Garibaldi now travel to every new location. The Garibaldi came from testing juicers: they found that a high-speed vegetable juicer whipped enough air into the orange juice to make it light and frothy. “Simple drinks have nowhere to hide,” Pride said.

Co-Founders | Call Mom Hospitality This winter, Med Abrous and Marc Rose take Genghis Cohen , the Fairfax Avenue Chinese restaurant they took over in 2015, to the former Sardinia space at 1801 Purdy Avenue in Miami Beach’s Sunset Harbour, with partner Jason Pomeranc . It will be the first Genghis Cohen they own outside California. “We’ve been looking for the right place to take Genghis Cohen in Miami for the better part of six years,” they told Observer. Abrous and Rose chose Sunset Harbour because, as they put it, “it’s where Miami Beach locals actually live year-round, and regulars are who Genghis has always been built for.” Pomeranc, a part-time Miami Beach resident who has owned hotels there, helped them settle on the neighborhood. Both native New Yorkers, Abrous and Rose took over the restaurant partly to keep East Coast Chinese American cooking within reach in L.A. “Genghis gave us the version we remembered: reliable, approachable, and meant to be shared around a lazy Susan,” they said. The Miami deal follows a forced move at home. After 42 years at 740 N. Fairfax Avenue, Genghis Cohen held its final service there on May 31, 2025, because the property was slated for redevelopment. “L.A. really showed up that night,” they said. The send-off doubled as Abrous’s birthday party, with live music and DJs until late, and the red leather booths and the fish tank made the trip to the new space. Abrous and Rose started delivery from a new space down the street the next day and reopened the dining room in September. Their Los Angeles portfolio also includes La Dolce Vita, the red-sauce Italian room they reopened in 2023; The Spare Room, the gaming parlor and cocktail lounge they opened in 2011; and the café Winsome. Beyond California, they run food and beverage for five venues at Graduate hotels in Seattle and Nashville, including the Mountaineering Club rooftop bar, the White Limozeen rooftop bar and restaurant, and the animatronic karaoke bar Cross-Eyed Critters Watering Hole. “The day we turned on those puppets for the first time was pretty damn strange,” they said. They count AJ Capital, GAW Capital, Related and the Reuben Brothers among the developers and hotel groups that give them a first look at space. Their influence also travels through the bar world. Their annual Ode to the Bowl party , the unofficial kickoff to Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, draws about 1,200 bartenders and operators. “It’s the ultimate icebreaker,” they said. In June, White Limozeen held a tasting event with Chinola at Bar Convent Brooklyn, which drew 5,300 industry professionals.

Chef-Partners | Launchpad Hospitality This year, Jihan Lee turned Launchpad Hospitality’s former West Village bakery into one of the neighborhood’s longest lines. TBD Gimbap, the Korean rice-roll pop-up, ran from mid-March to the end of August, next door to Nami Nori in the old Postcard Bakery space, and it often closed early after selling out. For Lee, the dish is personal: his mother made bulgogi gimbap at 5 a.m. before his taekwondo tournaments and fishing trips. “To me gimbap was never a snack,” he told Observer. “It’s a complete meal someone makes by hand so you can go do something.” The team rolled about 350 a day and usually sold out by 4 p.m. “New restaurants create lines; only the good ones keep them,” Lee said. On August 15, it moved to Citi Field for the New York Mets’ Korean Heritage Night, a game that drew 34,737 fans. There it sold close to 1,000 rolls, and according to Lee, the stadium called it the longest pop-up line it had seen. In October Lee brought it to Taste of Asia in Madison Square Park. The partners now plan to launch the gimbap concept permanently in Manhattan, backed by a new commissary kitchen. The pop-up sits alongside the business that Lee and chef partner Takahiro Sakaeda are best known for: Nami Nori, the open-style temaki bar that opened in the West Village in 2019. They built it around a hand-roll style Sakaeda served at Masa and on Brazil’s temakerias. Within a couple of years, they saw the format copied everywhere, sometimes down to the holders they designed. “We take that as a sign we got something right,” they said. It now has five locations, including Miami’s Design District and, since October 2025, Atlantic Park in Virginia Beach, and serves more than 7,500 covers a week. Pharrell Williams has been an investor and creative advisor since 2024 and is a partner in the Launchpad Hospitality Group. He found Nami Nori when the team catered the launch of his auction house, Joopiter. He brought them to Atlantic Park, his hometown project built around a surf park, and Nami Nori means “surfing” in Japanese. The team caters his events, including Louis Vuitton shows during fashion weeks in New York and Paris. The business grew 40 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to the company. Next up is a 4,300-square-foot Nami Nori in the Nora District of West Palm Beach, expected in the first half of 2027. Before then, the partners paused to bring in a CEO and write Launchpad’s first five-year strategic plan. “We knew the next five restaurants couldn’t be built the way the first five were, on pure energy, guts and late nights,” they said. To lead the growth, the partners hired Launchpad’s first COO, Ryan Suh, in May. Suh comes from Blue Bottle Coffee, where he was growth director for North America before leading the company’s expansion into Korea.

