Boston Globe
October 2, 2003

The Big Night
A summer of sweat gives rise to a new South End restaurant

By Betsy Block, Globe Correspondent This summer, cameras captured the tortured opening of a New York City restaurant by chef Rocco DiSpirito. The show, aptly called "The Restaurant," was rife with made-for-TV contrivances: a poorly trained (albeit photogenic) wait staff mugging for the cameras; an egomaniacal and perfectly tousled chef; an absurd timeline for opening (seven weeks, which included locating and renovating a site).

Here in Boston, a team of restaurateurs was busy with an opening of its own. The Aquitaine Group, comprising Seth Woods, Jeffrey Gates, and Matt Burns, started planning a restaurant on Washington Street in the South End a year and a half ago.

"Seth's always ready to do something new. Matt had to be convinced," says Gates, who recently joined their ranks as a part-owner. With scores of new luxury condominiums going up on once-quite Washington Street, the location is "up and coming," Woods says.

Despite the absence of network cameras, the Aquitaine Group experienced plenty of drama in the months leading up to their latest debut. In fact, this article was originally scheduled to run in mid-August, while the show was still airing on NBC.

But the doors remained shut until just yesterday, when Union Bar and Grille finally opened for business. Even under the best circumstances, opening a restaurant is not for wimps.

At the end of July, Union Bar and Grille is still a dusty, sweltering construction site, full of bags of cement, stacks of wood, and not much else. Originally slated to start serving up contemporary American food than three weeks from today, construction delays have resulted in a pushed-back opening date of early September. The rooms that ostensibly will become a beehive of commerce in a couple of months are full of possibility today, but not much else. For the moment, Union is more of a seedling than a plant.

The three men responsible for this mess on Washington Street, Woods and his partners, Gates and Burns, aren't fazed at all (Woods, obviously an optimist, is leaving soon for a two-week vacation with his family). The partners bring, collectively, five decades of experience in the restaurant industry. They're players, and running restaurants is their game.

In a way, the concept for Union took root more than three decades ago, when Woods asked for a lobster meal instead of presents for his fourth birthday. Woods, now 35, along with his partners, owns and manages Aquitaine bistro and Metropolis Cafe on Tremont Street, Aquitaine Bis in Chestnut Hill, and Armani Cafe on Newbury Street. Union may not look like much at the moment, but that's the way it is with new restaurants. Delays are almost expected, and snafus are a daily special.

They know that owning a restaurant requires a director's view of the big picture, a fashionista's understanding of what styles endure, and a comedian's humor and timing. Restaurateurs also need a psychologist's understanding of people and an obsessive attention to detail, and you begin to see what it takes to own one. Restaurants depend on huge teams to get them going and keep them running - architects and designers, wine dealers and food purveyors, electricians and plumbers, not to mention the staff in the front of the house and the kitchen. If any one element falters, things can fall apart fast.

Even restaurants run by experienced professionals endure crises, especially in the beginning. That's why some restaurant reviewers and diners in the know tend to stay away those first few weeks when service glitches and menu failures still have to be smoothed out. Opening when you're not quite ready "has happened to all of us, believe me," Gates says. "You just can't let the customers know that."

Of course, the unexpected can still crop up after that: say, when a cook shows up to work drunk, the heat goes off on a bitter winter day at lunch time, or the chef quits in the middle of Saturday night service (all of which have happened in Boston-area restaurants, along with kitchen fires and personal injuries of all sorts). Peter Christie, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, cites a study of his group's restaurants that found that at the end of five years, two-thirds were either no longer in business or had changed hands.

Two weeks have gone by and some progress has been made, but Union is still a shell. The opening has been pushed back to Sept. 22. "Reality happened," says Gates with a laugh. Still, September is a date they can live with. Independent restaurants almost never open on schedule, and Christie cites a host of reasons, but the biggest by far is the bureaucracy that restaurateurs must navigate in order to acquire liquor, building, and occupancy permits.

