Allan Stillman

Restaurateur

By Dan Rattiner

Ordinarily when I interview somebody interesting for these “Who’s Here” columns, I find that who I am talking to has had ups and downs, moments of inspiration and decision, a few dead ends and then, finally success in some way or another that has made me think they were interesting enough for a Who’s Here in Dan’s Papers.

Alan Stillman is another matter. He is an ordinary Joe, Brooklyn born and raised with what seemed to me no particularly unstoppable drive. And yet, from rather middle class beginnings in Brooklyn, he made a few decisions here and there, absolutely all of which worked out beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. All together in his life, I guess it is fair in his life, these decisions totaled five. Not very many actually. But here he is, a man in his late sixties who looks in his late fifties, and who, in spite of himself, has just about everything a man could want. All of which fell into his lap before he was forty years old.

Alan Stillman is today one of the most successful restaurateurs in the City of New York. And he told me all about his life while we sat on the beachfront deck of a grand twenty-four acre estate in Sagaponack, something he’s owned since 1977. It is worth today fifty times what he paid for it, I believe. In 1977, that was decision number three.

He pours me a drink from a bottle of Rose. I happen to know that he knows his wines. He founded the steakhouse chain Smith & Wollensky. (Number 4.) He founded Park Avenue Café in Manhattan, which his publicly traded company owns today. That was decision number 5. None of these decisions turned out to be wrong.

Alan is a jolly man with a sunburned face, a moustache and an avuncular air about him. He talks plainly, even with some surprise, about his good fortune. Even he can see this is sort of an upscale version of what happened to Forrest Gump.

“I was born and raised in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, the son of a CPA who had a small accounting firm in Wall Street. He did audits. He did taxes. I had a perfectly normal upbringing. And after high school, I went off to Bucknell where I majored in girls and minored in business. I was thinking I might want to be a CPA too.”

“Any idea while in high school you might be something other than what you wound up to be?”

“No. But at Bucknell in my freshman year I played on the freshman basketball team if that helps.”

Stillman is about five feet ten. But basketball played shorter back then.

“After high school, I worked for my father for a year in his Manhattan office, but I came to realize I didn’t want to be an accountant. But I had had an education about business. So after a year, and with his blessing, I got a job as a salesman for a Brooklyn chemical firm called Felton that manufactured essential oils. You might not even know what essential oils are. But I can tell you they were made by chemists, and they consisted of perfumes and flavors that were needed in the cosmetics and candy business. So I made the rounds. And I got an apartment in Manhattan with three other guys.”

“What was your biggest sale?” I asked.

“250 drums of raspberry.”

“Not bad.”

“Well, it was not that good. My roommates were all working on Wall Street making three times what I was making. But it was a job. And then, around 1964, a very interesting thing happened.”

Stillman’s shared apartment was in a building on 63rd Street between First and York. Every day he would take the subway home from his job in Brooklyn, and he’d stop at bar at the corner of First and York. He didn’t particularly like the bar, which was called the Good Tavern. It was kind of dirty and dark, with a bullet hole in the front window. But it was on his way home.

One day, Stillman spoke to the bartender, who turned out to be the owner.

“You know, why don’t you put some Tiffany Lamps all around and some sawdust on the floor, and make it inviting for some of the young people who live around here,” he said. “We really don’t have a place to go. And there are a lot of us.”

At that particular time, this particular part of Manhattan was middle of the road and nondescript, but affordable for the pocketbooks of young singles, stewardesses, pilots and aspiring models. The owner of the Good Tavern gave Stillman an odd answer.

“I don’t know,” he said, surveying his empty barstools and booths. “Why don’t YOU do it? For $5,000 I’d sell you the place.”

Thus was Stillman’s first decision made. He hastens to explain how luck played such a major role in what happened next, which was the founding of the singles bar. Undisputedly, this whole dimension of our lives was the first singular achievement of Alan Stillman. And decision #1.

“1964 was the year that the Pill came on the market. Suddenly girls were as interested in sex as the boys were. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I just wanted to meet girls, and I figured if I had my own place, that would do it.”

Alan borrowed $5,000 from his mother. And he used $5,000, his life savings that he had in the bank. The first $5,000 paid for the place. The second $5,000 was used to fix it up.

“I knew a lot of young single people in the neighborhood,” Alan said. “I gave them all paintbrushes. We painted the outside of the building blue.”

“And?”

“And I decided on a name. TGIF. Thank God It’s Friday.”

Think of the sitcom “Cheers.” Think of anything you want. Before TGIF, which quickly bloomed into a half dozen bars in Manhattan and then went national, there was no bar especially for young people. Even fast food was not around in 1964. TGIF was the first singles bar in America.

“What did you serve?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Twenty different kinds of hamburgers. Mixed drinks. And beer. Sunday mornings was Sunday Brunch for $5.95 with all the champagne you could drink. And that was it. I never owned a restaurant before. But I was there every day. And I found it was a joy. Never had any problem setting up or running a restaurant. It was not complicated.”

Decision #2 was in the form of a person who walked by TGIF one day in 1969 on the arm of a friend of Alan Stillman.

“Here I was with a singles bar, and I meet my future wife out front.”

He walked outside and talked to his friend. And then later that day and called him up and said if he ever stopped dating this girl, Donna, please let him know.

Alan Stillman courted his future wife on weekends in the Hamptons in the late 1960s. He rented houses in and around Amagansett, and was part of the big singles scene that had blossomed in that town by that time, which was the early 1970s. Although he was attached by then. And he loved it here.