Founder | Parcelle Holdings Restaurateur Grant Reynolds , founder of Parcelle Holdings, consults for airlines, airport lounges and other restaurant groups. He curates the wine for JetBlue’s Mint cabins and Chase’s airport lounges, and has worked with venues and events including the U.S. Open, Formula 1, Cannes Lions and the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. His flagship, Parcelle, grew from an e-commerce wine shop launched in 2019 into a New York wine bar and restaurant that debuted in Chinatown in 2020. It was followed by Chinese concept Tolo in 2023, Japanese concept Mitsuru in 2024 and Korean concept Sunn’s in 2025. He has since sold Parcelle’s Greenwich Village location, which opened in 2024. His reach now runs well beyond the rooms he opened. Reynolds is co-founder and CEO of Penelope Hospitality Services, a management services company that works with Kent Hospitality Group to operate the 70 Pine restaurants: Saga, Crown Shy and Overstory. He’s the founder of Rider, a digital platform for the luxury economy’s top guests, and is chairman of the online wine auction platform WineBid. He has also collaborated to build wine lists with restaurants such as Momofuku, Una Pizza Napoletana, Lucali and Graciela, and is an investor in the sandwich shop Counter Service. Now Reynolds is branching out again, with four new locations and two businesses planned for the next 12 months. They include a private-dining concept in New York; several concepts at 80 Clarkson in 2027; and a music-driven, membership concept in New York City in 2027.

Co-Founders | Good Time Hospitality Childhood best friends David JoonWoo Yun and Steve JaeWoo Choi formalized their success this year, founding Good Time Hospitality in early 2026 as the umbrella group for three Manhattan restaurants created with Yong Min Kim . The friendship began at their Korean church in Atlanta, followed by an afternoon at Choi’s house eating Costco pizza and playing video games on a Windows XP computer. They are C as in Charlie, the Michelin Bib Gourmand-recognized Korean-Southern tapas restaurant that opened in NoHo in 2022; Kisa, a Korean diner on the Lower East Side and a 2025 James Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant; and buzzy newcomer Good Time Country Buffet, which opened in September. Throughout this expansion, they have drawn on different elements of their upbringing as Korean immigrants in Atlanta, offering takes on Korean dishes made with Southern ingredients. The buffet is the most personal of the three. “Growing up, country buffets felt like the most American thing to us,” the trio told Observer. “After our families immigrated to Atlanta, walking into one felt like entering an amusement park.” Many of those buffets were run by Korean immigrant families, and Yun’s father supplied food to them. Yun rode along on deliveries in high school and rejoined his father for shifts as research for the restaurant. Their fans include Zohran Mamdani, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joe Jonas, Jennifer Lawrence and Steven Yeun. Good Time Country Buffet’s first reservation release, 15 days out, was fully booked in 30 minutes, and about 400 names sit on its notification list. Reddit is full of advice on how to get in. Kisa, which opened in April 2024, drew lines two avenues long and three- to four-hour waits, and on its busiest night served 280 dinner guests in 36 seats. The partners say its platter format has since been imitated in Los Angeles, Flushing, Canada, Australia and Korea. They take it as a compliment. “Drivers’ restaurants aren’t something we invented,” they said. “To us, influence means helping people see new possibilities in something they might otherwise have overlooked.” This year, for the first time, they branched out into their own branded soju, Mannam, made in partnership with Wangjike Distillery on Jeju Island, South Korea, where Choi’s parents now live.