However, says Gates, while delays may be common, they have no bearing on a restaurant's fate. He should know - at 42, Gates has worked in the industry for 23 years, running the front of the house at such respected Boston institutions as Davio's and Mistral, and helping open five restaurants (Union is his sixth). He says that what determines a restaurant's eventual success is whether it has what he calls a "story." The story for Metropolis Cafe is "cozy Italian trattoria"; for the two Aquitaines, it's "French bistro." Gates, Woods, and Burns strive for that elusive balance between trendy and timeless by serving uncomplicated food at reasonable prices.

This is what Woods set out to do when he first opened Metropolis Cafe in the mid-'90s. At all Aquitaine Group locations, the food is consistently good; at Metropolis, the low prices - appetizers are priced under $10 and entrees under $20 - come as a pleasant shock. As for the Armani Cafe, the Aquitaine Group has been lauded for improving the service and food since they took it over a year and a half ago.

Success may have come at a price for Woods: former and even current employees say he can be hot-tempered, overly critical, and a penny-pincher (all
spoke on condition of anonymity.)

"When you're the CEO, you can't always be the nice guy," Woods says. the way he sees it, he has worked hard to make his way up the ladder, one time literally falling asleep on a staircase because he was so exhausted from work. Now he's proud to be the head of a corporation, not a "toiling chef."

Burns, 33, who worked at Friendly's in his high school days, was general manager of the Armani cafe before joining Woods's management team. He
learned Spanish to communicate better with the kitchen staff, but Gates is the one that seems most respected by the rank and file.

It's not surprising that a group of 200 employees turns up a handful who complain about the bosses. Perhaps, as their longtime publicist Chris Haynes suggests, some of their worst critics are merely jealous.

Gabriel Frasca, who worked as a line cook at Metropolis and the chef at Aquitaine Bis, says Woods and Burns are "extremely good at what they do, and
they're very good to the people who are on their side. Seth is a classic driven guy, wonderfully obsessive. And Matt has a certain amount of finesse that Seth doesn't have.

"They do watch every nickel and dime, but the profit in restaurants is in nickels and dimes. Nickel-and-diming is practically a compliment."

Gates is standing in front of a crowd crowd of about 20 waiters, talking about wine on this mid-September morning. At the edge of the unfinished dining room, Dan Michaud of Ruby Wines, a wine and liquor importer, talks to the servers. At times it's hard to hear him over the buzz saws and banging hammers; as Michaud speaks, clouds of dust waft up from the sidewalk, dirtying the windows. The dining room still lacks a floor, tables and banquettes are strewn about the room. But the bones are here. Things are shaping up. Nearly three weeks of training, originally scheduled for mid-August, started two days ago. During this time, Gates will cover everything from phone etiquette to computer systems to wine education. If all goes as planned, "hopefully it won't be like a brand-new restaurant," Woods says later with a laugh.

Today, training gets heady when the discussion turns to Prohibition's effect on the history of wine consumption in the United States. How does this rather intellectual discussion relate to the job at hand - namely, training waiters? Gates says the wait staff needs to understand such details so they can become ambassadors of the Union story: an American bistro with an American wine list. Strangely, as he talks about the unpleasantness of phylloxera (a root louse that destroyed three million acres of European vineyards in the 1800s), Gates's enthusiasm is infectious. A number of staffers say that the opportunity to work with Gates is what has drawn them to Union. "He's an amazing manager," says server Bernadette Lord, who has worked with him before. "He was recommended to me by a friend," adds Julia Hodges, who hasn't.

The three owners are getting excited as the finish line comes into view. "Boston loves chef/owners," Woods had said earlier this summer, though he added, "I'm much more of a businessman than a chef now." These days, his chefs de cuisine are the ones literally stirring the pots at his five restaurants. Woods, a 1989 graduate of the esteemed Culinary Institute of America, was named a rising star chef in 1996 by the James Beard Foundation. He maintains creative control over all his menus; his straightforward food philosophy shines through in all his restaurants, where clean, classic flavors reign. Not even his detractors dispute Woods's cooking skills or his ability to hire talented chefs.

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