“I’d work until 3 a.m. on Saturday night, and then drive out to Amagansett and sleep from 5 a.m. to 10.”

The Stillmans rented Cliff Klenk’s boathouse in Georgica. They rented oceanfront in Napeague.

Then came 1976, a seminal year for Alan and Donna Stillman.

“The country had gone into a recession,” he said. “But we were still expanding. We opened in Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, and with a partner, in Dallas and Houston. And we were looking to borrow money to open even more TGIFs. But we were having trouble. Then I ran into an investor named Curt Carlson. He said he wouldn’t lend us any money but he’d buy the whole goddamn chain. And so we sold it to him. Actually it was Carlson who subsequently turned a 10-unit chain into a grandstand homerun. More power to him.”

As for the Stillmans, they decided to buy a house in the Hamptons. They loved it out here. But first they went on an extended vacation for half a year. They lived in the South of France where both of them learned about the wine and food business. Then they came out and began to look for a place in the Hamptons.

“We had some money from the sale of Fridays. We didn’t have a million dollars, but we had enough to believe that with the payout we could afford a million dollars. We had enough for a one hundred thousand dollar payment somewhere.”

Two choices presented themselves. One was a house on Hook Pond in East Hampton owned by the Black family. The other was 24 oceanfront acres in Sagaponack. There were no homes on this property.

“So here is where we bought. And I have to say that for about four years, I was pretty terrified about how we were going to pay for it. The property was divided up into ten lots. I gave the building rights to one of them to the Town. I have five lots. And I sold the four remaining lots to three different people.”

Today there are four different homes on the property.

Back in New York City, Stillman was walking down Third Avenue one day when he noticed the abandoned restaurant which had been up until then known as Manny Wolfe’s. It had had a kitchen fire that had gotten out of control. All that remained was the wooden exterior of this small two-story building. Alongside of it, a big developer was about to start building a skyscraper.

“I made enquiries about this. I found that the little building was for sale at the right price. So I called some friends who had a lot of money and I said you put up a lot of money and I’ll put up a little money and let’s buy it. I think I can make something out of this. I ran a string of burger joints. How about the next step up — a steak house. I could do that.”

Stillman and his investor friends bought the property and began fixing it up. But in the first year they had to fend off offers from the people next door, the Cohen Brothers, who wanted the whole block for the skyscraper. But Stillman said no. They offered him more and he still said no. Finally he told them he had plans for the property, and he wouldn’t sell it no matter what. And so one day they returned with another offer.

“Suppose you sell us the air rights,” they said. “We could build our building four more stories higher if we had your air rights.” And so Stillman sold that to them.

“We can never build up,” he said to me, a twinkle in his eye.

And then came the job of naming the place. Day after day they were inside, working on the remodeling. For a while, they thought they’d call it Bannisters. But it didn’t have much of a ring. Finally, crunch time approached.

“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” Stillman said. He got a Manhattan telephone directory and he opened it. “Wherever my finger lands, that’s what we name it.” Everyone agreed. And he pointed.

He looked down at his finger. It had landed on SMITH. “We can’t call it that,” he said, warily. “I’ll try again.” And the second time the finger pointed to WOLLENSKY.

“So that’s how we got the name Smith & Wollensky.”

This is perhaps the most famous steakhouse in the City of New York.

“I thought Smith & Wollensky was 200 years old,” I said.

“Everybody thinks that. Even I think that. But it’s not. We just marketed it that way. It is 29 years old.”

And Smith & Wollensky, which looks like a gift box sitting out in front of this big skyscraper, was a hit right from the start. (Well, almost.)

Stillman formed a corporation. It is a public corporation today, and around the country they have opened almost a dozen Smith & Wollensky’s. They market a steak sauce. And they are now planning to open a chain of Wollensky Grilles.

So that was decision #4. But Stillman was not done. Having become a celebrated restaurateur in the city, he decided that they ought to open some truly great restaurants. And thus came decision #5. The Park Avenue Café is one of them. Maloney and Porcelli is another. And Alan Stillman’s son Michael, now grown, has opened a restaurant of his own in Manhattan inside the firm, called Quality Meats, between Fifth and Sixth on 58th. It’s a roaring success. And more in other cities in the country are planned.

Stillman has fun. Some of his promotional ideas have been legendary. He once ordered a million dollars worth of wine shipped to one of his restaurants in a Brinks Armored Truck. On another occasion, upon learning that Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream was looking for new CEO, he suggested himself as the ideal candidate. The merged company could be called Ben Smith & Jerry Wollensky Steak & Shakes.

Perhaps his greatest marketing success, however, was in the founding of his semi-annual Wine Week promotions. These are held at Smith & Wollenskys around the country and at the most recent renewal of this event, more than 18,000 bottles of wine were served. For a number of years, when the event was just held at the Manhattan restaurant, among those who came to personally pour their wine were Robert Mondavi and Count Antinori.

Alan and Donna in the Hamptons? Their days are filled with golf, beach, parties and all other manner of relaxation. One thing it does not include is work.

“I’ve kept it a complete break from everything else,”

He and Donna also do a lot of traveling. They’ve been all over the world. And in 1985, ten years after their first extended vacation in France, they returned to rent for a season in Cap Ferret.

“With all your travels,” I asked, what’s your favorite place?”

Stillman hesitated. “My wife, I would say, would choose the South of France. Me? Three months, right here. And that’s all I need.”

Stillman is currently working on a book titled Madness: So You Always Wanted to Open a Restaurant.