CEO & President | Crew In September, Alex and Miles Pincus opened Holywater on Conti Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter, in a 19th-century maritime chandlery. It’s the second location of their Tribeca oyster and cocktail bar, and their first restaurant under their own name in the city where they grew up, where they created and ran Seaworthy at the Barnett for three years, now licensing it and consulting on operations. Their father ran a hotel and restaurant in the French Quarter in the 1980s, when, Alex Pincus said, hospitality there was vibrant “with a hint of debauchery in the air.” Alex Harrell runs the Holywater kitchen, and Neal Bodenheimer directs the beverage program. Holywater New Orleans was one of three venues the brothers added in 2026. In March, they took over Montero Bar & Grill, the Brooklyn Heights sailors’ bar Joseph and Pilar Montero founded in 1939, buying the bar and, reportedly, its building for about $4.5 million. They promised the founders’ son, Pepe Montero, they would keep the bar’s look and feel, and what Alex Pincus calls its “welcoming, democratic, and mischievous spirit.” In June, they launched Fireboat, a Caribbean bar aboard the Governor Alfred E. Smith, a fireboat built in Camden, N.J., in 1961 that served the FDNY for more than 50 years. The brothers bought her at auction in 2016 and spent nearly a decade restoring her, stripping her to the steel and rebuilding her bronze fire-hose pumps to pour beer and wine. She is docked at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 6. The model started with Grand Banks, which the brothers opened in 2014 aboard the Sherman Zwicker, a 142-foot wooden schooner at Tribeca’s Pier 25. Building a new vessel to run as a restaurant would cost “millions upon millions,” Alex Pincus said. Instead, the brothers restore boats that would otherwise be abandoned. Four of their New York venues sit on public waterfront leased from Hudson River Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the brothers now draw about 7,500 guests a week, according to the company. Their alumni run rooms of their own: Rita Puskas owns The Palace in Greenpoint, and Lauren Schell runs Saint Tuesday.

Entrepreneur | Joint Seafood Liwei Liao supplies dry-aged fish to more than 70 restaurants in Los Angeles and beyond, including Kato, Restaurant Ki, Damian and Yang’s Kitchen, from Joint Seafood, which he founded in 2018 and which the company said is the world’s largest dry-aged fish facility. In April, Liao opened Joint Seafood’s downtown flagship , a 4,000-square-foot space that quadrupled the company’s dry-aged fish output. With a new warehouse expected to open in 2027, he expects to triple that output next year. After 10 percent revenue growth from 2024 to 2025, the company projects $9 million in revenue for 2027, a 50 percent increase over 2025’s $6 million. The new flagship is also home to the downtown location of Uoichiba temaki bar and The Butcher’s Counter . There is also Uoichiba at the original Sherman Oaks Joint Seafood. The original Uoichiba previously operated in Culver City. The Butcher’s Counter offers a single 7 p.m. tasting for eight guests on weekends, at $250 per person, and hosts private parties of up to eight on select days for $2,240. Liao also serves as a brand ambassador for Ōra King salmon, Balfegó and Loch Duart salmon. On May 20, he and Joint Seafood collaborated with Mume, a one-Michelin-star restaurant in Taiwan, on a one-night, five-course menu built around Joint Seafood’s dry-aged fish. In July, Liao hosted a one-night dry-aged omakase dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Cut Beverly Hills, cutting fish tableside alongside Cut executive chef Drew Rosenberg for $450 per person. This September, he was featured in Mastercard’s International Dreamonomics Report, part of a campaign focused on small businesses.

Co-Founder | Sixty Hotels Jason Pomeranc’s hotels have become launchpads for other people’s restaurants. “Our restaurants and bars are the local face of our hotels,” Pomeranc told Observer. “They give each property its personality, both for our guests and for neighbors who may never see a room.” In March, Carver Road Hospitality brought Carversteak, its Las Vegas steakhouse, to New York, the brand’s first expansion beyond the Strip. The 124-seat, Rockwell-designed room sits in Pomeranc’s Civilian hotel in the Theater District, where Carver Road already operates Rosevale Cocktail Room and the Starchild rooftop. “What appealed to me about Carver was its modern approach and a bit of Las Vegas flair that feels right at home in the Theater District,” he said. In September, Malka, Israeli chef Eyal Shani’s kosher restaurant, already open in Tel Aviv, New York and Florida, opened at Sixty Beverly Hills. Pomeranc still remembers his first meal at a Shani restaurant in Tel Aviv: “It was a revelation, not just a meal.” This winter, Pomeranc is partnering with Med Abrous and Marc Rose to take Genghis Cohen from Los Angeles to Miami Beach in a deal that doesn’t involve a hotel. “We plan to grow this to multiple locations,” he said. Pomeranc learned the business at Thompson Hotels , which he co-founded with his brothers, Michael and Lawrence, with the 2001 opening of 60 Thompson in SoHo. Their father, Jack, who came to the U.S. in 1952 with a fourth-grade education, wasn’t involved day to day, but he shaped how they worked. “He always taught us never to be intimidated, to trust our instincts and to challenge convention,” Pomeranc said. That instinct once cost him a celebrated partner. He was deep in negotiations with a Michelin-starred chef and a prolific downtown restaurateur on a hotel restaurant when breakfast became the sticking point: the chef didn’t cook eggs. “But we were a hotel, after all, and eggs are kind of our thing,” Pomeranc said. “We walked away over the eggs.” The chef opened the restaurant elsewhere, went on to win nearly every major culinary award and still serves no eggs. Pomeranc launched Sixty Hotels under his Sixty Collective in 2014.

Owners | Scratch Restaurants Margarita Kallas-Lee and Phillip Frankland Lee expanded Scratch Restaurants rapidly over the past year. In Austin, Texas, the co-owners opened Big Slick, a boutique steakhouse; Shokunin, a sushi bar; and Frank and Margie’s, an Italian-American neighborhood restaurant. They also added new locations of Sushi by Scratch and NADC Burger on both coasts. Big Slick is booked through November, with 3,000 names on its waitlist. The husband-and-wife owners reported a 25 percent increase in revenue from 2024 to 2025, to $40 million, and project another 25 percent or more in 2026, to $50 million to $55 million. They have grown without outside investors, and Frankland Lee sees that as a trade-off. “We could probably be 10X what we are now if we raised proper money,” he told Observer. “But then again, we’d have to answer to other people who don’t understand what we’re doing, and for that we may actually be 10X smaller.” They now run more than 30 restaurants, including Sushi by Scratch in 13 cities and 15 NADC Burger locations, which Frankland Lee co-owns with skateboarder Neen Williams, one of his best friends. The two were skating and making burgers together for fun years before NADC became a business. Each Sushi by Scratch is built to suit its city: in Montecito, the counter sits behind big glass windows near the beach, and in Chicago, it’s underground beneath an NADC Burger in a Prohibition-era speakeasy. NADC’s 800-square-foot shop on Austin’s Sixth Street does about $3 million a year. Kallas-Lee has created every dessert across the group’s concepts since 2012, and she also runs its branding, marketing and social media. “I’ve barely gotten any credit, and most of the time people don’t mention that this group is half-owned by me, no matter how many times Phillip or I say it,” she said. Across their locations, Scratch Restaurants serves A-list guests like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher and Joe Rogan. Frankland Lee made Michelin Guide history with his brother Lennon Silvers Lee when, for the first time in the U.S., two brothers at two separate restaurants were awarded Michelin stars at the same time. He and Kallas-Lee also run pop-ups at events and venues including Coachella, Formula 1 in Austin and Las Vegas, and the Four Seasons Hualalai in Hawaii. Over the next 12 months, they plan to open about 10 more restaurants, including Sushi by Scratch in La Jolla, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Nashville, and NADC Burger in Philadelphia and San Marcos. In 2027 comes The Inn at Crumley Ranch Road on a property just outside of Austin, Texas that will be home to a seven-bedroom bed-and-breakfast and tasting-menu restaurant on a four-acre farm they’ve spent four years building, where they’re openly aiming for three Michelin stars. “If you’re going to aim for anything, why not aim big? And if you’re going to aim big, why not aim the biggest?” Frankland Lee said. Still, he added, he’d trade those stars “in a heartbeat for a sold-out establishment with people enjoying their time with us.”

Co-Founders | Pappas Restaurants Since 1970, Chris and Harris Pappas have built Pappas Restaurants into one of the largest independently owned restaurant groups in America, with more than 80 locations across eight states under brands including Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen (a favorite of Beyoncé’s), Pappasito’s Cantina and Pappas Bros. Steakhouse. When they opened their first seafood restaurant, their father asked why they didn’t put their own name on it. “The lesson behind it was pretty clear: once you put your family name on the door, you have to stand behind what happens inside,” Chris told Observer. The range runs from a 24-hour diner to Pappas Bros. “We can cook pancakes and prime bone-in ribeye,” Harris said. Their real estate instincts aren’t always conventional. Facing a best-and-final bidding war with a rival they knew, the brothers agreed to settle it with a coin toss, which they won. They paid the other bidder to step aside, and the site now holds three of their restaurants. “Not a bad outcome for a coin toss,” Chris said. In 2025, they bought On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina out of bankruptcy. This June, after a year spent trying to stabilize the Tex-Mex chain, they closed all of its roughly 30 company-owned restaurants and kept its franchised locations open. Chris and Harris have continued the family’s legacy while using their restaurants as a platform to strengthen the communities they serve. Most recently, Pappas Restaurants launched Pappas Restaurant Weeks, a company-wide initiative spanning 10 concepts and multiple markets that raised $1 million for food banks and hunger-relief organizations across the country. The next generation is building its own restaurants: Chris’s daughter, Victoria Pappas Bludorn (who worked for Pappas Burger for years while in high school), co-founded Houston’s Bludorn Hospitality Group with her husband, chef Aaron Bludorn, and Cherif Mbodji. “They are building a fine restaurant group that would hold up to any critic,” Chris said. That commitment to community is also reflected in how they build their team. Pappas Restaurants employs more than 200 in-house service staff, including electricians, truck drivers and equipment repair specialists, prioritizing local employment over outsourcing. “When the a/c goes out in August in Texas, there isn’t time to wait for a third-party crew to come to the rescue,” Harris said. The company has an average employee tenure of 5.4 years, with many team members celebrating 20, 30 or nearly 40 years with the organization. Eighty percent of leadership roles are filled by people who began in hourly positions. Mike Rizzo, now CEO of Pappas Restaurants, started as a college waiter in the 1990s, looking for extra cash to take his girlfriend on dates; he later married her.

CEO & Owner | Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors Pat LaFrieda supplies more than 3,000 restaurant and hospitality customers, including Shake Shack and Minetta Tavern, from two family-owned facilities in North Bergen, N.J. When he moved his main facility to New Jersey, he said, he turned down state development incentives rather than replace his New York staff, many of whom later moved to New Jersey anyway. In 2025, he booked more than $300 million in revenue, up 10 percent, according to the company. LaFrieda reinvests profits in equipment, including auto-stop bandsaws that cost 10 times as much as standard ones. In September, LaFrieda made his first full-scale push into the Southeast through a distribution partnership with Atlanta-based Inland Foods, which now sells a curated LaFrieda beef collection to restaurants, independent markets, butcher shops and specialty retailers across the region. “You get the product into their kitchen and let them work with it,” LaFrieda told Observer. “Then we have to earn the next order, the same way we did in New York.” The brand also travels under its own name. Pat LaFrieda’s Chop House has operated at Citi Field since 2013, alongside LaFrieda concessions at Madison Square Garden, Smash by Pat LaFrieda at the Prudential Center in Newark and Pat & Stuggs at Camden Yards in Baltimore. At this June’s U.S. Open golf championship at Shinnecock Hills in Southampton, N.Y., concessionaire Aramark built signature items around LaFrieda pastrami and sausage. At the U.S. Open tennis tournament, LaFrieda returned with his own stands, and his Prime 850 prime rib went into the French dip at first-year vendor Salt Hank’s. LaFrieda landed his first self-cultivated customer, Joe Bastianich, when Bastianich’s purveyor raised the price of veal osso buco, a cut that was hard to get at the time. LaFrieda specialized in veal. “I was there at the right time with the right product,” he said.

CEO | Carnegie Deli Brand On September 15, Sarri Harper brought Carnegie Deli back to Seventh Avenue, nearly a decade after the original closed. The new restaurant, a 2,500-square-foot, roughly 110-seat room at 834 Seventh Avenue, sits in the space that once housed the Stage Deli, its old rival in New York’s pastrami wars. “You really couldn’t write a better New York story,” Harper told Observer. “My grandfather would have gotten a tremendous kick out of that.” It takes walk-ins only and drew lines down Seventh Avenue through its opening week, according to the company. The towering sandwiches and cheesecake are back, despite today’s meat prices. “Nobody comes to Carnegie Deli expecting a small sandwich, and I’m certainly not going to be the one to change that,” she said. So is the Wall of Fame, rehung with its original photographs and frames. The first new face she’d add is the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson. Harper, the third generation of her family to run the deli and the granddaughter of Milton Parker, who took it over in 1976, kept the brand alive while it had no permanent Manhattan home. Her earliest memory of the deli is sitting at a table with her feet not yet reaching the floor, ordering matzo ball soup and, as her entrée, macaroni salad. Parker’s lesson stuck. “Don’t cut corners,” she said. “Make the food great, make the portions bigger than anyone expects, and people will come back.” Carnegie Deli has run concession stands at Madison Square Garden since 2011, appears seasonally at the U.S. Open, Saratoga Race Course and the Belmont Stakes, and ships nationwide. Over the past year, Harper put a pre-sliced pastrami and corned beef combo pack into Costco stores in the Northeast and staged collaborations with Serendipity3, Temple Bar and Black Tap. The deli, founded in 1937, turns 90 next year.

Founders & Restaurateurs | Blau & Associates Renowned Las Vegas restaurateur Elizabeth Blau and chef Kim Canteenwalla spent 2026 honing their strengths while turning their vision further afield. Canteenwalla is expanding his international restaurant portfolio with new concepts at the highly anticipated Wynn Al Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, and Blau has consulted on Saudi Arabia’s emerging culinary scene, much as she did for Las Vegas over the past 30 years. The lesson they’re taking to the Gulf is a simple one. “Great service and creating extraordinary experiences are the things A.I. isn’t going to replace,” they tell Observer. Blau and Canteenwalla operate six restaurants, with more than 12,000 covers a week. They own Honey Salt in Las Vegas and run the others as managing or operating partners. The married couple says their very different palates are an advantage, letting them appeal to a broader range of diners. Crown Block, atop Dallas’s Reunion Tower, has been Michelin-recommended three years running and books about two weeks out for prime tables. In April, Blau hosted the second Women in Hospitality Leadership Conference at Wynn Las Vegas, the annual event of her nonprofit, the Women’s Hospitality Initiative, which encompasses education, mentorship, networking and industry programming. In November, she will be inducted into her alma mater Cornell University’s Hotelie Hall of Fame. Meanwhile, Canteenwalla worked with Carver Road CEO Sean Christie to open Carversteak NYC this spring, bringing the Las Vegas meatery to New York’s Theater District for the restaurant’s first national expansion. Drawing on his work at Crown Block, Canteenwalla said his advice as a consultant was to keep the steakhouse basics and the Las Vegas flair, but to give it “a little New York personality of its own.”

Executive Chairman | Hudson Yards Experiences Andrew Lustgarten spent 2026 turning Edge, the 100th-floor skydeck atop 30 Hudson Yards, from an observation deck into an all-night destination. “The headline might sell the ticket, but everything around it determines whether they come back: the welcome, the service, the energy, how easy you make the evening,” he told Observer. This summer he unveiled a multimillion-dollar overhaul that added seven permanent, all-weather immersive installations, including the city’s largest working kaleidoscope and the 23-foot Crystal Cave, and opened the Skyline Bar & Café. Tickets run from $42 for general admission to $88 for priority access. Above the Edge observation deck, Lustgarten and his operating partner, Tao Group Hospitality, opened three venues in quick succession: Marquee Skydeck on May 1, Peak with Priceless on May 29 and Avenue Sky Lounge on June 11. “New York nightlife should still be capable of surprising you,” Lustgarten said. “There’s something extraordinary about hearing a great DJ while the entire city is lit up around you.” The hardest part, he said, was the operating plan: closing Edge early enough to set up, moving guests up and down, managing sound, being a good neighbor, planning for weather and making the shift from daytime attraction to nighttime venue feel seamless. “Every detail takes more coordination at that height,” he said. “The guest should feel the excitement; our teams have to solve the complexity.” Marquee Skydeck has 40-plus performances scheduled this year, including sold-out shows from Diplo, Benny Benassi, Vintage Culture and Cassian, and Avenue Sky Lounge’s launch drew Kourtney Kardashian, Travis Barker, French Montana and Draymond Green. A partnership with Mastercard gives cardholders priority reservations at Peak with Priceless, VIP tickets to select Marquee Skydeck shows and priority entry and a complimentary glass at Edge. “It gives us more ways to make someone feel personally invited,” Lustgarten said. Edge has also become a stage: in 2026 it hosted a FIFA World Cup Trophy photo shoot, a press event for the cast of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and U.S. Open watch parties. Next is a 12-minute Post-Sunset Light Show across the installations each evening. For the winter, Lustgarten and Tao have launched 100 Above, a nightlife series that picks up where Marquee Skydeck’s summer season leaves off. “If someone comes for the view and returns because they had an incredible night, we’ve accomplished something,” he said. Lustgarten knows his operating partner well. As president of MSG Entertainment, he led its 2017 acquisition of a controlling stake in Tao, which MSG sold in 2023. He later ran Madison Square Garden Sports as president and CEO. “MSG taught me to focus on delivering a great guest experience,” he said. “Like all good entertainment experiences, this starts at entry and doesn’t stop until the guest exits.”

CEO & Co-Founder | Infinite Machines Chris Webb spent 13 years building ChowNow around a single argument: restaurants shouldn’t hand 20 to 40 percent of every delivery order to the apps. Webb credits his love of restaurants to the late chef Patrick Clark’s short-lived Los Angeles restaurant in the early ’90s. Webb, a childhood friend of Clark’s son Preston, ate there and got his first look at fine dining. “It opened my eyes to what food could be,” Webb told Observer. His commission-free ordering platform signed up more than 20,000 independent restaurants and processed more than 400 million orders. “This has saved restaurants billions of dollars in commissions over the years,” Webb said. “Which is something I’m proud of and feel we got right.” Webb’s regret is that ChowNow put so much into serving restaurants that it underinvested in diners. “We focused so much on our restaurant clients that we did not spend enough time considering the consumer and their needs,” he said. After stepping away from ChowNow, Webb took a year off. He moved to London, traveled Europe with his family, played golf and ran the London Marathon. “I knew I was ready to start again when creative ideas started zooming around in my head,” he said. He co-founded Infinite Machines this year, backed by Wonder Ventures and Bonfire Ventures. “Infinite Machines lets business owners build whatever software they want and need for their business,” Webb explained, adding that it is only possible because of recent advances in A.I. Restaurant operators, in his view, “often overpay” for software, and the first one he wants on the platform is his sister’s coffee shop. Of his investors, he said, “You cannot overestimate trust.”

Chef & Owner | Virtue Hospitality Group Erick Williams is building his next restaurant around a chef he trained. In July, Williams and Damarr Brown, Virtue’s chef de cuisine, announced plans for a new restaurant at 219 N. Elizabeth Street in Fulton Market, set to open in 2027. Brown came up in Williams’s kitchen. Food & Wine named him one of its Best New Chefs in 2022, and he won the James Beard Award for Emerging Chef in 2023. It’s the latest step for a group Williams started with Virtue, which he opened in Hyde Park in November 2018. Its first menus drew on the food of the Great Migration, and in 2022 the restaurant made Williams the first Black chef to win the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes. He has since added Daisy’s Po-Boy & Tavern, a New Orleans-style po’boy shop, and, in November 2024, Cantina Rosa, his first bar, devoted to agave cocktails. Williams’s influence runs through the people he’s trained. He founded the Virtue Leadership Development program, a nonprofit incubator that teaches young adults of color entrepreneurial and leadership skills through hands-on restaurant work. He also counts chefs Dave Beran and Jenner Tomaska among those who came up under him earlier in his career.

Источник: Observer